Tint2 is a a fully customizable taskbar that can add some more eyecandy to your linux desktop. It features custom color and transparency on fonts, icons, borders and background. It also has a clock you can setup.

To get it, download it from this link. Save it to your desktop and open up a terminal. Type in the following commands to extract and install tint2 (your folders may be different if you downloaded a different version)

cd Desktop/
tar -xvf tint2-0.7-beta1.tar.gz
cd tint2-0.7-beta1.tar.gz/
cd src/
make
sudo make install

After the install, I tried to run it in my terminal and got this error…

tint2: error while loading shared libraries: libImlib2.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This can be fixed by installing the libimlib2 library. You can look for it in synaptic or type

sudo apt-get install libimlib2

Now you need to play with the config file to get your desired look. The default config file should be under /etc/xdg/tint2/tint2rc. I was going for a transparent style with each open task as a floating element. Here is my tint2rc with a screenshot under it (tint2 is the bottom panel).

#---------------------------------------------
# TINT CONFIG FILE
#---------------------------------------------
 
#---------------------------------------------
# PANEL
#---------------------------------------------
panel_mode = multi_monitor
panel_monitor = 1
panel_position = bottom center
panel_size = 900 28
panel_margin = 15 0
panel_padding = 9 3
font_shadow = 0
 
#---------------------------------------------
# PANEL BACKGROUND AND BORDER
#---------------------------------------------
panel_rounded = 7
panel_border_width = 1
panel_background_color = #000000 60
panel_border_color = #ffffff 18
 
#---------------------------------------------
# TASKS
#---------------------------------------------
task_text_centered = 1
task_width = 120
task_margin = 2
task_padding = 6
task_icon_size = 13
task_font = sans 7
task_font_color = #ffffff 70
task_active_font_color = #ffffff 85
 
#---------------------------------------------
# TASK BACKGROUND AND BORDER
#---------------------------------------------
task_rounded = 5
task_background_color = #ffffff 30
task_active_background_color = #ffffff 50
task_border_width = 0
task_border_color = #ffffff 18
task_active_border_color = #ffffff 70
 
#---------------------------------------------
# CLOCK
#---------------------------------------------
time1_format = %H:%M
time1_font = sans 8
time2_format = %A %d %B
time2_font = sans 6
clock_font_color = #ffffff 76
 
#---------------------------------------------
# MOUSE ACTION ON TASK
#---------------------------------------------
mouse_middle = none
mouse_right = close
mouse_scroll_up = toggle
mouse_scroll_down = iconify

Screenshot:

Hope this helps make your desktop look even more incredible

Thanks to python’s easy to use IMAP library this is a piece of cake. The script should work with any IMAP mail server. I have tested it with my Gmail and Drexel University accounts. Your mail server info should be publicly available. Google has theirs under the gmail settings >> imap/pop3 tab (You may have to enable imap under this tab). Best bet is to search google.

The script shows you the total number of messages in your inbox and the number that are unread.

To get it working edit your .conkyrc file. Add the following line under the TEXT section. Change the path to where your script is

${execi 60 python /path/to/script/imap.py}

This’ll make obsessive email checking much easier…no need to login manually

Screenshot

Download IMAP.py here (Right click and Save link as…)

This morning I decided to write a script to stick the deal in my conky. Having it sit on my desktop means one less thing to manually check in my browser

If you don’t know what conky is here’s my conky tutorial
I used the same method as I do in the rest of my scripts…set flags around our data, extract the info between the flags and shoot it out to conky.

To get it working add this line to your .conkyrc under the TEXT section

${execi 12000 python /path/to/script/woot.py}

Now you’ll know what’s on Woot as soon as you turn on your computer

Screenshot

Download woot.py here (Right click and Save link as…)

If you don’t know what conky is click here for my conky tutorial.

To get it working, download the script and add the following line to your .conkyrc

${execi 120 python /path/to/script/stocks.py stock1 stock2 stock3}

Replace 120 with your interval, use your path to the script, and change the stocks to actual stock quotes.
Example:

{execi 120 python /home/bhavik/scripts/stocks.py goog msft aapl}

Hope it helps any of the linux users out there that also like to trade =)

Changes:
3/5/09 – Removed decimal conversion to float…
If the market was closed the value was N/A.
Since you can’t convert a string to float it was getting errors.
Should be good now.

Screenshot

Download Stocks.py Here (Right click and Save link as…)

The script goes to the Flyers (or any other NHL team) website, pulls out the scoreboard and prints it to the screen. Once you add it to conky you’ll have a scoreboard on your desktop. No need for a browser or clicking that refresh button. When the game is in progress the script will update the score automatically, when it’s not in progress it’ll show the date and time of the next game.

The basic idea of the script is:
Set two flags (one before the scoreboard and one after)
Store the substring between the flags into a variable
Break this substring into tokens (Team name, date, time, etc…)
Each token is displayed as the scoreboard

Side Note:
The bad thing about this script is it’ll break anytime the NHL changes their scoreboards HTML. I’ll try to keep it as updated as possible. If they change the HTML i’ll fix it and upload another version. I doubt they’ll be changing it often though. Also, Im using Python version 2.5.2. I havent tested with any other version

If you don’t know what conky is check out my Conky Tutorial

Theres two things you need to add to your .conkyrc file after you download this script.
1. This should go into the TEXT section of the .conkyrc
120 is the interval in seconds for it to update (so every 2 minutes)
Call python and then your scripts location and your teams name as an argument

${execi 120 python /path/to/your/script.py flyers}

2. This needs to go in the parameter section before TEXT.
If you leave this out the script output will look cut off in conky.

text_buffer_size 512

You can either supply your teams name as an argument or change it manually in the code. The team name should always be one word. If you enter an incorrect team name the errors will look like this:

bhavik@bdesktop:~/Desktop$ python scoreboard.py crap
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "scoreboard.py", line 60, in
    html = urllib2.urlopen('http://' + team + '.nhl.com/index.html') #open site
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 124, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 381, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 399, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 360, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 1107, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 1082, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
urllib2.URLError:

If you do it correctly the output should look like this

bhavik@bdesktop:~/Desktop$ python scoreboard.py flyers
 
          Thu Feb 19, 2009 7:00 PM
 
       Teams   1st   2nd   3rd  Total
       ------------------------------
     Buffalo     0     0     0      0
Philadelphia     0     0     0      0

Screenshot

Download the script here

And of course after all that I came across a website that just streams the entire game for you live… www.hockeywebcasts.com

The script still comes in handy when I’m too busy to actually watch the game or if the feeds on that site are down. Try it out and tell me what you think. If you have a cool conky setup, post it in the comments!

Enjoy!

EDIT: Script is broken during the off-season…The Flyers have lost, I don’t know if I can go on…I’ll fix the script once I recover