Moblin blazing fast
I updated my netbook to give it a new look. I switched the Xfce Panel against bmpanel2 and changed the background (the previous definitelly lasted very long.) Not much changes, but I topped a cold boot of about six seconds, always faster baby :-P And the window manager is OpenBox by the way.
The only real useful entry missing in this panel is a battery monitor. At least I have an indicator over the keyboard that starts blinking when there is about three percents left. What I like about this panel is the cool themes that it is provided with, however the configuration is set through a hand-written configuration file which sucks but what do you want, it is extremely lightweight on the other hand.
Update: Should I mention I totally forgot about the Xfce power manager? Well I did, and it is provided with a notification icon displaying the battery status :-) However I had to fix the default ACPI script related to the lid, since HAL doesn't list it, in order to get the netbook to go into sleep.
Moblin blazing fast
I updated my netbook to give it a new look. I switched the Xfce Panel against bmpanel2 and changed the background (the previous definitelly lasted very long.) Not much changes, but I topped a cold boot of about six seconds, always faster baby :-P And the window manager is OpenBox by the way.The only real useful entry missing in this panel is a battery monitor. At least I have an indicator over the keyboard that starts blinking when there is about three percents left. What I like about this panel is the cool themes that it is provided with, however the configuration is set through a hand-written configuration file which sucks but what do you want, it is extremely lightweight on the other hand.
Update: Should I mention I totally forgot about the Xfce power manager? Well I did, and it is provided with a notification icon displaying the battery status :-) However I had to fix the default ACPI script related to the lid, since HAL doesn't list it, in order to get the netbook to go into sleep.
Late April Xfce desktop
It's only been two weeks since my last awesome desktop, but already I've found a new look. Where mid-April's look was grungy, stormy, and dark-toned, my newest desktop is sleek, airy, and light. It exudes a reserved warmth; perfect for the approaching summer. Lots of light wood, airy spaces, pale blue skies, and soft shadows.
icons: Simplistica
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk
background: Shards
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
The downside to such a beautifully bright environment is that it's too bright when using the computer in dim light. 'Specially late at night or early in the morning. Dark themes with lower contrast are a bit easier on the eyes in those cases.
The Simplistica icon set is comprehensive and well-designed: It's intuitive and it has more icons than even Tango, at least on my machine. Every icon looks good, though I wish there were a few more mimetype icons, for example .txt and .xml. Something like the appearance of the .zip and .tar icons.
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. Check out those icons.
The weather plugin is running, displaying the local forecast.
That image editor is Fotoxx. When you need to make quick touchups or corrections to pictures, give Fotoxx a shot. It's way faster than The Gimp, and easier to use. There's an ebuild available in my overlay, though I need to update the ebuild for the 10.x releases.
Also visible is xfrun4, a popup application launcher that remembers your most recent commands. It's pretty nifty; I like its autocomplete feature.
April Xfce desktop
Behold this month's Xfce desktop.
icons: Smokikon
gtk+: Shiki-Colors
xfwm4: Shiki-Colors
background: paleis by Steven Schreurs
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
It's nice and grungy, though the gtk theme's blue highlights aren't quite dark enough. A simple color mod would fix that. I do like Shiki's unified titlebar; it lends an elegant touch. Someone needs to port Shiki to the Rezlooks engine, since Clearlooks is just too smooth, too nice for the grungy wallpapers I favor. Also, there aren't nearly enough decent grunge icon sets. Everything's too bright, too shiny, too smooth, too 3D, etc.
Applications
As usual: Decibel for playing music, and Thunar as the filemanager.
Highlighted in the panel menu is PyRoom. An ebuild for it is available in overnight.
The album featured in Decibel is Rain on Mars by Koalips. It's freely available at archive.org.
VLC with GTK+ look-n-feel
To get Qt applications to look like GTK+ applications run qtconfig and in Select GUI Style choose GTK+. Next click in the menu bar File > Save.Something is still puzzling me, why does GNOME run VLC automatically with native GTK+ look-n-feel and not Xfce?
Update: Thanks to the power of tig and grep, I figured the Qt library (qt_init function) defines the desktop environment as GNOME for Xfce (this results in GTK+ theming, GNOME like Open dialogues, etc) by retrieving an X11 atom on the root window and compares it to “xfce4”
Update2: The latest version Qt 4.6.2 doesn't include the code for checking the X11 atom (it's in git), which explains why it doesn't work.
VLC with GTK+ look-n-feel
To get Qt applications to look like GTK+ applications run qtconfig and in Select GUI Style choose GTK+. Next click in the menu bar File > Save.Something is still puzzling me, why does GNOME run VLC automatically with native GTK+ look-n-feel and not Xfce?
Update: Thanks to the power of tig and grep, I figured the Qt library (qt_init function) defines the desktop environment as GNOME for Xfce (this results in GTK+ theming, GNOME like Open dialogues, etc) by retrieving an X11 atom on the root window and compares it to “xfce4”
Update2: The latest version Qt 4.6.2 doesn't include the code for checking the X11 atom (it's in git), which explains why it doesn't work.