If you look up in your taskbar, the one on the top of your monitor, you’ll see Applications, Places and System. We’re going to look at System today and see a few bits of what’s in there that can be useful to us.
We’ll just touch on a few things up there, this won’t be an exhaustive guide but you should find it useful if you like things like screen savers and themes. This was written on a machine running Ubuntu 6.06 with Gnome.
First let’s go to System-> Preferences. Here’s where you can do a bit of customizing.
The first bit we’ll look at is Desktop Background Preferences. Here’s where you can choose what image you’d like to display as your background. Simply save an image to your computer and then use this utility to browse down to it. Of course, if you’re like me and find that having your background change between many choices when you’d like it too, you can look at this article.
Next we’ll look at Fonts (system-> Preferences-> Fonts). You can get pretty crazy with the fonts in Ubuntu, making your system so awful to look at that you’re guaranteed to get a headache. Of course you can go the other way to and make a really swish look for yourself.
Ubuntu comes with a few neat fonts but of course there are ways to get more. If you’d like to download the MS fonts, or other fonts, you can do the following. You’ll need your extra repositories for this.
sudo apt-get install gsfonts-x11
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
sudo fc-cache -f -v
Once you’ve got the fonts you want, this tool will help you set up everything from the title bar on your open windows to the fonts on your desktop. Fool around a bit as you can’t break anything and you can always change them back. You’ll notice that the changes are dynamic, as soon as you pick a font to try, the change is applied. I’ve got most of my system set to Comic Sans from the msttcorefonts package. Except for my Window Title Font, which is set to Metal Lord. It’s cheesy, but appeals to the 80’s rocker in me.
Now that we’ve got our wallpaper and fonts set up, let’s look at how we can customize our screen savers. Personally, I’m not a big fan of screen savers on laptops, but enjoy them on Desktops for some interesting eye candy when I come back after a meeting.
Let’s go to System-> Preferences-> Screensaver. It’s fairly self explanatory. You can select a specific screen saver from the left, select Random if you want it to cycle through them all, or select blank screen if you want that. Use the slider to set how long your system will remain idle before launching the screensaver. Laptop users be advised that some of these things can suck your battery life down to nothing.
Now on to my favorite part of customizing. Themes! This is the heart of the look and feel of your desktop. Themes determine what icons are used, the colors of your windows borders and to some extent the color and behavior of open windows. They are highly customizable and there are hundreds of them available for download. Check out these sites:
Controls, Windows Borders and Icons. That’s what a theme is, a combination of those three. You can choose a theme which has these three preset, or you can create your own theme by mixing and matching.
To install a downloaded theme, simply save it to your desktop, open up your theme manager (System-> Preferences-> Themes) and then drag and drop it from your desktop into your theme manager. Couldn’t be easier!
Check out a bunch of the themes and see what they do, then if you want to customize further, click the Theme Details button.
This will bring you to three tabs, the previously mentioned Controls, Windows Borders and Icons tabs. Click on each of these and choose what you like. Again, the changes are dynamic so you don’t need to constantly click apply or exit out to see how your changes have taken effect.
When you have a combination that you enjoy, close the Theme Details window and you’ll be back to the Theme Preferences window. Your new theme will be at the top, called “Custom Themeâ€. Click the Save Theme button and give it a name. Congratulations, you’ve just created your own theme!
Currently I’m using the Outdoors Controls, the Aero-NG Windows Borders and the Nerdy Lines Icons. I’ve included a screen shot below so you can see how this looks.
geek out.
0 Comments For This Post
1 Trackbacks For This Post
September 6th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
[...] Ubuntu Basics – Wallpaper, Fonts and Themes (tags: ubun) [...]
Leave a Reply