‘Outsiders’ Emerald window borders

Some things are standard: milk on cereal; Doctor in Tardis; window buttons in frame.

Well, the latter was standard; 0rAX0‘s  ‘Outsiders’ Emerald theme pack literally pushes the traditional boundaries away in these off-corner creations.

They certainly look good – but how do they handle? That’s for you to decide.

‘Outsiders’ requires Emerald to be installed and in use as your window decorator.

Download @ 0rax0.deviantart.com/art/Outsiders-Emerald

Five cool conky set-ups for Ubuntu

Here are five cool Conky themes that require no-input other than downloading, installing and then running.

Suuuuny-conky by ~BigRZA

Conky Popup by ~FezVrasta

Conky Tiles by ~BigRZA

Circles of imagination by ~clanlordus89

Conky Ken by ArnoNymus

Conky by VSV

 

Required fonts:
Infected http://www.dafont.com/infected.font
Defused http://www.dafont.com/defused.font
Juice http://www.dafont.com/juice-gadisradio.font

It looks great with this wallpaper http://www.almostsmart.com/wallpaper/Weasel/Ataraxia.jpg

GTK Theme http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Clearlooks_blackblue?content=46165
Emerald http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Die+Hard+4.0+-+Matthew+Farrel%27s+theme+%28E?content=66714
Icons http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/LaGaDesk-BlackWhite-III?content=109452

xplanetFX 2.1.1 - Other GNOME Wallpaper

xplanetFX is a daemon for rendering high quality views of mother earth as wallpaper in real-time (sun, moon and clouds). It comes with a handy GTK interface but is fully usable under CLI.

xplanetFX depends on xplanet and imagemagick and is available as DEB, RPM (untested) and TAR.GZ. The GUI uses pygtk and cairo.

A couple of available templates embed the renderings in different scenes and are downloadable as separate packages which can be easily installed by drag&drop to the themes list in the GUI or since 2.0 directly online via the themepool inside the application.

Features like delayed autostart multi language (japanese, czech, dutch, english, spanish, italian, french, russian, greek and german by now) and a lot of customization make xplanetFX an easy-to-use interface for xplanet drawing the earth in high quality.

The base images of the templates are mostly licensed under creative commons from flickr.com and some free texture stuff from the www.

A lot more information, the users manual and the templates can be obtained under the web adress.

There is a signed repository for the deb package available, please read the infos in the blog under "installation".

Debian

(xplanetFX DEB)

Red Hat

(xplanetFX RPM (untested))

other

(xplanetFX TAR.GZ)

Source http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/xplanetFX?content=129697

Increase the size of Compiz shadows

By default CCSM’s (CompizConfig Settings Manager) ‘Shadow Radius’ setting for Window Decorations the fixed at a maximum of 18; you’re unable to go higher using the slider or by adjusting the value box.

However, you are able to enter a value much greater than CCSM offer via gconf-editor:

• Open up gconf-editor (ALT+F2 > gconf-editor)
• Navigate to /apps/compiz/plugins/decoration/allscreens/options/
• Change ‘shadow_radius‘ to a higher value; the effect will apply immediately for you to gauge reaction

I played around, setting mine to 25 and then 48. The result was a very deep shadow that gives the appearance of ‘lifting’ windows off the page. Your tastes will likely vary, so have a play around with different values to find a setting that suits you.

Compiz radius shadow at 48

Compiz radius shadow at 25

‘Ejector’ tray app adds indicator applet

Windows users miss an easily accessible tray icon for un-mounting their drives safely in Ubuntu should check out ‘Ejecter‘ (*), an nitfy tool that has recently received some new features…

It’s hard to waffle on about what ‘Ejecter’ does, after all the name kind of gives it away.

Suffice to say it provides convenient access for un-mounting external peripherals hard drives, DVD tray and USB sticks with little more than a click on the system panel.

When your device is ready to be unplugged from your computer a native Ubuntu notification bubble will appear.

Install

Maverick comes with an old version of the tray app available in the repositories. This works fine but for all the new features you’ll need to upgrade using the following PPA:

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fredp/ppa
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ejecter

Ejecter adds itself your system start-up items and will launch automatically upon your next login.

*Ejecter is not a typo, it’s how the application is spelt

This is a clean beige theme based on Clearlooks and Murrine. It is inspired by the controls theme GTK2-H2O (author: ?). The corresponding Emerald theme is included.

Install LibreOffice 3.3 Ubuntu

The first stable release of the free office suite ‘LibreOffice’ is now available for download.

Forked from OpenOffice late last year, LibreOffice 3.3 provides users with the familiar set of applications – albeit with greatly improved features such as: -

• Import and work with SVG files
• Easy way to format title pages and their numbering in Writer
• Improved Navigator Tool for Writer
• Improved ergonomics in Calc for sheet and cell management
• Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro document import filters.

A detailed breakdown of new features in LibreOffice 3.3 can be found @libreoffice.org/download/new-features-and-fixes

Download LibreOffice

Enough with the chit chat how do you get a-hold of it? LibreOffice 3.3 can be downloaded in .deb format from libreoffice.org or, for Ubuntu 10.10 users, installed from the LibreOffice PPA using the following commands: -

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libreoffice

Ubuntu 11.04 testers will already have LibreOffice installed as it undergoes evaluation for as OpenOffice’s replacement.