Installing & Using Gnome-Do

Posted on July 14th, 2008 in Applications, Gnome by admin

GNOME Do (Do) is an intelligent launcher tool that makes performing common tasks on your computer simple and efficient. Do not only allows you to search for items in your desktop environment (e.g. applications, contacts, bookmarks, files, music), it also allows you to specify actions to perform on search results (e.g. run, open, email, chat, play). Want to send an email to mom? Simply type “email mom.” Want to listen to some music? Simply type “play beatles.” Do provides instantaneous, action-oriented desktop search results that adapt to reflect your habits and preferences. For example, if you use Firefox web browser often, typing “f” in Do will launch it. Or, if you visit The New York Times webpage often, Do will open it if you simply type “nyt.” Unlike other search tools that present search results as flat, homogeneous lists, Do provides familiar graphical depictions of search results that assure you that your intent is being realized correctly; searching for “mom” will show a picture of mom, and searching for “beatles” will show a Beatles album cover. Do has many more powerful and exciting capabilities that must be seen to be appreciated.

Quick: How to Hide Mounted Drives on Gnome’s Desktop

Posted on July 13th, 2008 in Gnome by admin

I prefer a clean desktop with no icons cluttering it up, but by default most Gnome based distros adds icons to the desktop for every single removable drive that you attach to your system.

Put icons in your Fluxbox menu

Posted on June 2nd, 2008 in Fluxbox by admin

If you want include some icons in your menu use this in the ~/.fluxbox/menu file.
[exec] (gnome-terminal) {gnome-terminal} <~/.icons/xterm.xpm>
[exec] (firefox) {firefox} <~/.icons/firefox.xpm>
[exec] (Run) {fbrun } <~/.icons/run.xpm>

Note: you can only use xpm images. version 0.9.12-r1 supports png and jpg over imlib2 support
http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/imlib2.html

Set Background Wallpaper in Fluxbox

Posted on May 20th, 2008 in Fluxbox by admin

Fluxbox isn’t like KDE or Gnome in the sense that there’s a ‘desktop configuration tool’. To change the desktop wallpaper, for example. you’ll have to drop into a terminal window. It’s not hard, just different.

  1. Get the image you’d like to use as your desktop wallpaper downloaded or otherwise saved somewhere on your sytem
  2. Open a terminal window and use your favorite text editor to open your ~/.fluxbox/startup file.
  3. Look for a line that starts with the command fbsetbg. If you see one, edit it to reflect the path to your new background image. If you don’t see such a line, make a new one as such (note: depending on your screen size you may see this as two lines, this should be one line in your startup file:

    fbsetbg -f /home/jon/.fluxbox/backgrounds/my_background.jpg

Another way to get this to set every time you start fluxbox is as follows by adding the command to the ~/.fluxbox/init file. Find the line beginning with session.screen0.rootCommand: and enter the proper command afterward ( fbsetbg -f /home/jon/.fluxbox/backgrounds/my_background.jpg ). You can also use the simplified command fbsetbg -l to load the last wallpaper loaded by fbsetbg, to avoid changing the init file each time you change your wallpaper.

Create an ‘Open as Root’ Action in Konqueror

Posted on May 20th, 2008 in KDE by admin

To have a service menu which opens the selected directory as root in Konqueror, create a file, say konq_root.desktop in ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
ServiceTypes=inode/directory
Actions=open_as_root

[Desktop Action open_as_root]
Name=Open as Root
Icon=konsole
Exec=kdesu konqueror %F

Now, if you right click any directory in Konqueror and go to Actions, a new menu appears, Open as Root. If you select more than one directory, Konqueror will open each of them in a new tab.

Make icons on your fluxbox desktop with idesk

Posted on May 19th, 2008 in Fluxbox by admin

Idesk is an app used to show icons on the desktop, which by simple or double clicking (according to users preferences) will execute a command. It’s used mostly to work with window managers. Icons can be dragged to the desired position on the desktop and that position will be remembered on next idesk startup. The formats supported are png and svg, though there might be problems with the last mentioned format so it’s recommended to stay with png.

Kicker’s hidden tweaks

Posted on April 4th, 2008 in KDE, Tweaks by admin

KDE is one of the most popular and used desktop environments for Linux systems because not only that it looks very much like Microsoft Windows, but it combines ease of use, superb graphical design and new age functionality with high-end technologies of the Unix-based operating systems. Kicker is one of the core parts of the KDE desktop, it is the main panel. This panel can be customized by users in almost every possible way you think of. For example, you can add a lot of useful applets (clock, system tray, show desktop, color picker, desktop preview & pager, dictionary and many more), application shortcuts or you can make it completely transparent

Kicker also has a lot of configuration options that are not revealed in any of the existing graphical user interfaces but can be very useful for advanced users. You must know first that these options are found in the /usr/share/config.kcfg/kickerSettings.kcfg and the /home/yourusername/.kde/share/config/kickerrc configuration files. Below are some of the top tweaks found in the kickerSettings.kcfg file, but nothing stops you to read and modify, as necessary, every option.

Make the Windows Key Open the Gnome Panel Menu

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Gnome by admin

We’ve already covered how to make that Windows Key useful in KDE and Xfce, but what about Gnome? Well these instructions should help you out getting the Windows Key to open up the Gnome Panel Menu.

Make Conky Transparent in KDE

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 in Applications, KDE, Tweaks by admin

Conky doesn’t display properly with a transparent background in KDE, this is a rather quick fix. Type the following in the command line:

feh –bg-scale `dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface currentWallpaper 1`

If you use a centered wallpaper, use –bg-center instead.

Also see: Make Conky Transparent and movable

Make the Windows Key Open the Xfce menu

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 in Xfce by admin

This allows you to bind your ‘windows’ key to the desktop right-click menu or middle-click menu, for example.

By default, the windows key is considered Super_L, a modifier key. Therefore you’d have to bind a command to windows+[some_key], which is not what we want. So what you want to do is re-map your windows key so that it’s not a modifier. The easiest way to do this is to use xmodmap like so:

xmodmap -e “keycode 227 = Menu” &

(on older versions of xfce it will be xmodmap -e “keycode 115 = Menu” & )

“Menu” above specifies that when you press the windows key, it will pop-up the app’s menu. We will later overwrite this to pop-up an Xfce menu. The 115 above is the keycode for the windows key. It should work for most people, but you can verify what it is for you with xev.

Now that you’ve changed your windows key to Menu, you can use it with one of the following shortcuts:

xfdesktop -menu <– pops up the right-click menu

xfdesktop -windowlist <– pops up the middle-click window list

If this all works out for you, you may wish to put the xmodmap command in your .xinitrc or .xsession file so that it will execute on startup.

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