Aye Karamba!
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
One of my favorite things about Linux is its seemingly endless customizations, including various eye candy! My favorite eye candy, or rather eye-candy controller, is SuperKaramba. It provides you with a nice GUI (see/ click screenshot) for loading tons of eye candy to your desktop.
Currently, I have Liquid Weather, and my own variation of TechMon running on my desktop (see screenshot), but there are countless other themes you can run including ones for media playback, photos, email, and more! A great place to get these nice themes is the Karamba section of KDE-look. But first, you must download/ install SuperKaramba. To do so, you can build form source, or find a file on KDE-look that is built for your distro (ie. rpm, etc). If you decide to build from source, make sure you have all the libraries for KDE, QT, and Python installed (I was not able to install without these). Install with the traditional ./configure, make, and make install. Once installation is done, have fun downloading all the "useful" eye candy you can! But, sometimes you may find that what you download isn't quite right for you, and you feel the need to configure. Since most themes don't have the option when you right-click on them to "configure theme," you will have do the editing the good old text based way. To do this, find the .theme or .py (if you know Python) file of the theme you want to edit and open the file with your favorite text editor. Configuration is fairly simple, and you will learn fast. Editing your theme is especially helpful with system monitors (such as TechMon) if they don't automatically find the right hardware to monitor. Luckily, you will most likely not have to configure anything or make changes. So, have fun with your new eye candy!
Currently, I have Liquid Weather, and my own variation of TechMon running on my desktop (see screenshot), but there are countless other themes you can run including ones for media playback, photos, email, and more! A great place to get these nice themes is the Karamba section of KDE-look. But first, you must download/ install SuperKaramba. To do so, you can build form source, or find a file on KDE-look that is built for your distro (ie. rpm, etc). If you decide to build from source, make sure you have all the libraries for KDE, QT, and Python installed (I was not able to install without these). Install with the traditional ./configure, make, and make install. Once installation is done, have fun downloading all the "useful" eye candy you can! But, sometimes you may find that what you download isn't quite right for you, and you feel the need to configure. Since most themes don't have the option when you right-click on them to "configure theme," you will have do the editing the good old text based way. To do this, find the .theme or .py (if you know Python) file of the theme you want to edit and open the file with your favorite text editor. Configuration is fairly simple, and you will learn fast. Editing your theme is especially helpful with system monitors (such as TechMon) if they don't automatically find the right hardware to monitor. Luckily, you will most likely not have to configure anything or make changes. So, have fun with your new eye candy!
