What is Dash?
Dash is Athena's "dashboard". It serves several purposes:
o the menubar across the top of the screen serves as a help system as
well as an easy way to run a lot of the software that is available
on Athena, without having to know where that software is stored, or
what its name is.
o it provides an easy way to logout, in the form of a logout button in
the lower-right-hand corner of the screen.
o it can provide an analog clock (similar to xclock) on the screen for
you -- in the future, it is hoped that dash will be able to provide
many other screen accessories more cheaply than their non-dash
counterparts, such as xload, xcalc, and kerberometer.
o it warns you when your kerberos tickets are about to expire and puts
a warning box up on the screen, telling you to type "renew" to get
new tickets and renew your authentication.
Dash is extremely customizable. Some of the things that you can do with
it include changing the format of the time displayed in the menubar's
clock, adding and deleting entries from the menu structure, and having
dash put an analog clock up on the screen for you. These things are
described in the other OLC answers about dash.
Most of the customization that you can do is controlled through changing
dash's X Resources. X Resources are variables that describe how an X
program should act -- in this case, dash's behavior. X Resources are
normally stored in a file called .Xresources in your home directory,
however, dash also reads a file called .dashrc in your home directory when
it starts up. You can use this file to store resources pertaining
strictly to dash, or you can put the resources in with the rest of your
.Xresources. Many of the X Resources that dash understands are the same
as those recognized by other X programs, such as "reverseVideo",
"foreground" and "background". Other resources that modify the clock's
behavior are similar to the resources for xclock, and others are specific
to dash. As mentioned above, some of the more common customizations are
described in further answers.
When customizing dash, you may put resources into your ~/.Xresources file,
as mentioned. If you do not have an ~/.Xresources file, you can create
one with your favorite editor. After modifying this file, however, it is
necessary to re-load your resources into the X server, using the following
command (typed at your "athena%" prompt):
xrdb -load ~/.Xresources
The .dashrc file, on the other hand, is read every time start is started
or restarted, making it easy to see the effects of any changes you have
made. Again, if you do not have a ~/.dashrc file, create one with your
favorite editor. To restart dash, select the "Restart Dash" option under
the "Dash" menu.
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