Cutebuntu

First little bit about my desktop in general. What I have there almost all the time. (In parenthesis the application I’m using atm.)

• IM (Pidgin)
• RSS reader (Liferea)
• More than one terminal window (urxvt)
• Audio player (mpd/ncmpc++)
• IRC client (Irssi)
• µ-blogging client (Gwibber)
• Browser (Firefox 3.5.5.)
• Clock / System related information / updates / weather / bling bling (Conky)

I generally prefer dark and simple looking themes, but of course there are exceptions making the rule. My choice of wallpaper, well… Colours vary mostly in grey, green and turquoise shades. I like abstract and architectural wallpapers, nature and especially grass, ladybugs etc… I usually don’t have humans on my desktop and you definitely won’t catch me staring at your average bikini girl wallpaper nor oily hunk. Rather something like what I had in September (although it’s pleasure to look at/listen to David Gahan… did I mention I’m going to go Depeche Mode gig in February). Well it’s just matter of what different people find aesthetic. I’m pretty picky about this wallpaper stuff… Anyway.

To give little idea what I like. I change wallpapers pretty often and I’m always checking Customize.org for new ones. Vladstudio, ether, Miriam Moshinsky, iuneWind, jugga-lizzle for example are good too, to name few.

Wallpaper: Temi by BgDawg
Icons: SimpleMoblin by aymaraceci
Fonts: BauhausMedium, SecretCode, AvantGarde LT Medium
GTK theme: Mix between perfection and P.O.S

Because Exaile decided to stop working, I tested some other media players today and one of them was Quod Libet. Well Exaile came back but I decided to stick with Quod Libet (I installed also Ex Falso). It seems to be more versatile than I expected under its modest cover. Anyway I wanted to add Quod Libet in my Conky too and after little googling I found way to do it. Not difficult at all.

Scrot is a simple but quite powerful command line screenshot tool. I have been using it now sometime already and it is a lot more versatile than for example gnome-screenshot. I wanted to make it little easier to use for me and decided to add my most used commands in Openbox menu. Of course first thing is to install Scrot. If you are using Ubuntu, just install it thru Synaptic Package Manager or type in terminal:

sudo aptitude install scrot

Adding the Scrot in Openbox menu

If you are new to Openbox, I recommend reading for example these:

* menu tutorial
* Openbox guide – urukrama’s weblog (especially “4. Configuring Openbox”)

So open the menu.xml -file (~/.config/openbox/menu.xml) in your favourite editor (for example gedit or Leafpad). Dot in front of config means it’s hidden, so you have to enable showing hidden folders/files if you look for it in your file browser (ctrl+h). Or you could type in terminal:

leafpad ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml

From my menu.xml -file:

<menu id="scrot" label="Scrot">
	<item label="Scrot (PrtSc)">
		<action name="Execute">
			<execute>
				scrot -e 'mv $f ~/images/screenshots/'
			</execute>
		</action>
	</item>
	<item label="delay 15">
		<action name="Execute">
			<execute>
				scrot -d 15 -e 'mv $f ~/images/screenshots/'
			</execute>
		</action>
	</item>
	<item label="Scrot area (Alt-PrtSc)">
		<action name="Execute">
			<execute>
				scrot -s -e 'mv $f ~/images/screenshots/'
			</execute>
		</action>
	</item>
</menu>

The first option takes screenshot immediately, second one has 15 seconds delay and with third one you can select the area (using the mouse) of the screen.

I have also set keybinding for each alternative (more about keybindings). This you can do by editing rc.xml -file (~/.config/openbox/rc.xml).

<keybind key="Print">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>scrot -e 'mv $f ~/images/screenshots/'</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="A-Print">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>scrot -s -e 'mv $f ~/images/screenshots/'</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="C-Print">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>scrot -d 15 -e 'mv $f ~/images/screenshots/'</execute>
      </action>
</keybind>

More about scrot options in scrot man page (you can access in man also by typing in terminal man scrot).