The blog of Michael Rice

Today after I ran svn update on my fluxbox I realized it had been a few days since I had last read through the Changelog. As I was reading through it I noticed some cool new features added to fluxbox-generate_menu. If you didnt know Fluxbox now has support for png icons in the menu. You need to build with ./configure –enable-imlib2 to enable the support in fluxbox because it is default off as of this posting current svn is Revision: 3890. So I see that someone named Dung N. Lam has added support to find .desktop files as well as lots of icons too. Here is a screen shot (pic removed sorry) of the menu that got generated on my gentoo system. I thought that was a pretty impressive addition to fluxbox-generate_menu Its a really long shell script that will run on any platform fluxbox will. The old version always lacked finding a lot of apps, but this one gets the job done much better. I decided to send Dung an email with a link to the screenshot. He responded pretty quickly and told me its missing alot of icons it should have and I have been trying to help him by sending output of commands so he can improve the script for the gentoo users too. He also told me about another project he has called tablaunch its a sweet little app… The whole point of this long story

I installed tablaunch about 2 hours ago. Its very small, but does have a dependencie of imlib 1.9.14 (required) Imlib2 1.0.6 (recommended). setup is a snap. The default for this app is to look for icons located in ~/.icons/48×48/ so what I did was:

ln -s /usr/share/icons/gentoo/48×48/ ~/.icons/48×48

and created a symbolic link to the snazy looking bubble icons that you get if you emerge gentoo-artwork (iirc) you can get them from here if you want. I did the same for the 64×64 icons too. Next I created my ~/.tablaunch file here is mine if you just want to use it. Make sure you have the right files in the right place for it to work though. Next all you have to do is start it. I used a couple of the command line args,

./tablaunch -fg white -bg black -fn snap -sfn snap -sfg white –iconhome ~/.icons/64×64

I wanted the larger icons so I used the 64×64.

Here is a Screenshot of what it looks like in action I didnt fully install the app. If you wish to test it out with out installing it like I did then you can download the source to ~/src/ then unpack it

tar -xzvf tablaunch-0.4.tar.gz && cd tablaunch-0.4/src && make

If all goes well it will create an executable that you can envoke with the command above.