I am glad I know such geeks.

The magic of the status bar should be kept in village of the community ssu, and Mitrandir shall be the guardian of the holy package of debian.

I too have climbed the walls of VMware on the shores of puppy linux but lost my way in the sands of sandbox.

Okay, now the small instruction for brave ones:
1. Make sure that you have libhildondesktop0, hildon-desktop and libhildonwm0 packages of exactly version 1:2.0.18-1fix1 and not, for example, 1:2.0.18-1fix1-1 or 1:2.0.18-1fix1-2. You can check it with this:
It also seems that if you have installed patch for locking home applets from qwerty12, you must remove it and install regular version before.
2. Install this with “dpkg -i”: libhildondesktop0_2.0.18-1fix1-12applets_armel.deb. This package has 12 applets limit instead of 7.
3. You must also alter matchbox theme.xml to make space for more applets in statusbar. Below are my modifications of Echo theme, you can modify your one in the same manner. Statusbar should be increased to hold 5 more applets which equals to 5×40px = 200px.

/usr/share/themes/echo/matchbox/theme.xml:

Old: New: Old: New: Old: New: I have also changed background image in /usr/share/themes/echo/images/qgn_plat_application_status_bar_background.png to make window title “tab” narrower.

4. Reboot

Before this can be suggested to Community SSU guys, we must find some convenient way to specify number of applets in some configuration file. This 12-applets version cannot be used with regular themes without modifications, because when user will select more than 7 applets, the dropdown arrow button will not be visible with usual theme. So, this parameter should be configurable. I have no idea at the moment, which config file is right for this option. Need to investigate it a bit more.

So, the magic of the Statusbar shall be strengthened and adorned by modest wanderer Mitrandir before he could give it to the elders of Community SSU village...

Btw, giladmttw, the ‘7’ digit was not in the place you have pointed a couple of pages ago. It was for Bora, but in Diablo the Seven was hidden in the bowels of the sources, and even not #defined! But thanks for your hint!

Yes indeee, I have witnessed the evil seven elsewhere too. Now wise Kroll must train his army of pixmaps for the battle of the twelve icons:

Wow that looks great! Giladmttw, what app do you use for the clock in the status bar?

I'm not quite ready to try all those patches and setting changes, I've had to reflash my NIT these last few days for some things I screwed up. Is there any chance we can put all these together in one or two quick steps? And is it possible to reverse it in one or two?

Be careful if you are doing this the hard way, and not waiting until a package is released, cos I have now managed to drop my N810 into a reboot loop. I reckon it must be the theme.xml file I have managed to screw somehow.

Make sure you take a backup first!! I should know better!

giladmttw, great screenshot!

Guys, please don't try to follow the instructions UNLESS you're really know what you are doing. As usual, i'm not liable if the instruction will break your device, make it unusable or make it realize itself and run away from you.

We need to think about some good way for end users to get this updated hildon-desktop...
(of course updated hildon-desktop should include some more good patches, such as locking of home applets and allowing to override notifications)
Of course, we can append somethink like ‘-1’ to version of libhildondesktop0, publish it somewhere and make Diablo5 depend on it, so users will get patched version automagically. But 1) i'm not sure that maemo.org repository scripts will allow to add patched libhildondesktop0 to Extras or Extras-Devel; 2) if next iteration of Community SSU will choose the same suffix for it's hildon-desktop, users won't get hildon-desktop from SSU; 3) users who have osso-software-version-rxNN installed will have to remove it, because osso-software-version-rxNN depends on strict version numbers of built-in packages.
(It is possible to include patched /usr/lib/libhildondesktop0.so into diablo5 package and replace installed one with it, but it is terribly ugly way).

I think we should ask for advice one of Elders of Community SSU village. lma? Stskeeps?

The clock is large-status-bar-clock, it has a bug in its configuration if you tick "enable alarms" it will kill the desktop somtimes, otherwise it's stable. Don't do any changes yet, I've played with the theme before and know what do if it breaks. Any change to theme.xml that is not right can make the desktop in load/crash loop. I boot from SD so it's easy to take the card out, mount on PC and change back.
It might be possible to use matchbox-remote to change the theme, sleep and change back, but I haven't tried it.

Yes, it will work. Very fast, by the way