Yes, that's right... DFM...

None of the newer guys/girls will probably even know what DFM is since it hasn't been updated since 2001, but I figured I'd throw this question out there and hope for the best.

I work for a software company that develops Retail POS software (among other Retail apps) and our legacy POS system runs on systems as old as RH 6 and as new as RHEL 4. Despite the version of Red Hat, we have stuck with an IceWM/DFM desktop over the years (don't ask me why).

My issue is that I have a request to create shortcuts on the desktops of some systems that will point to web URLs. I know you can do this on all the modern desktops like Gnome and KDE, but I couldn't find a way to do this with DFM. It's quite possibly a feature that doesn't exist, but I figured I'd check.

If anyone knows a way to create these in DFM or possibly even how to create a web link with "ln" (or some other command line tool) it would be greatly appreciated. This is for a massive number of production systems, so changing the Desktop or File Manager is not an option.

Thanks!

Swill

I perfectly remember about it

It's hard to remember the limits and capabilities of dfm after so many years. But, in the worst case, you should always be able to use bash scripts or something like that. A simple script would be this:

Save it, chmod u+x it and then put it into your desktop just like any other executable file. If this is not enough for you, then you must elaborate a bit more on what do you want to do. You would need at least, some kind of file to hold the url like the lnk ur url files that some other desktops use, and you would also need to use a mime type association to associate a given program (the browser) to this kind of file. I can't remember what mime capabilities did dfm have. But even the simplest association mechanism should suffice, maybe needing a bit of bash scripting. I will try to remind a bit about my dfm times and will let you know if I find a simple way to do this.

There's probably not a justification to change the file manager just for this.

Hmm, that bash method might just do the trick. I'm not yet sure how pretty it needs to really be, but we'll be hitting a mix of Galleon, Netscape, and Firefox browsers due to the varying default browsers in Red Hat over the years. I'll see how the script approach works and post back.

Thanks!

Swill

Well, that worked just fine with Firefox. I still need to test with galleon and netscape, but my guess is that it will work just fine. Now I feel kinda dumb for not thinking to pass the URL as a command line argument

Thanks again!

Swill

Glad that it worked for you.

The $BROWSER variable is usually set by your distro, if not, the users can always do it themselves in .bashrc or .bash_profile

You can as well just hardcode the browser, that that's less flexible.

The best solution would be to add some checks into the script to:

This is easy to code in bash, a -x test checks if a file is executable. If successful, that directly implies it's somewhere on the user $PATH and it's readable and executable by that user.

To check for non empty variables use -n, to check for zero length use -z. The rest is just if...else...fi. This way, you ensure that the script is going to behave under extreme circumstances.