Using the 3D desktop on your Slackware box:
===========================================

First of all, make sure you've fullfilled the requirements, most notably
you should have downloaded and installed the imlib2 package.
Furthermore, 3D Desktop will not do much good if you are not in the
possession of an OpenGL capable graphics card with hardware acceleration
enabled in Xorg.

This having been said, how do you use the 3D desktop as a replacement desktop
switcher?

1) Make sure you run the command "3ddesk --acquire" when you start X.
   There are several ways of doing this. The manual approach is looking for
   the menu entry "Start the 3D Desktop Server". Nicer is to let the 3ddesk
   daemon be started automatically.
   I use KDE, so this is how I do it:
   * create a file called "3ddesk" in ~/.kde/Autostart/ and make it executable
     by running "chmod +x ~/.kde/Autostart/3ddesk"
   * Adding the following lines to that empty file:
       #!/bin/sh
       3ddesk --acquire
   That will make sure that the 3ddeskd daemon will run with a cached image
   of your virtual desktops.

2) Map a function key to the "3ddesk" command, so that you can call
   the program quickly.
   Again, because I use KDE, here's the recipe for KDE:
   * Start the menu editor (from the 'Settings' menu.
   * Look for the "3D Desktop - Random" menu entry under the 'System' menu.
   * The "Current shortcut key" is not assigned. Click on the button, and then
     press the F2 function key. Save your changes. Ready!

3) Now, whenever you need to switch to another virtual desktop, press 'F2'
   and navigate through the graphical representation of your virtual desktops
   using the arrow keys, the mouse scroll wheel, or the 1st and 2nd mouse
   buttons.  Select your desired desktop by pressing the <ENTER> key or
   the middle mouse button.

In case you don't like the randomness of the graphics, you're free to change
that behaviour of course - look at the other menu entry for instance, which
uses a Carousel to show the desktops.