Tweak Your Desktop Like a Pro

Tweak Your Desktop Like a Pro

Customize your desktop environment, and find a few things you never knew you needed, like a pop-up Quake-style terminal, automatic wallpaper shuffling, and dashboard functionality.

The default Ubuntu GNOME environment is very streamlined and easy to use. Due to its ease of use, however, some of the "power user" features aren't included in the base install. KDE can also benefit from the same tweaking. Here's how to get more usability and features from Ubuntu.

Get Icons on Your Desktop

The default Ubuntu Dapper Drake desktop has no icons on itwhich gives the system a very clean and simple look. If you're coming from Windows, you may miss the My Computer icon and other desktop icons in that OS. It's relatively simple to add them to Ubuntu; it just requires the use of a configuration editor called gconf-editor [Hack #15].

If you hit Alt-F2, the system will pop up a Run Application dialog. Type gconf-editor in that dialog and click Run. The Gconf configuration program will start. Select "apps" from the left pane; then select "nautilus" and "desktop." In the right pane, you will see several options, like "computer_icon_name" and "computer_icon_visible." If you click on the checkbox next to the "<name>_icon_visible" option (see Figure), Nautilus will spontaneously add that icon to your desktop. In this fashion, you can add icons for your computer, home directory, network places, documents, and wastebasket.

GConf showing the Nautilus icon-configuration options

Get Organized with Tomboy

Tomboy, shown in Figure, is a tiny application that sits in your panel and acts as an always-on mini Wiki. It's great for making quick notes to yourself without worrying about saving myriad text files or waiting for an editor to start. Much like a Wiki, you can cross-reference the Tomboy notes you make using Wiki-like annotations. Not only that, but the notes are quickly searchable using Tomboy's built-in search capabilities.

Tomboy notes

To install Tomboy, just apt-get it from a terminal:

bill@defiant:~$ sudo apt-get install tomboy
            

That will fetch and install Tomboy and its dependencies. Once that's completed, you can add Tomboy to your panel by right-clicking on the panel, selecting "Add to Panel," and then choosing Tomboy Notes from the dialog.

Automatic Wallpaper Switching

Something GNOME doesn't provide for is a way to automatically rotate your desktop wallpaper. Luckily, there's a little application written by someone known only as "Earthworm" called wp_tray that will sit in your notification area and rotate your wallpaper based on whatever scheme you wish. The source code for this application is at http://planetearthworm.com/projects/wp_tray/files/wp_tray-0.4.6.tar.gz, but Bill has built it for Ubuntu and made it available at http://wildbill.nulldevice.net/ubuntu/wp-tray_0.4.6-1_i386.deb. Download the .deb for wp_tray and install it using the following command:

bill@defiant:~$ sudo dpkg -i wp-tray_0.4.6-1_i386.deb
            

Once wp_tray is installed, add it to your startup programs so it starts when you log in: click on the System Menu, then Preferences, then Sessions, and add wp_tray to the list of Startup Programs. Log out and log in again, and you will be able to right-click on the applet (see Figure).

The interface to wp_tray

wp_tray's configuration screen

Getting a Pull-Down "Quake" Terminal

There's a very useful KDE application called yakuake that takes the standard KDE Konsole and changes it to a drop-down, on-demand terminal over your desktop and applications. (It's called a "Quake" terminal because of its resemblence to the console that drops down in the Quake series of games.) This is a very handy little application. To install, simply use apt-get to install both konsole and yakuake:

bill@lexington:~$ sudo apt-get install konsole yakuake
            

Add yakuake to your startup session using the same instructions for the wp_tray applet. Log out and log in again, and then you can hit F12 to cause yakuake to drop down over your desktop, as shown in Figure.

yakuake: the drop-down konsole