More on the Raspberry PI

One of the last comments on the entry where I described the installation of quisk on the RPI was that it was up to the user if he/she wanted to add a nice desktop icon.

The point is that I upgraded my RPI to model 3B, and therefore had to reconfigure the RPI with quisk from scratch. I followed my recorded recipe exactly, and was happy to learn it still worked, now I am running quisk version 4.1.10.

However, I could not recall how to make a desktop icon. For some reason the developers of LXDE (the graphical desktop environment used by raspian) like to make this a pain! I followed instructions found on-line, unfortunately to no avail (and I am quite sure it worked on my previous instantation!)

But after some time fiddling around, I found a workaround that worked for me.

  • Open the menu, and select Preferences – Main Menu Editor
  • I created a new menu entry called ‘Ham’ by pressing the button ‘New Menu’
  • In this menu entry, I created a new item called ‘quisk’ by pressing the button ‘New Item’
  • A pop-up window appears. You need to enter a name and a command. Both can be called quisk (but note that the text ‘quisk’ in the command field must be all small characters, no capitals)
  • After you have created it by pressing ‘OK’, you can change the Icon by using the ‘Properties’ button
  • Now you can find it in the menu. If you select it, and click on it with the right mouse button, a context menu appears, giving you the possibility to add it to the desktop

That’s it!

Another thing you may want to do, is to have quisk automatically started when you start the RPI.

There are several ways to do this, but I found the most easy way to achieve is to add quisk to the autostart file of LXDE:

sudo leafpad /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

This probably has the following lines:

@lxpanel –profile LXDI-pi

@pcmanfm –desktop –profile LXDE-pi

@xscreensaver -no-splash

You should add the following line at the end of the text:

@quisk

Save it, and restart the RPI. Quisk will now start automatically.