#sh Blog - Entries tagged as Desktop

If you are a GNOME-Do user, you may have noticed that the Mozilla Thunderbird® icon doesn't look nice when appearing in GNOME-Do. That's because the logo is upscaled to fit the size of the Do bar. That scaling is made necessary, because the icon-size of the icon that Thunderbird puts into /usr/share/pixmaps/ by default is too small. To get a crisp logo in Do the logo should be about 128x128px (like the firefox.png you might find in pixmaps). To replace the thunderbird.png with a larger icon you can take the 256x256px icon from /usr/lib/thunderbird-3.0.6/chrome/icons/default/default256.png. Copy that file into your home-directory (or somwhere where you have write permissions). Then use GIMP to scale it down to 128px. After saving and renaming the file to thunderbird.png you can then copy it as root to /user/share/pixmaps/ replacing the old icon.

Copy-command:
sudo cp thunderbird.png /usr/share/pixmaps/

After restarting GNOME-Do, you should see a nice crisp Thunderbird icon. Like that:

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.

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.

Da inzwischen die letzte Beta Version des zukünftigen Ubuntus heraus kam, habe ich heute mal mein System auf die neue Version »ge-upgraded« [Anleitung].
Da dies die letzte Beta vor dem finalen Relaease sein wird, kann man schon ohne Befürchtungen auf die neue Version upgraden. Ich habe dieses mal wieder ohne CD mithilfe des Update-Tools installiert. Das dauert zwar Ewigkeiten, aber man muss danach nicht alle Programme, die man zusätzlich installiert hatte wieder installieren. Ich denke ich werde aber dennoch eine saubere CD Installation vornehmen sobald die Final draußen ist.
Der Upgrade Prozess hat eigentlich ohne Probleme geklappt. Nach dem Upgrade gibt es wie üblich noch ein paar kleinere Zipperlein. So funktioniert sudo irgendwie gerade noch nicht. Die Fonts im GNOME-Terminal und in GDM werden auch etwas komisch dargestellt. Aber ansonsten ist fast alles wie beim alten. Außer das ich natürlich das tolle neue GNOME und den neuen Firefox am Start habe.

To spice up your daily communication, Spicebird was designed with chat and News-Feed integration. It's the perfect tool as a lightweight Evolution replacement and more focused on the home user. Rather than to bring all the important business features it's made to integrate all your personal Topics in one piece of Software. It comes even with a neat start-screen to give you an overview of what's currently going on in all departments.
Anyway, I didn't want to write a long story here. Spicebird was hyped all over the web those days. So most things are probably explained. Only one thing that still iches me, is that I can't make use of the mail and the chat feature yet. Because usually all my connections (Jabber, IMAP, SMTP) work on SSL. But Spicebird seems to still have issues with SSL/TLS handling. Probably it works already with the "official" certificates. But not with CA-Cert ones, even if you import the Root-Cert yourself.
So, I hope I will have more luck with that, when the beta phase is over!

So far it looks not at all bad!
[Screenshot]