#sh Blog - Entries tagged as Design

Color management has finally arrived at the GNOME Desktop. The new piece of software is called gnome color manager and is still pretty young. I heard about it while ago, so after installing Ubuntu 10.04 I found it in the repos and gave it a shot. It looks quite simple and promising. Still a bit unstable (crashes on some clicks) though. Unfortunately I couldn't calibrate my screen, because the color profile (ICC) I had for my screen was not suitable for full color calibration and I don't have any equipment to mesure my screen. But it's a good thing GNOME is getting a color manager, which it opens up to the professional Designers and DTP uses.

I made some screenshot for those interested.

A few day ago I stumbled over the desktop widget "Conky". Convinced by the nice configurations some people had running, I decided to give it a shot. Conky is quite flexible and powerful, that's why it has it's own kind of scripting language.
The script for the individual configuration is stored in the .conkyrc file. I spend the last few days tweaking my configuration, starting with the one from here. For my configuration to run you need to install at least parts of the conky-colors package which also delivers you the fonts you need.
I didn't really install the conky-color package though, just downloaded and unpacked it. The scripts I needed I copied into a hidden folder in my home directory (.conky-scripts/). The conkyVinyl Script for the cover art was modified by me. You also need an account for weather.com to use the weather Script, as explained in this post.
I ended up with the design you can see in the screenshot. The fastest way to get my setup is to unpack this ZIP-File in your home-directory and rename conky-scripts to .conky-scripts and conkyWeather.conf in .conkyWeather.conf (after you added your settings in there) and install the three fonts. After that you can use my .conkyrc as provided underneath. I hope you like it!
[My conky-config after the jump.]

Ubuntu Jaunty (9.10) has the nice new dark look for the status icons. But this is only working if you use the "Humanity-Dark" icon theme.

I wanted to have another icon theme, but keep the nice dark status icons. So I had a look at the Humanity-Dark icon folder in /usr/share/icons/ and discovered, that this is only an overlay of the normal Humanity icon theme. So this overlay could be used for my favourite icon theme as well. So I just made a copy of the Humanity-Dark folder (if you want to make a new folder in /usr/share/icons you have to be root of course) and changed the name of the new folder to Colors-Dark (because I want to inherit from the gnome colors theme). In the Colors-Dark folder you have to modify the index.theme file, to use another theme than the Humanity one. First you should change the name to avoid confusion. For example Name=Colors-Dark. After that the important part comes: change the inherit value to your prefered icon theme. For example Inherits=gnome-wise if you want to use gnome wise. That's already everything you have to do. If there is any icon-cache file you better remove and recreate it. You can use gtk-update-icon-cache to create a new cache. Now you have your nice new icons being used, when you choose the Colors-Dark theme, but the dark ubuntu-icons stay.

Nachdem ich seit ca. zwei Wochen im Besitz eines Netbooks bin, möchte ich auch hier mal über meine Erfahrungen berichten. Besonders auch zu Betriebssystemen die sich für solche Rechner anbieten.

Hardware:
Ich habe mich für ein Eee-PC Modell von ASUS entschieden. Nach einiger Recherche scheint wohl das Modell 1005HA-M das mit derzeit bestem Preis-/Leistungsverhältnis zu sein. Nachdem dessen knapper Vogänger plötzlich nichtmehr verfügbar war, habe ich dann dieses Modell erstanden, dass trotz Windows-XP™ Lizenz auch günstiger war. Außerdem hat das M-Modell einen matten Bildschirm (also auch für draußen geeignet), eine lange Akkulaufzeit (angeblich 8Std.) und eine angenehme Größe, so dass man noch gut drauf tippen kann.
Nach ca. 2-wöchiger Benutzung bin ich eigentlich auch ganz Zufrieden mit der Hardware, auch wenn der Akku eigentlich noch nie 8 Stunden durchgehalten hat, hält er doch einen Uni-Tag ohne Netzteil durch.
Note: Der Rechner wird zwar nur mit Windows ausgeliefert, alle Komponenten funktionieren aber problemlos mit Linux (inkl. WLAN und Webcam).

Ich wollte das auch mal ausprobieren: Eine Wortwolke, erstellt mit Wordle, mit den Worten aus diesem Blog.
Hier ein Auschnitt (klicken für die Vollansicht):

A new version of GNOME-Do was just released a few days ago. I already tried it and the new Docky is quite a nice idea. Docky is the new big feature in Do, which offers a panel with starters on it. It's already quite nice to use, and almost ready for productive use. If you already like Do you should give it a try! There are already packages for most Linux-Distros, even a repository for Ubuntu. Have fun!

Note: You have to resart the Do-Deamon before the new features are available.

I also made a Screenshot.

Die Opensource Schrift Linux Libertine ist in neuer Version erschienen. Linux Libertine ist ein hochwertiger und sehr vollständiger Font, der komplett unter einer freien Lizenz steht. Leider gibt es zur Zeit erst wenige Opensource Fonts die diese Qualitäten erfüllen. Als Schriftenbegeisterter kann man sich deshalb über solche Entwicklungen nur freuen.
Ich habe hier mal alle Schnitte aufgeführt die bisher verfügbar sind:

Abb.: Font Demo für Linux Libertine