LINUX - Customize Ubuntu (Beautify the Desktop Environment) 2017

hey folks welcome back to the bite pit in today's video we're gonna take a look at how I like to customize my Ubuntu installation now there's a bunch of ways of doing this and I know that you want to just switched from there unity desktop environment to the genome environment so I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes going over what I like to do in terms of customization it is one of the most widely used distributions of Linux out there and hopefully you guys can pick up on some ideas and implement them in your in operating system so let's take a look so here we are at the desktop of basically a default installation of Ubuntu 1710 now I did move the doc to the bottom of the screen and I've also installed some applications that I was testing but essentially there's been no changes to the aesthetics or the or enhancements to the desktop environment so this is what you would get as an out-of-box installation for the operating system now as I pointed out in the beginning of the video what we're really gonna be going to is something similar to this whereby I have the doc from the bottom and the toolbar from the top sort of combined together I have all of my actions in one particular area and I also have a new icon set that I use and a theme you know you can change a text and and go from there I think the changes that I have that I implement to me make it a more elegant experience and I think that's what I'm really going for now you can spend hours and hours and configure the desktop environment to your particular standards you can change it outright and go to another one entirely that's all up to you guys of course but hopefully some of the choices that I've made and the suggestions I offer here in this video helped to kind of guide you guys into making some changes on your own that you know can help enhance the visual effects enhance the the actual operating system in terms of the desktop environment so let's go ahead and switch back here press go this is the original VM here and I'm gonna go ahead open up the browser and the first thing I want to do is make sure that we configure the the extensions genome dot org URL to work and what I mean by that is there's basically an extension that you have to install along with the command you need to run that allows you to install any of the extensions from the genome world in onto your desktop environment and it's actually pretty simple it's just a click of a button and you can enable and disable extensions ad hoc so the first thing I want to do is go ahead and click on this link here to install the browser extension it's gonna come up and it's gonna say do you want to allow it I will say yes and we'll give it a couple of seconds to go through and it's just giving you a rundown of what it intends to do access your data for this page and display notifications access browser tab so I'll click Add and there it is it's been added so once I've done that there is a second part that I need to do that involves running command in the terminal so that it'll actually sort of link up and allow you to install the the extensions so since we have the extension installed I'm gonna click on the wiki page here this link for a quick second and once the page loads if you scroll down based on your release of Linux in our case it's the ubuntu release so I'm just going to scroll down to that section here this is the command that you need to install and this will allow us to as I said before install any of the extensions available to us from the page directly into our operating system by just clicking one single button so let me just copy that out here real quick and I'll open up the terminal and I'll go ahead and paste that in and for the password real quick and let it do its thing alright so now that I've done that I can close out of the terminal here in fact I'll close out of the wiki page as well and now what you'll see is once I actually refresh the page it will remove the the the information here that sort of balloon pop up because obviously it's gonna detect that we have the extension install in fact you kind of get this a list here of the extensions and then the search box which is great which is exactly what we need and just to point out the the process here I'm just gonna click on open weather as an example and once it comes up you'll see that there is now a switch here and if I do click on it it'll actually prompt me and say you want to download and install this particular extension onto your computer I can say yes or no so I'll cancel that for now and that's essentially the first step we wanted to take just so that we can get the tools ready and set up for us to continue the the customization process before we can install our extensions it's worth taking a minute to install the kinome tweak tool it's extremely useful and I really would wish that the norm would actually combine both the tweak tool and the control center into one because obviously as a user of the desktop environment I find myself going back and forth between the two and really at this point it doesn't serve anybody any benefit to have them separated out now you can install the tweak tool from the command line just like you can any other application you can do it from the Software Center and you can also do it from a package for us right now I'm just gonna use the apt command and install it because it'll take just a quick second and then I'll show you guys what that looks like and then we'll get right into the extensions so let's go ahead and start by installing the genome tweaks tool now this tool is really really useful for us because it allows us to go into one central location modify a number of topics for the actual desktop environment along with the extensions we're going to install so let's go ahead and do that now you can install it from a package you can install it from the software Center you know or you can install it from the command line I'm gonna go ahead and use the command line because it's just or the terminal rather because it's just easier to do right click I'll open up a terminal here and I'll go ahead and type in the command it'll let that process doesn't take very long to do all right we'll go ahead and close that out and I want to take a look at the tweak tool for just a quick SEC and just to show you guys what that looks like in fact we're gonna keep that minimised as well so I'll click on the launcher here and I'm gonna scroll down because it's gonna live in the utilities folder here so I'll expand that and there it is here's tweets okay so this is what the tweaks application looks like when the dénouement weeks tool looks like and I should add that you know at this point it would be beneficial for the kinome folks to the developers to combine this with the control center I mean it gives you a number of useful settings as you'll see and it's you know quite useful for everybody it doesn't harm the operating system in any way it doesn't take away or detract from the the desktop environment as as in point of fact it actually adds to the value of it and as you can tell from the left hand side you can change the appearance and make changes to the themes you can go to the desktop and show some icons and the all-important extensions now quick bit about the extensions here you can see that the Ubuntu app indicators and the Ubuntu doc are installed and they show us on and if I were to go and just actually disable them or turn them off it won't make any difference at all and the reason for that is because these are system extensions that Ubuntu has implemented now there is a quick way to actually remove them if you wanted to but by default I just wanted to show you this just so that you guys are not running you know you don't assume you're running into any problems if you want to turn them off from here so these regardless of showing is on or off it doesn't actually do anything for you because they are system extensions and you can also change the fonts you can work on the keyboard and mouse power the top bar even workspaces so clearly the whole slew of options for you and you'll start to see why I think it's beneficial for this to be combined with the control center alright so let's go ahead and click on extensions and we'll minimize this guy here we'll come back into extensions and actually you know what I do want to move the dock the Ubuntu standard or the Ubuntu default dock to either the left or the right hand side the reason for that is because when we install the new - dock it'll actually combine the top toolbar with the launcher of its own and it'll place it on the bottom here and so if you do this now it'll actually overlay both of them together it causes some problems harder to work with so I want to kind of avoid that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and open up settings here real quick and I'll click on dock and I'm gonna change this from the bottom to the left now by default if you install the operating system right out of the box this is exactly what you'll see you'll see the activities toolbar here with the date and time and such and then the the dock will be on the left hand side so now that we have that here let's go ahead and install our first extension it's gonna be - - panel okay now there are two options here to select from the first one is - to dock this is just as the title suggests it creates a dock for you now most people out there will pick one or the other some will prefer this where they have the dock and then the system toolbar at the top great if that's what you prefer or you can actually have what we're gonna install today is the - - panel this actually will combine the two so to combine the launcher and the system toolbar or the system tray all into one for you and in fact this is what it looks like here from the the picture you can see that it combines everything into one I think this is a more fluid design it's more elegant and also gives a little bit more real estate as you work on a laptop se or tablet or a system so let's go ahead and close that out here and since we install the extension the genome extension here for our browser we actually see that there's a quick flip switch here again very simple to use I'll put and click that and I'll say install and if you give it a second now you can see so as you can tell you that this is the new one so it removed the system tray it brought it down to the bottom here and it combined our our dock again much easier to work with more real estate you really can't go wrong and as I said before if we did not move this dock the system dock that is to the left of the right we would have sort of had an issue where we were dealing with both of them at the same time so definitely that's the case so now that we've got the - installed here I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to remove this default dock and when I say remove what I'm really doing is I'm hiding it from the system it's not gonna be deleted you can always bring it back if you want to so there's no problem there and in order to do that we actually need to go into the terminal and rename a particular folder so I want to go through and start by clicking on the file explorer here for a quick second and I'm gonna go ahead and click on other locations and we're gonna go ahead and open up the computer I'm gonna go to the user folder and I'm gonna go ahead to share and I'm gonna type in the Nome here so it's gonna be good on shell and extensions so if you come into this folder what you'll notice is the similar extensions from what we saw in the tweet tool you've got the app indicators here and you got the Ubuntu dock now these two are those extensions and as I said before because their system extensions trying to remove this or hide them from the tweak tool won't do anything for you but if we simply rename this folder log out and log back in you will see that the dock will will be removed or to be hidden or disabled because we already have one that we're going to use so let's go ahead and do that now I'm going to right click here in the folder I'm gonna say open in terminal and once that comes up I'm gonna do a quick ll this will just give you a directory listing of what's there so you can see the folder names and then I'm gonna do sudo because I want to actually perform this option with administrative privileges okay and actually I'm sorry I do need to type in Envy here so I'm gonna every just means to move or to rename in the Linux world so I'm going to say I want you to rename this folder to Bo RG and so what I'm essentially doing is I'm just gonna rename this folder and I'm going to append the ORR G letters to the end of it again just a quick way of hiding this extension from the system and so when I log out and log back in it won't be present or won't be visible anymore I'll enter type in my password here I might have be helpful if I typed it in correctly and there you go okay so now the folder has been renamed again I'm not deleting anything I'm just renaming it and so I'm gonna go ahead and log out and I'm gonna log back in and once I get back to the desktop you'll see that this doc here on the left-hand side will be removed a little it won't be visible any longer so I've logged back into the desktop here and as you can tell it's clean the default doc is no longer visible and both of the toolbars here have been combined into one panel and again I think it looks much better in this this configuration of this customization and layout and so the next thing I like to do is I like to move the panel to the top I've just been used to using that even in the Windows servers that I run I have that set up for the top as well so this leads me into the settings for - - panel which is a good thing so I'm gonna head and right-click on the icon here for launching the apps and I'll choose - - panel settings now there are a few customization settings in here that you can choose you can decide what type of indicator you want for focused apps that are started or unfocused apps you can actually choose to let you know the position whether you want them at the bottom of the icon here or if you want them at the top in fact if you take a look at the orange bar here I'm not sure if you can see it clearly enough but right now it's at the top if I choose bottom it jumps to the bottom so you can actually choose the type of indicator you'd like a couple of nice changes here that you need - to look into I'm gonna go to change the panel itself from the bottom to the top and then that should be exactly where I need to I don't need to worry about the size right now for the app icon of the panel size I think everything looks great for my particular layout of course if you want to change those please go ahead and do so and then you can take a look at the behavior tab and you can see it shows you the show favorite applications you can change the animation the activities here the window previews on hover if you want that to occur if I hover over similar to what Mac and Windows do right now so you can work on the workspaces as well click actions even fine-tune it here you can change the size of pixels for the tray left box a whole slew of other things including advanced options that you can change a timeout for the icon so if you guys are interested in using the - - panel I suggest you take a look at these options here and maybe play around with a few of them and see if they if they help you out or if they you know refine the look and feel even more than what we're doing here in that sense so that should basically cover the - to panel extension and so if I close this out here I'm gonna go ahead and open up the tweak tool just so that I can show you that we do in fact have one more extension that's been available and if I pull that up here I'm gonna go ahead and click on extensions and you can see that - the panel is now visible if you're wondering where the Ubuntu dock is obviously because we rename that folder and we log back in it's simply not gonna show in here if I were to rename the folder back and allow got in log back in it would show up in here in the list so that's why you don't see it in this list here so that covers the the - panel that I wanted to go over and we'll go ahead and take a look at the next extension now before we go on with our next extension I'm gonna go ahead and just save or change the settings here for the tweak so it remains on the dock for me so I'll just right-click and add to favorites so I don't have to keep going into a launcher and finding and launching it from there so our next extension I wanted to take a look at has to deal with workspaces now some of you maybe even most of you won't use this feature I know that Windows has something similar and Mac has something similar as well it's whereby you have virtual desktops so you can you know rearrange your applications in one desktop to another based on their their type or your particular workflow for the daily for daily use and so I like to use it on my main system because I have several monitors and I do like to play certain applications on certain virtual desktops within those monitors to kind of help me my workflow be as smooth as possible and in this extension you can definitely try it out in fact I suggest you do see if it does work for you guys and if you do find it useful in if it doesn't just go ahead and uncheck it or delete it from the system it's a click of a button so let's go ahead and open up our browser here and as you can tell I'm at the extensions page and I'm gonna go ahead and type in workspaces and you'll see something called workspaces to dock this is the one that I'm gonna be using now and this extension has a whole bunch of settings similar to the dock to panel extension we installed there's a whole slew of settings here there's the actual settings window itself has multiple tabs and we'll take a quick look at it but I kind of want to preface here by saying that you know if you do want to use this and you are preferable to this particular type of of workspace extension definitely look at the the settings there take a couple minutes and look at it because there's like I said a whole bunch that you can kind of tweak and fix and adjust to get it to work exactly the way you want it to for your desktop environment so with the extension selected I'm going to go ahead and click on the flip switch here and I'll say yes install and by default what you'll see is that it pops out here on the the right hand side now it is set to auto hide it's an intelligent hide feature so as you move windows into it's sort of area here it will auto hide for you and of course if you fullscreen a window it'll auto hide as well but let's go and take a look at some of the features that it has for one it's an active tile view or a live view quote-unquote of what you're doing on that particular desktop in fact if you pay attention to the right-hand side here for workspace number one you'll see that as I move this window around you get a live preview of the window itself so you can kind of see the changes going on and you also get by default a list of the icons or the apps that are running on the on the actual workspace and by clicking on them you can bring them to the for and and work with them I think that's a fantastic feature to have it kind of gives you a quick glance or add a quick glance you can see what applications are running and as you'd expect with workspaces you also have the ability to take an application or many of the applications running and move them to the workspaces of your choice so I'm just gonna click on the the Firefox browser here I'm gonna click and drag it over to the second workspace here and you can see that it moved it over the workspace number two and I'd also created a workspace 3 for me so by default it's giving you a clean workspace you know at the bottom so you can always refer to it or you can always move another application into it if you need to so that's also a really cool feature about it you can also click on any of them say well click will take you right to that desktop or that workspace or if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse which 99% of us do nowadays you can actually just scroll and while you hover over the extension here you can scroll and you can get to the workspace of your choice quickly and easily you don't need to press a hotkey or a global hotkey there is one it's actually the super key and W that you can press to invoke it if you have auto hide enabled but by default you can just scroll up and down and get to your desired workspace and you know use the applications in it or or remove or delete and go from there so next we're going to take a look at the settings for this particular extension to get to the settings what I like to do is just right click on the workspace number here and if you do you get the pop-up menu and I choose extension preferences and one thing I do want to point out here actually two things two quick things you will see that the extension list behind us isn't actually updating it does it doesn't update in real time you know even if you choose another subsection and come back to it it doesn't actually update so you do need to close out of the tweaks application and come back to it or reopen the tool and the second point I wanted to make is having this live view of the desktop here as you can see afford you the ability to have a running application or an installation of a piece of software or some kind of app or task that requires a progress or time in order to complete and you can throw that into one of your workspaces here and at a quick glance you can see it you know you may not be able to tell every you know particular detail but at least you'll get an idea of something finished or if the application loaded or quick you know along those lines so really helpful as as a feature set so getting back to the preferences here in fact I'll go in and I'll minimize the tweaks tool preferences as I said before has a bunch of stuff that you can you know click on and configure and sort of you know tweak to your to your desire and I just want to take a look at a few things because you know just for the sake of time of this video and the idea that these are the settings that I like to change when I install this extension you know the first time so first thing I like to do is change the opacity I actually drop that down to about 20 just to kind of give it a more you know better look to it around the edges of the workspace window and I go into the behavior tab here and what I like to do is I like to turn off the intelligent hide and so what that happens is that when I turn that off if I take my mouse all the way to the right-hand side it'll with the workspaces window you know if I leave this on here what it does is it kind of stays there until either an application comes into its workspace or the area that it lives or I fullscreen and at that point it would actually remove the or hide the workspaces extension so I actually like to remove that and if you go into the miscellaneous options here you do have a short key or a keyboard shortcut that you can actually look so if I do hit the windows W or the super W it'll come out or pop out for me and when I'm done with that I can just kind of hide it back again when I need to so that's always a nice little tidbit to have here and at that point I can go ahead and change the timing if I need to if I want to adjust the delay or the time delay in the in the workspace extension I can go ahead and do that and if I wanted to stay constantly here like for instance if I'm running multiple monitors and I have one of the monitors on the right or the left that I would like for it to remain permanently I can keep it there so this way it'll always be visible to me and I can utilize it at that point so again you know not to beat a dead horse but there's a whole slew of features here please do take a few minutes and see if any of these features can help you configure the extension you know to better match your needs so I'll go ahead and close this out here and we'll go ahead and take a look at the next extension so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the aesthetic changes that we're gonna make and the first thing I'm gonna start out with is installing a new icon theme I think it is a drastic change that can really spruce up or give a facelift to your desktop environment and also you know it's really easy to install so I'm gonna go ahead and bring up the browser here I've actually loaded up a web page and again I will put all of these links below in the description in case you guys are interested in and looking at this a bit more and from omg ubuntu.com you Kay has an article here where they list out some of the more popular themes and there's a whole slew of web it's out there that do the same you can do a quick google and come up with thousands of results I bet so the one that I particularly like is actually the first one listed here it's papyrus and I've tried a few out in the past and you know whenever I want to change I end up trying out some other new icon theme and then invariably switching back as the days go on but I think this is sort of the my default go to here and as you can tell it's kind of it's sleek and also has a really good you know link or set of icons for your applications and the article actually goes into a little bit detail on how to install it in fact it's pretty simple so let's go ahead and do that I'm gonna I'm gonna copy the first link here and I'll open up a terminal and I'll go ahead and paste it and enter it in let's try that passed one more time yeah I think I've changed it there we go alright it's asking me do I want to install the PPA and I'll say yes I'll hit enter and it'll go out and do its thing here and once I'm done with that I'll come back for this second line right click and paste got it enter here again and as you can see it's trying to go out and infect all of the icons and the files that it needs and once it's done this shouldn't take very long at all depending on your own your internet connection but once it's done we'll go ahead and go into the tweak tool and we'll change out the theme so give it a couple of seconds to finish here in fact I'll let I'll pause the video real quick and I'll be back as soon as it's done so that finished up for us I'm gonna go ahead and close out of the terminal here and I'll also minimize the browser here and let's go ahead and enable that icon theme for us so we'll open up the tweak tool here and I'll click on the well extensions first quick because you can see that the workspace is to dock it's now visible for us and if I click back to appearance here I'm gonna go ahead and select on icons and you can see that I do have a few to select from you can do the light the dark adapter based on your preferences and like so I'm just going to choose a default and you can see that it automatically changed the icons there's something much more pleasing you know more updated feel I think for for 2017 / 2018 and again I have tried a few so for me this is this is ideal but for you you may want to choose one of the others that's listed in here or go to the website or do a quick google and see if you find an icon theme that fits your needs the best so yeah so you can choose different ones if you want I think in fact the light in the dark may not really have much of an effect only because I haven't changed a theme here or the dark theme but you can choose the one that you prefer and that pretty much it covers the icon theme again very simple straightforward in fact I'm gonna go ahead and close this out and I'll bring up the launcher here just so you can kind of get a feel for what it's done to the icons you can see it's really made quite a difference here in fact even the utilities here have changed for us that you can kind of get a feel for again if you do a quick comparison between this and the standard icon and the standard desktop for Ubuntu 1710 or less you'll see it's you know a lot better you know terms of changes so that should take care of the icon set and we'll go ahead and move on and take a look at the next thing next we're gonna actually go ahead and change the wallpaper now that's the easiest thing you can do and in fact I do that often based upon my workflow or the theme or the color theme that I'm I'm using for that week or that day or that month and in order to do that you just right-click on the desktop here and say change background and I change both I changed the lock screen and I change the background so for the lock screen for this particular week I'm actually interested in using this these this deck here the planks of wood and I'll hit select and for the background there's one of the lighthouse so I'll select that and I'll change that out really that's all there is to it I'm sure you guys have done this plenty plenty of times before but it you know is just one of the things I like to do when I set up a new Linux environment so I'll close that window out and move on to our next change here on the next installation and that has to do with the file manager now Ubuntu does come with a file manager and you know it's the default obviously and it does the job you can get to the folder the path that you need to you can delete stuff go to your home directory look at column data you know and such file sizes but I think it's quite limiting in that there are other options out there that once you do start to use it or use them I think you'll start noticing that you know it's it's really a must-have so I've done a video that I'll post in the description below on a farm manager called polo and of course it's open source and if you guys are interested in it I highly recommend that you guys try it out there are a bunch of others out there too so you know don't let the whole amount a file manager stop you necessarily you can try out some others but really look to enhance your workflow you know one of the things that I do when I have my classes that work is that I sort of help folks you know adjust to their their new environments on the server end or the laptop end really anything that you can do to increase or refine your workflow I think is you know a necessity so with that said let's go to just close this guy out here and we'll open up the browser let me fullscreen this now this is the github page for the developer that created a polo file manager and it goes through all of the feature set and the look and feel and the information that you can read about for sure and again as I said I did make a pretty decent video about it going into the features and the options that it has so I'm just gonna scroll down here and I'm gonna go ahead and install it because I actually do this on every new installation of Linux especially the newer versions like 1710 and as you can tell here the first section is what we need to use so I'll just go ahead and resize this window here right click and we'll open up a terminal and let's go ahead and copy out the first one here this is adding in the PPA so we'll let that go through I think I've already added this in but if not there's no big deal I'll go ahead and want a quick update here and this obviously can take a couple of minutes or maybe even a minute depending on which it has to quote-unquote update and I'll go ahead and I will install the file manager so right click and paste alright so yeah it seems like half the newest version installed already go ahead and close this out here and I'll click on the launcher and here's the poll of file manager first thing I'm gonna do is right-click and add it to favorites just so I can have it in the doc so I'll do that and then let's go ahead and launch it now when you first launch it you'll be presented with this stalin doe in fact when we go to tools here and it's called Stalin wizard and from here you can actually select the quote-unquote initial view or the layout that you'd like to see when you first start the application so again this is also one of the applications here that has a whole slew of settings that you can go through and configure and fine-tune but you know suffice it to say that this is really the view that I particularly like it's two folders just so that I can kind of work you know with two different panes or two different folders and at the same time let me just go ahead and quit this farm here and then you can copy paste and go to different folder settings and paths and there's so much to this again this is I think it outshines the default file manager in many many ways so definitely take a look at that I also have this set to a particular dark theme in fact if I go to tools here and let's take a look at actually let's do let's see edit preferences here you can also get to it by the Settings icon here and then if you go to the UI you can actually select the gtk theme i have the dark Apolo there are a few you know to pick from so I have it set the way that I like to and again for me for a file manager this is it so far until I you know test something else out or something else comes up on the horizon so we'll just resize this here and go ahead and close this guy out and elyda mize this and we'll go on to the next thing next I'd like to take a look at a widget or more precisely a system monitor tool that I install and it's called konkey you guys some of you might have come across it in the past and it does allow you to display your system information along with some other stuff there's there's a whole slew of profiles and even themes that you can download onto your desktop and it sort of overlays on top of your desktop and it gives it a good really nice look and feel to the system and the I just want to preface by saying that you know the things we're gonna about to do to set up the application does require a little bit of work in the terminal and you know some of you out there that are new to Linux may not want to necessarily take on this this particular install but you know I say install Ubuntu in a VM try it out go through the process if you're apprehensive in doing so that is but you know I think once you see the end product and the way that it looks on the on the desktop here I think you guys will be interested in definitely giving it a go so what I want to do is I want to pull up a website that I've used in the past and I think it's gonna help us in this regard and I'll put this link in the description down below but essentially what it is is it shows you how to install the coffee manager on Ubuntu and it goes over it says it's a highly customizable system monitor for Linux and FreeBSD as well and OpenBSD goes over some of the information you can view there's a lot more too and it goes if you scroll down here it goes into the setup process now I'm gonna go through this process with you guys now and show you exactly what I do it's basically following this this step by step process here so you guys can take a look at it and again as I said try it out in your virtual environment see if you like it see if you like the themes and the information that it can display for you and if if it does maybe set it up on your main system so with that said let's go ahead and scroll back up here and we're gonna start this off so let's resize the windows so we have some real estate and I'm gonna go ahead and right-click and I'll say open terminal and let's go ahead and see all right here we go here is the first one so copy this command and we'll say hey actually this password was you said there we go if that was easy enough and so this is this website or the walkthrough here is actually saying that once you install it that's all we really need to do you can run it if I do you'll see that if I move the window here here is the actual window and you can tell it's actually flickering or refreshing every couple of seconds every second to give you that new data you know the CPU usage and the file system and memory and uptime and so on it's great you use it but I think it's it's not clean it definitely doesn't belong in 2017 and we definitely need to change the look and feel and more more precisely the the overlay of this information on the desktop so let's go ahead and just remove the window back here and I'm gonna hit ctrl C if anything that you run in your terminal as long as you see it running here if you do a ctrl and the letter C together it'll kill or stop that process so just terminating that process that's what I just did here and we'll go back to the website here so in fact it shows you a screenshot along with the Activity Monitor or the con key monitor system monitor running in the in the desktop there again does not look anywhere near what we would prefer in today's day and age so let's scroll down here and it goes into a section about the Preferences file the way that kaki works is that it requires a configuration file in order to fine tune the system of the properties of the application and so it basically goes into the system here and it says you can you know you can go in and you can use the system-wide configuration in this etc' directory or you can actually as a safer approach make a copy of it and throw it into your home directory and again when you run konkey when you actually start that up you can actually what it does is it looks at your home directory and sees if you have a configuration file so this is this right here and if it does it'll look to that and based on the settings in that file it will display the information for you hopefully that made sense anyway we're gonna go through this so if you have any issues with it please you know you can rewind the video and kind of watch it again and until it kind of makes sense for you so what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to follow along and I'm going to copy this file and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right-click open a terminal window here and I'm gonna go ahead and copy this command out right click and paste hit enter now because I'm copying a file that's what CP means I don't really need to do this with administrative privileges right I'm just going in fetching that file from this folder this et Cie folder and throwing it into my home directory by the way the tilde sign that you see here is really short for the home directory so I'll give you an example here I'm gonna type in LL to list out the folder contents and you can see that in this blue color that's desktop and documents and downloads music and pictures right and you can see that after the colon I do have the you just increase the size here a little bit you can see the tilde sign before the dollar so if I were to go into say desktop so ya believe it has a capital D so if I went to desktop you can see that it has the tilde sign slash desktop right that's the path that I'm working in so if I went to type CD means to change directory and if I type in that till they sign again it takes me right back to that home directory anyway that was just a quick aside just to let you know that what this command is letting you do is copy a file from one folder to your home directory all right so we're gonna go ahead and scroll down here and it's telling you that you can actually use a text editor of your choice and look at the configuration settings there is a lot in this file and it really isn't the most ideal way or method to adjust it now if you want to go and tweak the fog you can certainly do that and spend the hours that that you can spend in it or what you can do is you can actually use the conky manager and it this is a lifesaver because this allows you to apply all the widgets that you'd like apply the themes download more themes edit the widgets and configure them all with a simple front-end GUI so with that said let's go ahead and take a look at this now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna follow through here just so that you have the process in place but essentially the the file manager excuse me the conky manager won't work on the Ubuntu release of 1710 in fact I don't think it works on 17.4 and it actually just says that the PPA doesn't support 1704 not to worry because there's a really simple easy workaround and again if you follow these steps that I'm doing you can go ahead and try it and you'll see that it's not that difficult to install so I'm gonna scroll up here but again I'm gonna go through this process so I'm gonna copy and I'm gonna paste I'll go ahead and hit my password and go and hit enter and let this complete didn't take too long let's go ahead and run another update here no all right that was easy enough and I'm gonna go ahead and install the manager now if I scroll down just a little bit more what you're gonna see is it says the above PPA the above installation isn't gonna work with 17.4 you're gonna get this error message just want to run through the steps so you can see that so I'll right-click and copy paste it in alright and you can see that it says unable to locate the package alright no problem let's go ahead and scroll down here and it says if you're using 17.4 and obviously in our case using 1710 there's actually a another installation file at Debian installation file so we're gonna go ahead and grab that I'm in my home directory here right so I'm gonna go ahead and just copy out this 64 bit because that's the version of and I'll right-click enough paste and I'll hit enter those he all the students grabbing this installation file from the internet and I'll scroll down and it tells me how I get to install it so I'm gonna go ahead and run this after install to install this application here so I'll right click and hit paste say yes I know this seems like a overly drawn out or involved process in order to get this widget system installed but you know again going through this is just a one-time deal and then you can open up the manager and apply the theme or the widgets you'd like and I and again as I said I think it'll give it a really nice look and feel as you guys will see in just a minute here alright so I've gone through that and I've installed the Installer here and it tells you right then you can install the G Debbie and which this will actually automatically handle packages so I'm just gonna copy this guy out here right click and paste say yes all right so really that's all you need to do and then now it should be in your launcher and you can go ahead and launch it as an icon that's a cm for Kong key manager and this is what it looks like so let's go ahead and minimize the browser it's going to close out both of these terminals here and let's bring up the launch of here and here it is here is the application so I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna add to favorites and we'll go ahead and click on the app and load it up this is a very simple app it's not you know very complicated to use which i think is great and and it makes you know much much easier process than having to configure a text file and get into all the details and look at the explanation of pages and stuff so once you have this up here you can actually hit play or start excuse me you can start a stop the widgets from showing and what I like to do is I look I like to have the Gotham widget here in fact I'm gonna go to I'm gonna highlight it so you can see what it shows the date and time and it shows you usage in place and you can actually get more widgets and you can get more themes but this is what I'm going for now so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna check this off and you can see it shows up right for me at the top here it's trying to blend in but it's not completely transparent to the background and we'll just we'll change that very easily before I do I'm just gonna go through a few of them here and you can see this does a sort of date and time approach here's something that gives you the Linux system information including the uptime you can take a look at the CPU information as well and you can go go through and and really just there's a bunch of stuff here and as I said you can actually get more of these downloaded based upon your needs and your likes themes was next I it comes with one theme and of course you can get more themes but I'm just gonna highlight it so you can see that it changes the desktop background and it gives you the date and time here all in one and you can go ahead and apply it if you want just by clicking on the check box here now each of these have settings and options that you can play with including the settings for konkey manager itself so let's go back to the widgets real quick and I'm gonna highlight this here and I'm going to click on the edit widget when I do it's gonna bring up this window here and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change the transparency only instead of saying pseudo transparent I'm gonna drop this down and say transparent and when I hit apply what you're gonna notice is it's gonna blend in to the desktop much much better so I'm gonna click apply and there you go so you know no no sort of jagged lines there and it looks like it's a part of the desktop in fact it looks like it's a part of the picture but in reality it's live time you know live data as you can see here the CPU keeps changing it change a background color the reason why you have these settings for the widget is because based on the widget you know the transparency type might need to be changed in order to better suit your background and so you'd have to play with that in order to make it look as as good as you'd like it to be so once it's on transparent I'm gonna go back to location here like to change it to the middle so I'm gonna change that and I'm gonna say apply and it's all I need to do I'm gonna go ahead and click close and in fact let me just move this out the way here for a quick second and you can see how it looks it's clean I love the font you know it gives me the hard drive space the RAM CPU usage in today's date right there on the desktop for me so really clean look especially if I don't have any windows open it's kind of nice to have and view at a glance okay so I'm gonna bring this window up here and I'm gonna go ahead and click on the themes again this is just one of the themes you can actually download themes from the internet and you can you get a package throw them into the folder here in fact there's a link for the theme folder you can throw them in here and you can actually take a look at the different themes out there install them and then play with them if you'd like to and you can donate as well there's also settings for the application this is the settings for konkey which I want to take a look at next actually simple general and locations I run it at the startup obviously because when I start up my Linux environment I want that to be there by default and gives you startup delay 20 seconds is fine and then for locations you can actually go in here and you can actually add additional locations for where the themes live if you have a network folder or a Documents fold or a download folder that has all the themes for for coffee you can just add that location in here so let's go ahead and close this out here and I'll say ok and again a lot more options to select from you can go ahead and recycle recycle the widgets you can stop them start them and so on but for now this is really all I want to do and I do know that it took a couple of steps to get it to work and if you want to try it in a virtual machine please go ahead and do so or if you think this is a little bit too much work in the terminal then by all means you can avoid it but I think the overall look and feel is worth the time and effort alright well let's go on to the next thing so next I'd like to make a quick change to the terminal now there's a lot to be said about you know using one terminal a poor another and there's a whole slew of customizations that you can apply to the terminal itself and change what information shows when you first launch and all that for me I prefer just the simple plain old terminal window that I see here and in fact the color changes I'm going to make are even simpler to do just click on edit you can click on profile preferences here and I'm gonna go ahead and go to colors and I'm gonna move this over so you can kind of see it in real time here you know there the tilde sign is a little bit harder to read and I don't like the purple background either so what I'm gonna do is I'll uncheck this text in color black background from the system theme and that kind of gives me a nice cleaner approach and then I come into the built-in schemes and I changed that to tango and when I do take a look at the tilde sign for a quick second because you can see it hopefully in the video should come across but it'll make things that are smaller text a little bit more clear to read so I'll click that and it kind of highlights it that way and kind of gives me a nice look and feel to the terminal I'll go ahead and click close and I'm going to close this out and right click again and open up terminal and you can see that my changes have been saved again simple and easy to do but I particularly like these changes play with the rest of the settings if you guys like see if there's other color schemes that you guys prefer based on your theme or your background so I kind of wanted to bring the video to an end by presenting you guys with the URL from github now this URL has pretty much all of the you know most used or widely known applications for games and utilities and the terminal and for your desktop environment for you know applications it's got everything and it's you know kept up to date by the community I think there's a bunch of folks that work on it and so I want to show that to you guys right now okay let's go ahead and close out of the terminal here and I'll open up the Google page again I will throw this in the description down below it's called awesome Linux software the list is extremely long and it's got everything from you know in the application sections for audio and file managers and graphics and terminal utilities to command line - you know - setting up the environments to games I mean there's there's so much stuff here I'm just gonna scroll down for a little bit you didn't see and everything has its little sort of short description you can obviously view the details of which and install I haven't been through everything in the list but I think these are all open-source applications I could be wrong again take a look at it keep this bookmarked if you use Linux regardless of the flavor I think this list is sort of a must-have because as you can see as I keep scrolling down here you have editors and stuff for education and email you can even download software for recording your desktop if you want to start putting out videos on YouTube games as you can tell here and the list goes on and on and on so there is a bunch of stuff to look at you know over time I think you'll you know you'll find that you need a application for audio or video or for your you know storing something in cash or something like that so if you do you can check this list out and see if you know there's some viable options for you so this is the link I check probably like once a month maybe just to see if there's anything new out there or if I'm trying to install something for somebody a buddy of mine wanted to download some you know videos from the net so I just got the YouTube deal here which actually allow them to download those videos or you know those office suites that you can install so WPS as an example Libre Office so much to talk about so much to to go over in here in this list so ya can't go over everything obviously you won't use everything but it is definitely worth having in your favorites list so definitely take a look at it if you guys have some time and I'll minimize this here so that brings me to the end of the video and I hope you guys enjoyed and liked the customization slash software that I installed now I haven't gone into the software bit if you guys are interested please let me know I can certainly go ahead and make a video about the software that I use you know all the different types of software to accomplish the tasks that I do on a daily basis so if you guys interested in that please let me know obviously like and subscribe if you guys are happy with the video if you guys like it please do that certainly helps and if you guys have any comments or concerns just you know throw them into the comments down below and I'll be happy to respond as as best as I can so I hope you guys enjoyed and I thank you for watching and I'll talk to you in the next one

Channel: TheByteBit

Views: 140,062

Keywords: linux, ubuntu, ubuntu 17.10, ubuntu 17.04, dash to panel, dash dock, workspaces, file manager, ubuntu tweak tool

Id: gLZ_5QA03Aw

Length: 54min 19sec (3259 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2017