Customizing the Desktop Environment

Style Manager can be used to customize the appearance of the desktop.

• Customizing Screen Appearance

• Customizing System Behavior

• Customizing Startup and Logout

Note - By default, your customizations will affect only the current session unless you save them as the home session, as explained in To Set a Home Session.

Introducing Style Manager

To start Style Manager:

• Click the Style Manager control in the Front Panel.

Figure 9-1 Style Manager Front Panel control

The Style Manager controls and the items that they control are:

Color - Workspace colors and palettes

Font - Application font sizes and font groups

Backdrop - Workspace backdrop patterns

Keyboard - Key click volume and character repeat capability

Mouse - Mouse button click settings, double-click speed, pointer acceleration, and pointer movement threshold

Beep - Beeper volume, tone, and duration

Screen - Number of minutes before your screen blanks and whether your screen is covered and locked at that time

Window - How a window acquires focus, if the window raises when it receives focus, and where window icons are placed

Startup - How your session begins and ends

Figure 9-2 Style Manager controls

Customizing Screen Appearance

You can change the following aspects of your screen appearance:

• Color Palettes

• Workspace backdrops

• Font sizes and font groups

Color Palettes and Color Flashing

You set your workspace colors through a color palette. The number of colors in the palette is determined by your display type and the Number of Colors selection.

Figure 9-3 Number of Colors Dialog Box

Running certain applications may result in a phenomenon know as color flashing or colormap flashing, where the application appears with incorrect colors while the rest of the desktop appears normal, and when given the focus it displays with correct colors but the rest of the desktop does not. Color flashing is typically found in either of the following circumstances.

• Your workstation does not use a 24 bit graphics card

• You are running applications that are designed to use their own colormaps (thus placing a burden on the frame buffer)

This is due to fundamental limitations in XWindows when dealing with applications that do not use the default colormap. While you can't use more colors than your display allows, you can reduce the number of colors used by the desktop by choosing a lower-valued color usage in the Number of Colors to Use dialog box, or by exiting other graphics-intensive applications.

For example, if you have a high-color display and have selected More Colors for Desktop but you want to run a color-rich application such as a computer-aided design (CAD) program, you should choose More Colors for Applications or Most Colors for Applications to decrease the number of colors that the desktop uses. The remaining colors are available for the CAD program.

To Overcome Color Flashing

If you have closed all other graphics-intensive applications and your application is still experiencing color flashing, the following procedure may help eliminate the problem.

1. Open Style Manager.

2. Click Color.

   The Color dialog box is displayed.

3. Click Number of Colors.

   The Number of Colors To Use dialog box (see Figure 9-3) is displayed.

4. Select Most Colors For Applications and click OK.

5. Click Desktop background and choose a simple workspace background such as Gray Lt.

6. Make this session your home session by following the procedure inTo Set a Home Session.

7. Exit Style Manager and logout of CDE.

8. Login to CDE and re-open the application that previously experienced color flashing.

   If the application no longer experiences color flashing, make a note of the current Style Manager settings; if it is still experiencing color flashing, the application has probably specified a list of colormaps to be installed, CDE is only installing the first colormap in this list, so you will need to cycle through the colormaps as explained in the following steps.

9. Use the following special keyboard keys to cycle through the colormaps.

   Control-L2 (or Control-Again)	Steps forward through the colormaps
   Control-L4 (or Control-Undo)	Steps backward through the colormaps

   Cycling through the colormaps may end up installing the correct colormap, and will not affect the other windows on the desktop in any way. If you continue to experience colormap flashing, have your system administrator seek further information on SunSolve^SM.