Quick Tweaks » Design

10 Wallpapers for Ubuntu Lovers

ashokgelal — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:46:04 +0000

Give your desktop a Ubuntuish look! Here is the collection of 10 high quality wallpapers for die-hard Ubuntu fans.

Here is one with calendar for the month of October

There are many more wallpapers flying around the Internet. If you know any, share with us in the comments. If you have designed your own, shoot an email to admin[at]quicktweaks[dot]com. We will publish your wallpapers next time with your name on it.

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Gmail+Weather+Beauty right on your Ubuntu desktop

ashokgelal — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:32:40 +0000

[Update:After being hit severely by 'Digg Effect' when this post made to the front page this morning, this site is back again. Thank you for your patience, Diggs (Buries) and Comments folks! Digg on!]

Update2: Links updated. Instead of serving files from MediaFire, DropBox is used. Also, those of you having problem with weather or anything else don’t forget to read the comments. Thanks to everyone using this post and spreading the words because of which my hosting server is down several times!

Ever wished that you had new mails notifications right on your desktop? Ever wished you knew the weather info right on your desktop? Ever wished you had your hardware information right on your desktop? Ever wished your desktop was productive and beautiful at the same time? Ever wished you didn’t have to use Mac4Lin theme to hide the ‘ugliness’ of Ubuntu’s native appearance? Ever wished you had a desktop that looked as beautiful as mine? Let’s fulfil your wish:

I have already talked about how to make your Ubuntu desktop look beautiful and productive. This time I will focus mostly on Conky. Conky is a lightweight system monitor for X. Not only monitoring system, with a little bit of scripting, it can be useful to know your new mails, weather info etc.

Here I’ve attached all the required files, attached my Conky configuration file and explained how to make your desktop look similar to mine.

[Updated]

Read my previous post about AWN and Gnome-Do.
Install Conky:
$ sudo apt-get install conky
Download this file and save in your home directory(Right-click, Save Link As…save the file as .conkyrc)
Make a directory scripts in your home directory. Download these scripts, extract and copy them inside the directory you just created.
Download all these fonts, extract and copy them inside .fonts directory in your home directory. If you don’t have the .fonts directory, you need to create it. You might need to have administrative privileges to create this directory.
Open .conkyrc file. Look for this line:
${execpi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail_parser.py yourgmailusername yourgmailpassword 3}
Replace yourgmailusernamewith your username and yourgmailpassword with Gmail password. You might also need to install python-feedparser (thanks Onno and Neil for bringing this to my attention)
$ sudo apt-get install python-feedparser
To monitor your hard disk and CPU temperature install lm-sensors and hddtemp
$sudo apt-get install hddtemp $sudo apt-get install lm-sensors
Now you need to know the location id for your location for weather info. Head to http://weather.yahoo.com. Enter city or zip code for your location and click go. Copy the location ID from the adress bar. For examples the location id for Geneva, Switzerland is SZXX0013, for Kathmandu, Nepal is NPXX0003
Open pogodynka.sh file look for this line kod=USID0025. Replace USID0025 with the location ID you got from step 10 above
If you want the temperature in Celsius instead of Farenheit, find the following line:
w3m -dump http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/"$kod".html | grep -A21 "Current" | sed 's/DEG/°/g' > $plik
Replace it with:
w3m -dump http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/"$kod"_c.html | grep -A21 "Current" | sed 's/DEG/°/g' > $plik
Create a new empty file in your home directory. Name it weather. Leave the file as it is; do nothing with the file.
Bring Run Applicationdialog box (Alt+F2) type conky to launch it
If everything goes right, your desktop should be looking much ‘cooler’

More info:

My wallpaper, The Farm House, is from http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/details/1545/the_farmhouse.html
Emerald Theme is Scaled_Black_Mod from gnome-look.org
More variables for conky
Settings variables for conky

[If you want to share your desktop and want me to show the best looking desktops on my blog, shoot an email to admin[at]quicktweaks[dot]com along with the screenshot of your desktop and the conky file (if you wish). If you decide to send your conky file, don’t forget to delete your gmail username and password. Sharing is learning!]

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Manage Fonts In Ubuntu With Fontmatrix

ashokgelal — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:46:46 +0000

Designers know the pain of managing fonts in any OS. Without a font manager, previewing each fonts and than copying them to the fonts folder is very cumbersome. There are no. of font manager available for Windows such as AMP Font Viewer, Fontonizer. Managing fonts in Linux OS is lot more pain. Most of the users don’t know where to copy the fonts. The equivalent of C:\Windows\Fonts in Linux is /user/share/fonts. Now with Fontmatrix the pain of managing fonts are gone.

Fontmatrix is a font manager just like other font managers for Windows but it has some new professional features. One of the very appreciating features is the concept of ‘tagging’. You can tag a font for easy grouping and sub-grouping. Such as you can tag a font with keywords such as magazine, website, book etc. This will allow you to find easily which fonts you are using in a magazine and then export all the fonts tagged as magazine for instance. Besides tagging, fontmatrix can show all glyphs in a font, previews of sample text, variable sizing and also tells what kinds of advanced Open Type features are inside each font. You can import a directory containing fonts for previewing and installing them with an ease. Export font book menu allows you to create a nice PDF catalogue of user’s fonts for printing or reference.

Click here to download/install Fontmatrix from getdeb.net After installing go to Applications>Graphics>Fontmatrix to start managing fonts in Ubuntu.

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