how to fix icdrom icon position on the workbench

[ipino]

this is a really annoying issue I fighted in the past...

If the CDROM has its own Disk.info (the cd icon itself) then you can't do so much because you can't "snap" its position and  - of course - the CDROM is read-only.

Ralph Babel created a program called CDWrite on '97 (which is unfindable) that would allow you to fakely write on cdrom by simply creating a "fake" cd device beside the real one, where data are both readable and deletable and have all changes you made: of course nothing is actually written to the cdrom; it uses a directory on your hard drive to store changed files.
It is pretty cool but as I said, no way to find it, except for that page:

http://amiga.emugaming.com/cdwrite.html

It got reviewed by an Italian magazine and they said it was cool.
Maybe they were the only one to saw it


If the CDROM has not its own icon, or it is an Audio cd, then you can do something.
The first solution is to move their def_*.info files to the ram disk and change their type ("DISK" icons are not viewable unless they are "disk.info" on the root dir) to another one.
Then move them on the window at your desired position and snapshot them.
Then restore their type and copy over the old one (in ENVARC: of course).
To change icon type use the Workbench Information window.

Another way is to follow FAQ 2.0 of the unofficial OS 3.9 FAQ:

it says to grab a working version of MakeLink from either util/misc/beckermakelink.lha or gfx/show/Visage.lha (of course only if you use FFS), because the OS3.9' makelink doesn't support softlinks.

Then, follow these steps (copy'n'pasted from the faq):

Then follow these steps:

- Rename your preferred RAM disk icon as "def_ram.info" and copy it to ENVARC:Sys/.
- Put the following line in your S:User-Startup file:
C:MakeLink RAM:disk.info ENVARC:SYS/def_RAM.info soft
- Save the S:User-Startup file, and reboot; your preferred icon will now be used.

You can apply this to the def_CDDA.info too, of course.

The latter method is the one I use on my system.

[Hope my english is understandable ]

EDIT: another solution is to directly snap the def_*.info in ENVARC: (I assume you use DefIcons) with the shell program "IconPos". It's in the Workbench Install disk (C/IconPos), in the Amithlon/AmigaOSXL cd (AmigaWriter/C/IconPos),
dunno where on the OS 3.9 cd, but some archive on Aminet have it.


/ipino

[ipino]

I think there is just a really small amount of people that use the classic Workbench... you are right, it's poor and in the past there were some attempts to make it better, multithread, multi-whatever-you-want (MBench, ScalOS, another one I don't remember, and then of course DOpus 5)

The OS3.5 WB has been improved but it's still the same stuff as before.
One positive point is the ARexx interface.

Menus are the same since WB 2.0 and MagicMenu is a patch/hack to mitigate (?) their horrible look.

I saw some screenshot of MorphOS's Ambient enviroment and it seems cool.. ok it's just a "collage" of various Amiga programs (MUI, AHI, VisualPrefs) put together but who cares... it's cool IMHO...

[ipino]

DOpus Magellan is a nightmare to configure as well !

Oh I got the name of the missing WB replacement.. it's JazzBench (util/wb), and of course I didn't test it.

I tried Scalos in the AIAB package (I dl'ed it just for fun, I think it is for people too lazy to build a custom WB enviroment) and it seems fine, not as powerful as Magellan 2, but enjoyable.
I'm planning to install it on my A1200 (it has 3.9 but sucks with just 16MB fast)