Posts Tagged desktop eye candy

Replace Gnome-Panel with Tint2

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on April 7, 2009

Hey guys, Today we’re going to get rid of gnome-panel and replace it with something much better looking…

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

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Awesome System Monitoring with Conky

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on February 5, 2009

We’re going to make our Linux desktop look awesome with a tool called Conky. It’s a lightweight system monitor that you can customize to fit with your desktop theme. You can configure how it looks and also what it displays. It can tell you almost anything about your computer (OS,Kernel Version, IP addresses, Fan speeds, CPU Temperature and much much more).

It’s a nice and simple install on Ubuntu. Just run this command in terminal.

sudo apt-get install conky

If you’re running a different Linux you can see installation notes here.

Alright, to start it up hit ALT+F2, type in conky and hit enter. This is what it looks like with the default config…we can make it look a whole lot better. The configuration file is kept in the home folder and it’s called .conkyrc (hit CTRL+H in your home folder to view hidden files and you should see it). If for some reason it isn’t there you can just create your own and save it as .conkyrc. You can also copy mine and change to your liking rather than starting from scratch. This way you’ll have the default structure of the config file.

The config file has two sections, the top is the config parameters and under that is where you tell conky what you want to output. You can set how fast conky updates the info here.

# Update interval in seconds
update_interval 1.0

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