Everything is right about Ubuntu expect its look.  Changing its appearance is one of the highly requested features by many fans around the world. Fans were expecting a change with Hardy Heron, but it didn’t happen. They had a lot of expectations with Intrepid Ibex but it came with nothing more than small color changes and this non-sense wallpaper:

The ugliest wallpaper ever

If you hate Ubunut’s default appearance, here are some ways to make it look best of the all OSes

• Install Emerald Theme manager and download emerald themes from gnome-look.org. I’m using Scaled_Black_Mod
• Get rid of the bottom panel and replace it with some beautiful and productive dock. Here is a nice tutorial on how to do this.
• Get mails, weather, and system info right on your desktop with conky. After this ‘beauty’ comes as a bonus for you. Read my previous post on how to do this. I’ve included all the required files and fonts so it shoudn’t take you more than 10minutes.
• Download Ubuntu wallpapers to show your Ubuntu love. If you love nature and prefer some natural backgrounds instead, you can get them from devian art. Other place to look for the beautiful wallpapers are: InterfaceLIFT, and StudioTwentyEight
• If you want to get rid of the top menu, you can replace it with a nice looking cirular application menu.

After a couple of hours your ugly desktop should more beautiful then mine:

Desktop Screenshot with conky, AWN, Scaled Black mod theme, and Gnome-Do

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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]

1. Read my previous post about AWN and Gnome-Do.
2. Install Conky:
   $ sudo apt-get install conky
3. Download this file and save in your home directory(Right-click, Save Link As…save the file as .conkyrc)
4. Make a directory scripts in your home directory. Download these scripts, extract and copy them inside the directory you just created.
5. 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.
6. Open .conkyrc file. Look for this line:
   ${execpi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail_parser.py yourgmailusername yourgmailpassword 3}
7. 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
8. To monitor your hard disk and CPU temperature install lm-sensors and hddtemp
9. $sudo apt-get install hddtemp
$sudo apt-get install lm-sensors
10. Now you need to know the location id for your location for weather info. Head to http://weather.yahoo.com. Enter city or zip code for your location and click go. Copy the location ID from the adress bar. For examples the location id for Geneva, Switzerland is SZXX0013, for Kathmandu, Nepal is NPXX0003
11. Open pogodynka.sh file look for this line kod=USID0025. Replace USID0025 with the location ID you got from step 10 above
12. If you want the temperature in Celsius instead of Farenheit, find the following line:
    w3m -dump http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/"$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
13. Create a new empty file in your home directory. Name it weather. Leave the file as it is; do nothing with the file.
14. Bring Run Applicationdialog box (Alt+F2) type conky to launch it
15. 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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