Setting the desktop foreground and background colours is something that trips most of us up when we’re first picking up RES PowerFuse. The default PWRMENU.INI file contains default colours that are created at install that apply to all users. If these colours are changed via the Composition > Desktop > Background node in the RES PowerFuse Management Console, then the template PWRMENU.INI file is updated. Any time a change is made to the desktop colours, it won’t affect users that have already launched a RES PowerFuse session as the user’s PWRMENU.INI file won’t get updated (with the default settings). For an explanation and work around this, see RES Knowledgebase Article Q200186.
This however, is not what this post is about. Typically when uploading a custom background image we normally wish the background colour to match the background colour in our .BMP file (remember only the RES PowerFuse Shell supports .JPEGs). This is certainly true if we’re not stretching the image to fill the screen. If it’s not changed you’ll see the default blue background applied before the background image is applied and/or borders around the background image.
Unfortunately for us, when selecting the colours using the RES PowerFuse Management Console it is not necessarily intuitive or easy to pick the right colour that matches your uploaded .BMP file. We have to specify a custom colour, enter the RGB values, save the changes to make sure the default PWRMENU.INI is updated, open the default PWRMENU.INI file, note the colour “number” specified next to the DesktopColor property and then create a Home Directory Maintenance Task to update this value for existing users (as per the aforementioned KB article). Not particularly quick nor intuitive. Note: If you’re after a tool to pick up colours then you can use ColorPic and it freeware.
We’ll take Virtual Engine as an example. Internally there is a colour that is known as VE-Blue (or Virtual Engine Blue). This is the standard shade of blue used in email communication, on business cards and the on web site etc. The RGB (Red, Green and Blue) representations of this are; 4 (Red), 73 (Green) and 157 (Blue) or 04499D in hex. Is there an alternative process available to set the background colour used by RES PowerFuse without jumping through all the hoops listed above?
In the user’s PWRMENU.INI configuration file the colours are not specified in the standard hex/web format, they’re represented as a decimal number. Using the “Programmer” view available in the standard Windows 7 Calculator we can convert 04499D (hex) into decimal (280989). We now have the decimal representation that can be put straight in to the Home Directory maintenance task. Knowing this information we update the default PWRMENU.INI file and create a Home Directory Maintenance Task that updates this for all existing users… Ah – when testing this we end up with a nice brown, muddy background. Not what was expected!
After a little bit of reverse engineering, it turns out that the number is reversed and actually stored as a BGR (Blue, Green and Red) value. In our example we need to convert 9D4904 (hex) to its decimal value, i.e. 10307844. Putting this value in our Home Directory Maintenance Task and the default PWRMENU.INI file works first time and is an exact match. If you happen to have lots of different coloured backgrounds for various departments in your environment, this little bit of knowledge might save you 30 minutes and a lot of frustration one day..
