Customize your desktop

As you might have noticed, there’s a lot of cool stuff you can customize in Ubuntu. I took some of the cooler things and highlighted them here.

Unity Tweak Tool #

To get started you’re going to want to install the unity tweak tool via the command line. Once you’ve installed it you can run it from the unity application search.
sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

Conky #

You can install this with sudo apt-get install conky and from there build all sorts of cool widgets for your dashboard. The basic way this works is you’ll have a .conkyrc file in your home directory and it’ll look there for the specifications for the widgets. I’m using a version of this but I encourage you to look around and see if anything else strikes your fancy. Once you have a .conkyrc file you can just run conky from your terminal.

Couple of things:

1. If you need to shut off all your conky instances use killall conky so that you can start fresh.
2. If you want to run more than one, put this

#!/bin/bash

conky -c .conkyrc_theme1 &

conky -c .conkyrc_theme2 

in a file called conky_config.sh and run that using . conky_config.sh from your terminal.

Numix #

Numix has a lot of cool open source stuff and even more cool paid stuff available as tweaks for Ubuntu. Once you’ve installed the tweak tool outlined above you can install a bunch of different elements side by side using this:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:numix/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Now that you have the repo in your system, use sudo apt-get ... to get whatever theme/iconset you want. Mine currently are sudo apt-get install numix-icon-theme-circle and sudo apt-get install numix-gtk-theme. Install whatever you want, open unity tweak tool (either through the application menu or from the command line using unity-tweak-tool) and select them in the Themes/Icons sections.

There’s also a firefox theme associated with Numix found here so I like to get that one too. The out of the box Firefox themes don’t look great when you start tweaking things so you’ll need to get one of these themes.

And now you’re pretty set. Look around for unity themes and they’ll usually install pretty nicely using the tweak tool. Same goes with conky widgets. Just keep adding .conkyrc_theme# files and updating your conky_config.sh file to make sure that you can see all of them.