Enable Transparent Gnome Panels/Menus/Windows in Ubuntu 10.10

Do you want to customize your Ubuntu desktop with the transparent panels, menus, and windows? As we know, Compiz can do the job, but what if you don't need a complete transparency and want the font and controls/buttons is still perfectly visible?

This tutorial is about how to enable RGBA transparency in Gnome desktop, and this might be what you want.
 
Preparation :

To get RGBA transparency enabled in your Ubuntu, first you need to install and enable graphics driver properly.

And in right-click desktop menu "Change Desktop Background" option Visual Effects tab, make sure Normal or Extra was enabled.

Installation:

Open up a teminal from Appications -> Accessoires menu and add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:erik-b-andersen/rgba-gtk

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Now, install gnome-color-chooser and you can use it to enable RGBA:

sudo apt-get install gnome-color-chooser gtk2-module-rgba

Launch gnome-color-chooser at System > Preferences > Gnome Color Chooser. Go to Engines tab, tick "Global" and select "Murrine" in the drop-down box.

Now, click Preferences button to go to its configuration window and check the two check-boxes after "Configuration of Enable/Disable RGBA support"

Finally, logout and back in.

Note:

1. You can also install murrine themes with below command, and use it in right-click desktop -> Change Desktop Background -> Theme tab -> click Customize button.

sudo apt-get install murrine-themes

2. Due to bugs, the panel is only partially transparent and only GTK+ applications support RGBA transparency.

Screenshot:

fern-wifi-cracker

Wireless security auditing application

This is a wireless security auditing application that is written in python and uses python-qt4. This application uses the aircrack-ng suite of tools.
It should work on any version of linux running the following:

Requirements:
python
python-qt4
macchanger
aircrack-ng
xterm

To install simply run the following command in terminal after changing directory to the path were the downloaded package is:
dpkg -i Fern-Wifi-Cracker_1.1_all.deb
Software Icon can be found at the application Menu of the GNOME desktop interfaces
Icon can also be found at /usr/share/applications for KDE and also GNOME:
There you find "Fern_Wifi_Cracker.desktop"

Downloads:
http://fern-wifi-cracker.googlecode.com/files/Fern-Wifi-Cracker_1.1_all.deb

Guide to using apt-get

apt-get is the command-line tool for handling packages, and may be considered the user’s “back-end” to other tools using the APT library. APT is actually both a library and a front-end for dpkg to work with Debian’s .deb packages. It’s designed to track package dependencies, call dpkg and make the software installation easy.

Note: This entry is written with Ubuntu users in mind, hence the use of sudo when root access is required.

Package installation

Install a new package like follows:

sudo apt-get install foobar

You can also install multiple packages with one line, just separate the package names with a space:

sudo apt-get install foobar1 foobar2 foobar3

All required dependencies by the package(s) specified for installation will also be retrieved and installed.

Search

(OK, so you don’t use apt-get for searching, but apt-cache. Still comes in pretty handy though.) When you can’t remember the correct package name then you can search package names and descriptions using

apt-cache search foobar

Or, for a fuzzy search try

apt-cache search foo

This can result in a long list, every package that includes ‘foo’ anywhere in its name or description will be listed. To narrow it down to package names, or packages with words in their descriptions, which start with ‘foo’ try

apt-cache search ^foo

For names/words that end with ‘foo’ try

apt-cache search foo$

Installation from source

Instead of APT fetching the pre-built .deb for a package you can also use APT to build the package from its source code and get an optimised version for your system. Generally debs are absolutely fine to install, but you could see performance increases with CPU intensive packages (e.g. ffmpeg).

sudo apt-get build-dep foobar
sudo apt-get -b source foobar

The first line causes apt-get to install/remove packages in an attempt to satisfy the build dependencies for the package foobar. The second line fetches the source package for foobar. It finds and downloads the newest available version of that source package into the current directory. Source packages are tracked separately from binary packages via deb-src type lines in the /etc/apt/sources.list file. This probably will mean that you will not get the same source as the package you have installed or as you could install. With the -b option specified the package will be compiled to a binary .deb using dpkg-buildpackage. Depending on the package this can take a long time.

Once built, install the package with

sudo dpkg -i foobar-version-number.deb

Package removal and clean-up

To remove a package use

sudo apt-get remove foobar

The software package will be removed, but all of its configuration files will be left behind. This could come in handy if you ever plan on re-installing the package, everything will be back to the way it was before the uninstall.

To remove a package complete with its configuration files use

sudo apt-get --purge remove foobar

What happens to dependencies that were installed with the package? They are left behind. To clean these up use

sudo apt-get autoremove

autoremove removes packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for some package and that are no longer needed. If you have been trying out a lot of software then this might free up some disk space.

sudo apt-get autoclean

autoclean clears out the local repository (/var/cache/apt/archives/ and/var/cache/apt/archives/partial/) of retrieved package files that can no longer be downloaded and are largely useless. This allows a cache to be maintained over a long period without it growing out of control.

sudo apt-get clean

clean is more thorough than autoclean. It removes everything but the lock file from/var/cache/apt/archives/ and /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/. You will likely want to run apt-get clean from time to time to free up disk space.

Upgrade

There are two ways to upgrade your system. First a software update:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This installs the newest versions of all packages currently installed on the system. Packages currently installed with new versions available are retrieved and upgraded; under no circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or packages not already installed retrieved and installed. New versions of currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded without changing the install status of another package will be left at their current version. An update must be performed first so that apt-get knows that new versions of packages are available.

Second, a distro upgrade:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages; apt-get has a “smart” conflict resolution system, and it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones if necessary. The /etc/apt/sources.list file contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package files.

source : http://www.larryni.me.uk/blog/

Elegant Gnome Pack on Ubuntu

This is a project that provides an automatic configuration of your GNOME desktop just in one click, with the backup and restoring support.
The main goal of this projects is to create the most complete dark theme for the GNOME desktop with easy installation experience.

You must have this stuff installed on your system before you'll start:
Murrine GTK engine 0.98.0 or higher
Droid Sans Font
Nautilus Elementary (optional)

 

The pack contains the following stuff :

GUI utility to configure your desktop
Icon theme: Elegant-AwOken based on the AwOken icon set by alecive
GTK+ theme: Elegant GTK theme v 4.0
Cursor Theme: Neutral++ by ducakar
Wallpaper: gDIGE by *Muscarr
Keyboard layout indicator flags
Firefox theme
Google Chrome theme by Jorge Carrillo
Google Chrome scrollbar extension
Google Chrome selection extension
Smplayer theme
Pidgin buddy list theme by Szabo Istvan

 

Ubuntu Lucid/Maverick and Linux Mint 9/10 installation instructions:

 1. Install Elegant GNOME:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elegant-gnome/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
a)sudo apt-get install elegant-gnome
or
b)sudo apt-get install elegant-gnome-mint

  2. Go to "Applications -> Accessories -> Elegant GNOME"
1. Install Nautilus Elementary: (optional)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:am-monkeyd/nautilus-elementary-ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade 2. Run Elegant GNOME app
3. Choose Configure Nautilus -> Nautilus Elementary
 

To install the pack from sources:

1. Download the archive and extract it  

2. Open the terminal and cd to the extracted directory.
3. Run the command "make "(e.g. "make ubuntu").
run "make help" to see the available variants.
4. Run the command "sudo make install".
5. Go to "Applications -> Accessories -> Elegant GNOME".
6. Optional step. If you use the Nautilus Elementary:
a) Go to Applications -> Accessories -> Elegant GNOME
b) Choose "Configure Nautilus"
c) Select "Nautilus Elementary"
 

To remove the pack:(installed from sources)

1. Open the terminal and cd to the extracted directory.  

2. Run the command "sudo make uninstall"
 

To install the Google Chrome theme:

1. Download and extract the "Google Chrome" archive
2. Drag and drop the *.crx files into the Google Chrome window.

Ubuntu Keyboard Shortcuts For Linux Power Users

Get lightning fast and clever at the command line

You can use keyboard shortcuts and other command line tricks to make entering commands easier and faster. You might already know about the ‘tab’ key which completes partial commands and even file and directory names.

Here are some other keyboard shortcuts you can use within terminal:


Ctrl-a Move to the start of the line.
Ctrl-e Move to the end of the line.

Alt-] x Moves the cursor forward to the next occurrence of x.

Alt-Ctrl-] x Moves the cursor backwards to the previous occurrence of x.

Ctrl-u Delete from the cursor to the beginning of the line.

Ctrl-k Delete from the cursor to the end of the line.

Ctrl-w Delete from the cursor to the start of the word.

Ctrl-y Pastes text from the clipboard.

Ctrl-l Clear the screen leaving the current line at the top of the screen.

Ctrl-x Ctrl-u Undo the last changes. Ctrl-_

Alt-r Undo all changes to the line.

Alt-Ctrl-e Expand command line.

Ctrl-r Incremental reverse search of history.

Alt-p Non-incremental reverse search of history.
!! Execute last command in history

!abc Execute last command in history beginning with abc

!n Execute nth command in history

^abc^xyz Replace first occurrence of abc with xyz in last command and execute it

Also don’t forget to check out 4 websites where you can learn cool command line tricks