Organizing the OmniGo's Home Screen
                             by Marcus Groeber 97
                           email: mgroeber@gmx.net

[Copy of a message originally posted to the OmniGo mailing list and the
HPHAND forum of CompuServe.]

Some time ago, people asked about ways to remove infrequently used apps from
the home screen of the OmniGo to make room for the icons of additional
applications. The following steps describe a fairly simple way for achieving
the desired results:

1. Pre-requisites: apart from an OmniGo, you will need a Geos-based file
manager (probably the one written by Nathan :-)), a PC with an OG file
transfer program (OmniCom, OGFTP, ORC) and a DOS prompt driver on your OG.

2. Use the file manager to create a subdirectory in WORLD in which to place
the icons of the apps you want to remove and copy the apps from WORLD into
that directory (each of them will take only 512 bytes of memory, so don't
worry too much about duplicating them...). You cannot *move* them because the
files are stored in ROM, even though they show up on the RAM disk.

3. Use the file transfer program to download copies of the apps in the newly
created subdirectory to your PC. Do not try to copy them from the WORLD
directory, because there is a bug in the ROM file system of Geos which results
in parts of the files being lost when downloaded directly from ROM.

4. On the PC, enter the following commands for each of the program files just
downloaded (they will all have names ending in .geo, which are not identical
to the ones found on the OmniGo):

4a. At the DOS prompt, type DEBUG <filename>.geo (for example, JDEMO.GEO for
the Demo application)

4b. At the "-" prompt, enter "e 128 3".

4c. At the "-" prompt, enter "w".

4d. At the "-" prompt enter "q".

5. Now upload the modified files to the \GEOWORKS directory of the OG. You
cannot upload them to the WORLD directory, because there are already other
files of the same name there.

6. Reboot the OmniGo to get to the DOS prompt. Go to the B:\GEOWORKS directory
if you are not already there. For each of the files copied, enter "copy
<filename>.geo WORLD\<filename>.geo". After copying it, you can remove the
original by typing "del <filename>.geo".

7. After copying all the files, you can enter "geos" to re-launch Geos. You
should now see the reorganized home screen.

To make the icons reappear on the home screen, use either the DOS prompt or
the file manager to remove the files from the WORLD directory. The icons will
come back after the next reboot.

[For the technically inclined...] How it works: The applications you see on
the home screen are "mirrored" from copies originally residing in ROM. These
small (280 bytes) files in ROM in turn point to the actual application code
which is not visible in the file system. By copying files by the same name
which are marked as non-applications (this is what the DEBUG patch is good
for) into the WORLD directory, these files actually "shadow" the ROM copies,
making them invisible for the Home Screen application.

A note: what this modification does is only rearrange the icons visible on
screen, *not* free any memory (as said, you will even lose about a KByte for
every application moved because of the duplicated "pointer" and "shadow"
files). This isn't possible anyway, because unused apps will only occupy ROM,
not RAM.