Ricing Out Your Linux Box

How to make your win32 friends drool

Chris Clymer/Omal

Ohio 2600/Cleveland LUG

What we'll cover:

• Prettying up your terminal
• Pimping out your desktop
• Using and creating your own desktop applets

Which terminals to rice?

• aterm - very lightweight, small footprint. Fewer features.
• Eterm - medium footprint, oodles of esoteric features. Needs imlib2.
• konsole - built-in to KDE, extremely themeable. Large footprint if not running KDE, needs KDE's libraries

Why these terminals?

aterm, Eterm, and konsole all have a few features in common:
• pseduo-transparency
• custom wallpaper, fonts, colors
• ability to hide scrollbars, widgets, window decorations

aterm

Eterm

konsole

Pimp out your desktop

Start with some new wallpaper, themes, and iconsets
• http://deviantart.com
• http://kde-look.org
• http://gnome-look.org

Don't be fooled by names, all of these sites have a variety of good platform-neutral content

Applying wallpaper

• Fluxbox can't set wallpaper on its own. I use Eterm's "Esetroot"
• "fbsetbg" is just a frontend that looks apps like esetroot and hsetroot and uses them
• Desktop Environments like KDE and GNOME have their own built-in tools for this

Fluxbox

Fluxbox Icons

How to get these

• Download and extract a set of icons
• Append a reference to the appropriate icon in ~.fluxbox/menu
• [exec] (firefox) {firefox} <~/.icons/ice/firefox/_48x48.xpm>

Desktop applets

• Windowmaker Dockapps - http://dockapps.org
• Superkaramba - http://netdragon.sourceforge.net
• Gdesklets - http://www.gdesklets.org
• adesklets - http://adesklets.sourceforge.net

Windowmaker Dockapps

• Written in C
• Work well in Windowmaker, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Enlightenment
• Pain in the ass to write your own

adesklets

• Written in Python
• Uses Imlib2, just like Eterm and Esetroot
• relatively lightweight, good match for fluxbox, especially if you're using Eterm already.
• Not as many of them out there

gdesklets

• Written in python
• Good match for Gnome, but also fairly platform-neutral
• Quite a few themes out there

Superkaramba

• Written in Python
• Work well with KDE, uses its libraries
• A large library of them exist
• Stupidly easy to write your own!

Slack Track

^{karamba x=0 y=0 w=230 h=150 interval=2000 locked=false mask="background.png" image x=0 y=0 path="shadow.png" defaultfont font="Arial" fontsize=9 color=255,255,255 text x=20 y=3 shadow=1 fontsize=16 bgcolor=100,100,100 value="Slackware-Current" text x=20 y=20 value="Last Change:" text x=20 y=30 color=255,0,0 sensor=program program="lynx -dump ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt | head -1" text x=20 y=40 value="Recent Changes:" text x=20 y=50 color=255,0,0 sensor=program program="lynx -dump ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt | grep / | grep -v // | cut -f1 -d : | head -5" clickarea x=5 y=5 w=220 h=140 onclick="lynx -dump ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt > ChangeLog.txt; kdialog --textbox ChangeLog.txt 600 500"}

Code

# set some sensible defaults, set a mask and background image to make it pretty

karamba x=0 y=0 w=230 h=150 interval=2000 locked=false mask="background.png" image x=0 y=0 path="shadow.png" defaultfont font="Arial" fontsize=9 color=255,255,255

Code

text x=20 y=3 shadow=1 fontsize=16 bgcolor=100,100,100 value="Slackware-Current" text x=20 y=20 value="Last Change:"

Code

# this grabs date of last change by dumping top line of the changelog

text x=20 y=30 color=255,0,0 sensor=program program="lynx -dump ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt | head -1"

#print "recent changes" text x=20 y=40 value="Recent Changes:"

Code

# this grabs the names of the last 5 packages changed

text x=20 y=50 color=255,0,0 sensor=program program="lynx -dump ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt | grep / | grep -v // | cut -f1 -d : | head -5"

Code

# this provides a click area which pops up the full changelog when clicked

clickarea x=5 y=5 w=220 h=140 onclick="lynx -dump ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt > ChangeLog.txt; kdialog --textbox ChangeLog.txt 600 500"

Slack Track Theme