Onderstekop

Changing your wallpaper now and again may keep your mind fresh, but did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to change more? But what exactly? And how? This article was written to give you some perceptions into further personalization of your overall Ubuntu appearance.

1. Change/Install new themes

The current standard Ubuntu 'human' theme has a quite minimalistic look and requires a acquired taste for orange. Now, I'm not saying that it's ugly but changing the default theme might give your desktop life a new impulse.

To change the theme go to: system > preferences > Theme and select one from the list. If you aren't satisfied by what you see or if you want to tweak the theme a bit, click on 'Customize...' and go ahead.



Download even more Metacity themes on
www.gnome-look.org/, equivalently -for KDE users- download more themes on kde-look.org/

2. Change login and splash screens

2.1 Change the Login Screen

Now, one might argue that a screen you only see for a couple of seconds each day isn't worth changing, but I know from experience that it is. A fresh login screen makes you want to login! Makes you want to use that computer! What a brilliant splash screen! I can't wait to type away!! I wish my house had a login screen like this! This is effing fantastic!

So let's change that mother! Ubuntu commonly comes with a couple of login screens. Go to System > Administration > Login Window and have a look at the 'local' tab. This should show a list of available login screens. Pick one and you're set!

For the first couple of weeks -it might be shorter-..this is it. You happily log in to your system but each day you feel like the novelty is wearing off and on one day you can't help but notice that the time has come to install a new login screen. Luckily there are hundreds of login screens available for you to download at the great file depot gnome-look.org. Phew!

2.2 Change the splash screen

Have you ever noticed that little screen when you've logged in to your desktop? No? Well, let's change it anyway! Grab a nice splash screen from the above mentioned url and install gnome-splashscreen-manager so that you can change the splash screen. There are actually a couple of other ways to change it, but this is by far the easiest way (see the ubuntu forums for other methods)

3. Install Beryl

You probably know this one if you are new to Ubuntu, because this package probably drew you in in the first place and if not then I will just reveal that I'm off course talking of the famous 'desk-on-a-cube' that is Beryl (probably gave that away in the header). Now, the cube rotation is very smooth and looks great but there is actually a lot more to Beryl (really? yes, really). Probably the one most worth mentioning regarding this topic is the window decorator for Beryl called Emerald.



Emerald -just like the standard decorator Metacity- comes with a lot of pre-packed themes so you can change the appearance of your windows nice and easy (again, the themes are modifiable).

You might have noticed that I'm not giving out Beryl and Emerald installation HOWTO's because you can find that stuff anywhere on the web and posting such a potentially extensive tutorial kind of defeats the purpose of this article which is meant to give you an overview and some tips on adjusting the look (and feel) of your Ubuntu desktop.

4. Install gDesklets

gDesklets will provide you the missing links in your perfect desktop environment. Ever felt slightly jealous when seeing that icon bar on a Mac? Well, not anymore! Have your own icon-bar-launcher and system information widgets running in notime. Just install the package gdesklets and you are ready to go. When running the gDesklets shell it lists over a hundred widgets that you are able to load with only one click of work!



As with Beryl: you want to make sure gDesklets is loaded everytime you login to your desktop. This can easily be done by going to the System > Preferences > Sessions panel and click on 'New'. Enter 'gDesklets' or something along the lines as name and 'gdesklets shell' as command. Click OK and you are all set!

5. Change the terminal appearance/embed terminal in desktop

5.1 Change the terminal appearance

If you do -like me- spend a lot of time at the command line you might get bored with the plain white letters on the gaping black terminal background. Also, you might have grown tired of the people asking you what version of DOS you are using when typing away at work or a public place. It's time to do something about that!



Open up a terminal and go to Edit > Current profile. This is the walhalla of terminal adjustment! Check out the Colors and Effects tab for they will grant you the wisdom to a black letters on a transparant background terminal!

5.2 Embed a terminal in your desktop

The last tip I gonna leave you with is a tricky one, but one that is quite good when you get it working. To read how to do it, visit this site.

Last words and thoughts

I hoped this helped some of you out. Let me know if I haven't mentioned a program that I definitely should have mentioned or if you know of a good KDE equivalent. Also, if you happen to have used my tips it might be nice to show a screen shot of your resulting desktop to the other readers.