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Grokking the World

November 24th, 2005

I’ve been themeing up GNOME again, and am quite pleased with the results. However I think GNOME’s Theme Preferences program needs a little work. It isn’t made clear to a newbie exactly how to install a theme, sure it says you can drag and drop, but that’s not much good if the newbie has instinctively untarred the folder, for GNU/Linux to be successful in the desktop you’ve got to design with the non-technical user in mind. Anyway, I’m sure a non-technical user can manage with a bit of help:

  1. Grab your theme from the Internet, Gnome-Look is a good place to start.
  2. Download it to your home directory, open up a console and move the archive to either the hidden .icons or .themes directories with the “mv” command.
  3. Go into Desktop → Preferences → Theme → Install New Theme and enter the path to the archived folder (probably something like /home/alex/.themes/foo.tar.gz)
  4. You should now be able to use your theme / iconset etc.

I also played around with the fonts a little bit. I’ve found that size 11 Bitstream Vera Sans is a lovely font to program in. Sure it’s not monospace but it’s damn sexy on the eyes! Actually, it’s so good that I’ve changed the GNOME font defaults so that other programs use it on their widgets. The anti-aliasing knocks the sock’s off Windows XP’s Cleartype.

Update

About an hour ago I was at my old school’s awards evening to pick up my GCSE certificates. Special congrats to my good friend H. whose grade score averaged out as the best among the girls. Also congrats to my other friends who won something, whether it was community or academic related. Myself however am content with just my grades, it’s not my style to do any more than the expected.

It was actually nice seeing everyone again. I have a little saying:

Familiarity breeds contempt.

When I was at my old school I was sick of the constantly familiar surroundings and routine. Going back to it though, I feel slightly nostalgic, maybe not so much for the place, but for the people. Though saying that, my saying also applies to people generally, I think it’s easy to take someone for granted if you’ve known them for a long time.

Anyway, when we left the awards hall it started to snow outside, which certain Australian readers might be interested to hear. Apparently we’re going to have a cold snap over the weekend. Anyway, before I get any more boring, here’s a screenshot of my new desktop:

Grokking the world…

  1. GNOME around the Great Salt Lake, Utah.

Filed under: Life, Linux, Media by Alex at 10:23 pm | Trackback

5 Responses to “Grokking the World”

  1. H. Says:
    November 24th, 2005 at 10:44 pm

    Thanks Alex, and well done to you!!
    Nice to know people miss you?

  2. Alex Says:
    November 24th, 2005 at 10:54 pm

    Yeah, they’re a friendly bunch. Good year I reckon.

    Nice to know I miss them as well. :)

  3. Pascal Klein Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 5:05 am

    The snow. Ah… awesome. Make the best of it. :)

    While on the topic of themes… remember my creamy-human IceWM window decorations I made? I’ve redone them, and now they are white (the buttons) as apposed to black. I remember you suggesting that a fair while back. :)

    Oh, by the way, i’m going to diveintopython.org. Dad has been showing me some lovely little Python scripts in this nice development suite called Eric. Make sure to grab that if you haven’t already. Written in Python too.

    Kind regards,
    Pascal Klein

  4. Alex Says:
    November 25th, 2005 at 8:51 am

    Hmm, I woke up this morning and it was only a peppering really.

    It’s friggen cold though! :S

    Cool, I guess I should give KDE a bit of TLC too.

    Eric? As in Eric Idle I suppose. :) I’ll have to download it and check it out. Qt though, hrumph.

  5. Pascal Klein Says:
    November 26th, 2005 at 10:19 am

    I run GTK and Qt apps, side by side. It’s only Qt. :P