Howto: Apwal, A Lightwieght Pop-Up Launcher

I've been Apwal for a while now and have been surprised how few people have even heard of it let alone tried it. It gives you a bunch of launcher items that can pop up at you cursor location, its quick and simple and very useful.

First open a terminal and enter the following line to install it, or use synaptic if you prefer a GUI.

sudo apt-get install apwal

Now its loaded we should add some launchers to it so there is something for it to display, and ultimately launch. So now, open up that terminal if you thought you would get away with not using it before and enter the following:

apwal --edit

The config window will show and it will start to index available icons on your system for it to use as the launcher buttons. The only single downside to apwal I have, is that it does this ever single time you go to edit it, and if you have installed a lot of icons this can take a couple of minutes, so if it takes a while showing the load icons progress bar display, bear with it.

Ok, now its a fairly simple case of adding the command to the application you want, and an icon to show for it, use the filter box on the icon display, if searching for an icon to mplayer for instance, filter *player* as an example to show any icons with player in their filename.

Ok, assuming you have now setup several application launchers you will want to have a means of making it pop-up, I will describe how I did it on my system and if anyone chooses an alternative method could they describe it in the comments for others to benefit from, thanks.

I use Compiz and I wanted to have Apwal display when I pressed right click on the desktop with control held down (control+right click then). Assuming that sounds ok to you, open up the compiz settings manager from your Preferences menu. Now go to the Commands section (normally at the very top of the config pane).

In the first empty slot on the Commands tab (probably Command line 0, and enter "apwal" without the quotes, then click on the Button Bindings tab and for Run command 0 define the binding to <control>Button 3 I am not going to describe that, if you can't manage it, put your PC back into the box and take it back to the store ;)

Ok, now you should have a binding set that when you hold down the Control key and right click the mouse, your launcher will popup darned near instantly, its very fast. This will normally work on top of other windows such as nautilus and just about anything else in my experience.

I hope you enjoy it, its certianly my prefered application launcher method.

Howto: Make Rhythmbox Put Album Covers on the Desktop (Desktop Art)

Ever wondered how people get the album covers on the desktop of the tracks they are listening too?

From Ubuntu Linux Tips and Tutorials

I'm happy to say its very simple, though it will depend on your albums having the cover art available in the mp3 folders.
Open up a terminal and simply paste these commands in one at a time:

If you do not have subversion installed then issue the following command, if you are not sure then enter it anyway, at worst it will just tell you it is already installed and do nothing.

sudo apt-get install subversion

And then these:

mkdir -p $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/

cd $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/

svn co http://nedrebo.org/svn/rhythmbox/desktop-art

Fire up Rhythmbox and go to the Edit/Plugins in the menu bar and find Desktop Art in the lefthand list and simply enable it. You can now configure it using the configure button on the right hand pane, don't worry about using the X,Y positioning coordinates as you can simply alt+leftclick drag the desktop art frame when you exit the configuration. So just adjust the colours if you want, and chane the text position relative to the album cover art.

Enable Composite Manager in Metacity

Not every computer has the resources to run Compiz, but if you pine after some nice effects like window shadows then there is a good chance your computer is capable of running simpler effects. i use this on my Acer Aspire One, sure it can manage Compiz, but it is a little overkill on the baby netbook.

Well rejoice now as Metacity has a composite manager built in which can give you nice drop shadows as well as a window preview on alt+tab and that  pesky inactive window title-bar transparency (which I detailed how to disable last post).

Enable the composite manager in gconf-editor and navigate to the branch in apps/metacity/general

Tick the box next to the setting composite_manager and you are now hopefully enjoying drop shadows... Yay!

A quick alternative is to paste this into a terminal

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true

and if you need to disable it again use:

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool false

Adjust Titlebar Transparency in Metacity

I might be in the minority with this sentiment but I really dislike the transparency Gnome has gained on its inactive window titles when using the GTK window decorator. So here is how to make inactive windows have a solid title-bar or if you are are fan of it, make it even more transparent.

Press alt+F2 and in the run dialog enter:

gconf-editor

Navigate in the left hand tree to the branch /apps/gwd/

The two values we are interested in are :

metacity_theme_opacity which affects inactive window titlebars
metacity_theme_active_opacity which affects active windows

A setting of 1 will make the title-bars solid while 0.75 is the default at three quarters opacity.

Howto make autohide panels smaller and hidden more in Gnome

Autohide panels in Gnome default to a 6 pixel strip remaining showing. I suspect this is done to "reduce confusion" which is a popular phrase from the Gnome guys, regardless its a little annoying to autohide a panel and still have it show around 20% of itself, so lets fix that.

The easiest way to do this is pop open a terminal and enter:

gconf-editor

This is quite a daunting program if you are fairly new to dabbling in the guts of OS's, and I must warn you to be a little careful in here, certainly don't go just changing stuff around to "see what happens"... Ok, no-one is that dumb... right?

Anyway, down the left hand side is a nice tree menu, navigate to:

/apps/panel/toplevels/

You should then see your panels on the left in the toplevels branch, possibly named bottom_panel_screen0, top_panel_screen0 or simply panel_0, panel_1 etc. Click on each of the panel entries and you will see the right pane populate with some "keys", locate the one auto_hide_size which is very likely set to 6 at the moment, change the 6 to a 1 by clicking on it.

The change is nearly instant and you will hopefully see the relevant autohidden panel sneak a little further offscreen, setting the value to 0 (zero) will not have the desired effect incidently so stick to 1 please.

Do more with Gnome Do

Do more with Gnome Do.

I just discovered this launcher a few days ago and was instantly impressed after viewing the demonstration video available via the homepage. It provides some of the most powerful features of a launcher I have ever seen with massive potential for speeding up *real* productivity in ways you won't have considered.

First you need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the following lines:

For Hardy Users
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu hardy main

For Gutsy Users
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu gutsy main

Save and exit the file.

Update the source list file using the following command

sudo aptitude update

Install gnome-do using the following command from terminal

sudo aptitude install gnome-do

If you want to open gnome-do go to Applications—>Accessories—>GNOME Do

You can then open its preferences from the system tray and tick the first check box called "Start GNOME Do at login" so that it will launch when you reboot rather than remembering to do so from the menu.You can then choose the "Plug-ins" tab in the preferences to install any plug-ins that you feel would be useful to you, some I find very useful, Evolution, Files and Folders, Gnome Terminal, Locate Files, Tomboy and Tasque. Others would be more dependant on your computer uses and software such as Gmail Contacts, Imageshack, SSH, Rhythmbox etc

To call up Gnome Do just tap the Super+space key combo, that is windows key + space in other words. For further information it is well worth checking out the homepage and for help with plugins it can be helpful to open the preferences and click the About box for a plugin, you will be taken to its own wiki page that often has details on its use.