June Xfce desktop
This month’s Xfce desktop was inspired by old Japan.
icons: Feel of Japan
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: axiomd
background: The Great Wave off Kanagawa
cursor: Obsidian xcursors
The icon set is very pretty, with lots of creative touches. It can be a little hard to tell what an icon represents, but the more time I spend with this set, the easier it is to recognize items. Sadly, this set only had one release, and it’s still incomplete.
The gtk+ theme Simplistica (from April’s desktop) returns for June’s desktop. Its colors add an old-time feel to the desktop. The blue menu rollovers even match up with the wave colors of the background image.
The window manager theme is the darker variant of axiom, a simple, elegant theme. Its deep hue provides richly contrasts the sandy, woody tones of the gtk+ theme, and suggests dark, stormy skies to match the waves of the background image.
The wallpaper is a famous woodblock print by Hokusai, from the series 36 Views of Mount Fuji, and a simple Google search turns up any resolution you could want. The Great Wave is one of my favorite works. It was on my February calendar, and now it’s on my desktop. The image isn’t quite the rustic picture of ancient Japan that I’d like – that would take a couple of weeks to locate – but it’s still pleasing. Sakura, from last month’s desktop, is another good choice, but variety is the spice of life. The Great Wave goes well with my SLiM login theme, Wave.
I picked the mouse cursor theme because it reminds me of wet ink on rice paper, and it has occasional blue animations that match the wave colors. It’s available in Portage; you can install it by running emerge obsidian-xcursors.
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the foreground. An Xfce terminal shows an update to Gnumeric being compiled in the background.
Running in the panel are an assortment of application launchers, including customized dropdown menus for frequently used programs.
In the panel, I changed the default Xfce menu button (the blue X on the far left) to use a different icon; look in /usr/share/pixmaps for the four menu icons shipped with Xfce. Right click the menu button to change the icon. Since you have to supply the full path, it means that when you change icon themes, any menu icon included will not automatically be applied to the menu button. You’ll have to change it manually every time you change your theme.
After the launchers and taskbar, the notification area holds the tray icons for Claws Mail and Pidgin. Then a genmon applet that runs my lastsync.sh Portage script. After genmon, there are plugins for volume control, the Orage clock, and local weather.