Thursday, August 12, 2010

Desktop Eye Candy

I was reading the post about a good looking desktop by Seif Lotfy on My sexy desktop I really liked some of the things that he had setup but there were others that were not for me.

For example he was using some docks and the mac-ish menu bar at the top. Both of these tools really don't work for me and my daily usage. I also didn't care for the scroll bar in the theme. But I did find somethings that I like.

1. The background - I have to admit the wood background is quite nice.
2. The grey theme and the dark panels. I've been using the grey theme "Inverted" for awhile, so I stuck with that.
3. The icon set

So I used his background


I chose the "Inverted" Gnome widget theme
I chose the "Inverted" Window border
I chose the "Faenza-Dark" Icon set, it can be found here
I chose the "comfortaa" font that Fedora is using, it can be found here there is a Fedora rpm available for this as well, just search for comfortaa. The Droid fonts also look quite nice.

Now it gets a little tricky, but not bad.


Set your panel background color to color name: #716968, which matches the selected color of the title bar of the active window from the theme, keeping the colors consistent.

We set the panel to be a dark color, but the theme has dark text so to be able to read the text on the panel, we need to alter the font color on the panel. We do that by altering the theme colors.

Edit ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and add the following lines. These lines change the dark font color to white on just the panel and the user-switch-applet.

style "panel_color"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#eeeeee"
}
widget "*PanelWidget*" style "panel_color"
widget "*PanelApplet*" style "panel_color"
widget "*user-switch-applet*" style "panel_color"

Then logout and log back in. And you should get a desktop that looks something like this:



Comments?

2 comments:

Raisor said...

Personally, I'd rather use a wallpaper like this: http://unkool.com/wp-content/gallery/wallpapers/darkwood_floor_1920x1200.jpg

The darker color is easier on my eyes. Other than that I think it looks pretty good.

Kevin DeKorte said...

I switched to Faenza-Cupertino-Dark to replace the brown icons with blue ones.

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Faenza-Cupertino-Dark?content=133677