Windows icon, which is a handy feature! If you have several windows open on your desktop, you can
minimize them all to the LXPanel by simply clicking this icon.
The last two icons on the left side of the LXPanel, a light gray rectangle and a light blue rectangle, are
the Virtual Desktop icons. The first one is called Desktop 1, and the second one is called Desktop 2.
It is like having two virtual monitors. For example, you can open program windows on Desktop 1 and
then click the Desktop 2 icon and see no open program windows—just an LXDE desktop. You switch
back to Desktop 1 by clicking its icon, and there are your open program windows. Thus, you can have
different program windows running on the different desktops and jump back and forth between them.
This is a really nice feature!
On the far right of the LXPanel, as shown in Figure 2.5, is the Logout Manager icon. This icon opens
the LXDE Logout Manager window, which allows you to log out of the GUI session.
FIGURE 2.5 The icons on the right side of the LXDE LXPanel.By the Way: The Changing LXDE Logout Manager
Whether you have your Raspberry Pi set up to boot by default into the command line or
into the GUI will affect the appearance of the LXDE Logout Manager.
If you have your Pi set up to boot to the command line, the LXDE Logout Manager will
have only two buttons: Logout and Cancel. The Logout button will dump you—
gracefully, of course—out of the LXDE graphical interface and into the command line.
The Cancel button just cancels the logout request and takes you back to the GUI.
If you have your Pi set up to boot to the GUI automatically, then the LXDE Logout
Manager has two additional buttons: Shutdown and Reboot. As you would expect, the
Shutdown button shuts down the Raspberry Pi, and the Reboot button reboots it.The next icon to the left of the Logout button on the LXPanel is ScreenLock. ScreenLock allows you
to immediately lock your display screen. After you do this, the only way to get back into the system is
to enter a username and password. However, by default, Raspbian does not come with a screen saver
application installed, so the ScreenLock feature of LXDE does not work. Don’t worry, though: You
will be installing a screen saver in the Try It Yourself section of this hour.
After ScreenLock is the Digital Clock icon, which displays what your Raspberry Pi thinks is the
current time. If you hover the mouse over it, the current date is displayed. You can right-click the
Digital Clock icon to see the current month’s calendar. You can right-click it again to hide the current
month’s calendar.
The rectangle to the left of the Digital Clock icon is the CPU Usage Monitor icon. It gives you a nice
graphical display of how busy your Raspberry Pi currently is in terms of running programs, opening
windows, and so on. If a window is sluggish to open in the GUI, glance over at this graph. You may
see that your Pi is very busy!