Linux Screenshots

Here are some of the latest screenshots I’ve taken of my main Linux desktop and how to do the same for yourself. Click on the screenshot to be taken to the fullsize picture. I finally listened and provided a low-res picture here instead of resizing the large one, thus a faster download time for those of you on dial-up.

These add-ons on my desktop as known as eye candy. They are on my desktop to look cool and provide some functionality. It’s nothing I can’t already do by going into a web browser, but it looks neater doing it like this - to some anyway. First off, you’ll notice that my menu bar and icons are in Spanish. That isn’t part of the eye candy, but I figured I’d let you in on how to do that in case you also wished to practice your technology vocab. When you are starting up your computer, if you are using Fedora you will have GDM as your greeter - the place where you type in your username and password. Other distros may also use GDM or you may select it on your own. There is a button called “languages” and if you click there, it will set all of the menus to be in Spanish. And when you load Firefox up and go to Google, it will be Google in Spanish! (or whatever language you selected, if it’s supported)

Now, I am using a package called gdesklets which is similar to SuperKaramba in KDE. You can get gdesklets at http://gdesklets.org/. Then you can download these great programs!

In the bottom left corner I have iWeather. Once you enter your zip code it will bring you a four day forecast. On the bottom right I have “Bible Verse of the Day”. If you happen to be Muslim there’s a REALLY neat one called prayer time, which displays the day’s times for prayer. Above that I have a flickr desklet that runs through all the photos on my flickr site, allowing me to redisover photos I’d forgotten about. Or you can browse someone else’s site.

But be careful or your screen can begin to feel a bit cluttered as mine did when I added the sidecandyRSS feeds to my desktop. These allow me to have up to the minute news on my desktop. Currently I use bbcnews front page and bbcnews technology page. Clicking on a news story launches it in Firefox, or your default browser. I hope you enjoyed that information session. Next time I will go over why the command line is not quite dead yet!