Finally a new desktop

Yesterday night I decided that it was time to give my desktop a new design. In my case, usually everything begins with a new wallpaper, but this time I decided to also use a new icon set. So I asked yaourt what the AUR had to offer and stumbled upon some very nice themes called gnome-colors. They are beautiful, I am using GNOME-Carbonite, which is included in that package right now. The next step was to find a fitting background… in the end, I chose Kurt Russell who plays Stuntman Mike in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (which is part of Grindhouse). Needless to say that I like the movie and recommend it, if you like QT’s other movies. Last but not least, one needs to set some matching gnome colors (I pick them with GIMP right off the wallpaper) and re-configure conky. I’m glad I did that, because my old desktop setup got kind of boring (as with all of them after a while).

desktop, stuffed

desktop, clean

New Installation (Update!)

Last time I set up arch on my desktop pc (my laptop’s still broken :-\), I installed the i686 version in order to use it with colinux, too. I’ve figured out that colinux did not really work as good as expected – XServer crashed often (both XMing and Cygwin/X) as well as no Pulseaudio Server working with Windows Vista x86 (bad choice anyway) and it was too slow. The only good way to work with it was via Terminal. In the end I didn’t boot Win6 often and used arch all day. But what is Archlinux i686 on a x86_64 processor? Bullshit! So I did the reinstall.

On the Windows side btw, I decided to use Win7. Why? It is just up to date and not as fucked up as Vista. M$ made a step in the right direction here. I downloaded the build 7232 x86_64 somewhere and installed it. Oh and I haven’t booted it since then yet, because I use it just for games that don’t run with Linux (none installed yet) – and I don’t play these too often anyway.

Windows 7

Now to Archlinux. x86_64 here of course, with arch32 chroot. While the last one is making some trouble with wine and Alsa is not working as wanted yet (no mic), the rest of it runs pretty well. For the design I chose a less colorful one, so it is completely different compared to the Joker one (which I don’t really like anymore).

Archlinux Clean

Archlinux Stuffed

The conky configurations (click!) are inspired by Ghost1227’s Nice and Clean Theme, the wallpapers are from here (Windows) and here (Arch).

Gnomeish Wine Applications

Wine with Gnome-styled controls

Wine is able to somewhat apply Windows XP’s msstyle information to it’s windows (not the OS) in order to make them looking better. I already tried this on my laptop, but wine became really slow when activating such a theme, so I left it as it was. Now either wine got better or it is because of the increased CPU-power my machine has, that application’s don’t get slower anymore. While most Windows-Styles do remind you of Windows and therefore make you not want to have them installed (at least I think so), I found a website with really nice Gnome-msstyles. Note that the window-borders are drawn by Gnome anyway, so they are not important. Just focus on the controls and how good they match your current gnome theme. On the Screenshot I used Clearlooks Gummy.

Libnotify and Amarok 1.4.x -> LibnotifymaroK

Today I googled for libnotify and amarok in order to find a script that displays information from the OSD with libnotify (this is the gnome notification library mumble for example uses), so that it fits my gnome desktop better. There are a few scripts out there, the closest one to what I wanted here. But as soon as I installed it, I found a bug: The „body“ part of the message is empty, if there is a „&“ sign somewhere. So I fixed that bug (along with translating < and > ) and modified it a lot. A few hours later the script looks really nice:

LibnotifymaroK - displays English and German language

I decided to rename the script, because there are already so many „amarok libnotify“ scripts out there and put it at kde-apps.org – (thats right, here’s the download!). Enjoy!

„Cannot talk to klauncher“

You might get this error message when you try to start a KDE application outside of the K Desktop Environment (gnome for example).

solution:

kdeinit

New wallpaper on my desktop…

…and as usual I like to change the gtk theme and some other stuff (in this case especially conky!) to match it. So i choose green, because of joker’s hair.

clean:

stuffed:

About the wallpaper itself (SPOILER!):

I like „The Dark Knight“ very much. Even if James Rolfe says it is not soo good, its still one of my favorite movies (propably because I have never heared of „Two-Face“ before and didn’t expect that guy with the coin to become him, so I was really like WTF )

Guake

Guake is a nice terminal-emulator which works like a quake terminal. You push a specific key (default is F12) and it appears from top across half the screen. I like it very much since you don’t have any terminals floating around in your programs bar which you may accidentally close and kill an important app then. You can install it via pacman for archlinux and it is supposed to be run with gnome.

I switched to Gnome

Since I use linux (really using it since about a year), I had KDE installed. First it was KDE 3.5, pretty stable and doing what it should do, then I tried KDE 4.x, but i was shocked that it didn’t have all the features of ‘3.5, so I switched back after a time. Yoschi told me that this happens with all KDE releases, if they call a new version „x.0″, it doesn’t mean that it is stable by far. But I couldn’t stand how most distributions which run KDE as default just switched to that sort of unstable 4.x versions. Also KDE 3.5 didn’t seem to get anymore updates and I have been using Natilus (since it also has tabs) instead of Konqueror since two months or so. Another reason that I decided to switch is that gnome has much better support for compiz fusion (I know that KDE 4.x has its own composite manager, but this one doesn’t have all the features compiz fusion has – at least when I checked the last time). The only thing that prevented me from switching was Kicker, the KDE 3.5 Panel. But you can move the Gnome panels that they look just like kicker if you want to – and thats what I did.