Michael Wood

others in this series include:  argue.jpg and the much loved  diagram.jpg

Evidence proving that Ebuyer(.com) was writen by AOL-going 13 year olds:

- Ebuyer is AOL chat but in online shopping form, all the signs are there.

a) You very rarely find the information you need, If you do, it’s likely to be wrong or missleading.

“Product Information:

The Acer T135 Series Aspire Desktop with it’s new design chassis in black and silver offer the looks and technolgy for todays home and personal computing market.
Providing ease-of-use, high performance whilst combined with a 9-in-1 card reader supporting all your digital devices.”

- ebuyer.com

So just to recap.. that’s a “New design chassis in black and sliver” - not only is it new, it’s a design chassis (..i’m not sure what a design chassis is either) .The “black and silver offer the looks” of todays technology for the home computing market.. so.. they only look like it, and apparently; today’s home AND personal computing market (..arn’t they the same thing just said in two different ways ?). High performance whilst combined with a 9-in-1 card reader.. I’m not quite sure how performance COMBINES with a 9-in-1 card reader, Also dubeous of a 9-in-1 card reader supporting ALL of my digital devices, besides I don’t think i could physically fit all of my digital devices into it. - must be “special”

b) An unhelthy afinity with the caps lock key and special characters, especially exclemation marks.

“THESE DISC WORK GREAT WITH NEC DRIVE, UPDATE THE FIRMWARE FROM NEC AND YOU WILL HAVE NO PROBLEMS! THEY WORK AT 4x SPEED TOO!!! FAST!”

“THESE DISCS ARE TOP QUALITY AND COMPATABILITY if u know what u doing”

“NO HAD ANY COASTERS! BUY THESE THEY ARE JUST OVER 50p A DISC!!! ”

“* * * S P E C I A L  O F F E R * * *
Toshiba Satellite Pro M50 Notebook”

“The best selling notebook is now back in stock, still packed full of features including Bluetooth!!.”  - just incase you thought the features had walked off.

The defualt Browns for ubuntu are fine for a while but I find it’s something that I always change post install. I’ve looked around on various ubuntu sites/other blogs and there arn’t any very good guides to getting rid of the brown.
Topics covered: Changing gnome theme, changing backgrounds, changing login theme, changing splash image and changing the ubuntu boot splash (usplash)

Change your Gnome theme

Open up the theme editor:Do this by going to System > preferences > theme. The Theme Details tab will allow you to make
your own custom theme
figure 1
Open up http://art.gnome.org/ - Use art.gnome.org rather than any other site if you can help it as all the content gets properly moderated and tested before it gets published
On the Right hand side of the art.gnome.org website you have several menu items:

• 1. Application themes - how the controls looks e.g. the scroll bars, the menus, buttons etc.
• 2. Icons are all the icons which are used in gnome e.g. file system folder icons.
• Login manager themes are themes for the gnome login (gdm) .
• Splash Screens themes are the images which come up when you sucessfully login to gnome showing up while gnome is loading.
  
• 3. A Window Boarder is the edging for all the windows on your desktop e.g. firefox, file browser, confirm dialogs etc.
• GTK engines are the software which you need to render the themes onto the applications that you are running - you don’t need to worry about these as the ones that are needed come with gnome/ubuntu.
• 4. Backgrounds - The background image for your desktop

Browse through the categories downloading any Application themes/Icons/login manager/Window boarder/Backgrounds

Installing Gnome Themes

For Application themes (controls), Icons and Window boarders the neatest way of installing them is just to right click on the download button on the webpage : and select “Copy link location” then go to the window “Theme Preferences” window (see figure 1) and click “Install Theme” which will give you:

Simply do ctrl+v to paste into the location box, then click install. Once you have clicked install the new Application themes/Icons/login manager/Window boarder will appear in the lists that are in the three repsective tabs in the window “Theme Details” (see figure 1)

Installing Backgrounds

Simply download the background image and note the location you download it to, then right click on your desktop and select “Change Desktop Background”, select “Add wallapaper” and browse to your downloaded wall paper. Click open, then finish.
Installing Login Manager Themes

Firstly download the Login theme from the art.gnome.org website, noting the location you download it to.

Go To: System > Administratrion > Login Window

Select add 1. Browse to your downloaded Background. Click Install.

Then select the login theme from the list 2.

Important: 3. change this colour ! (this is something a lot of tutorials miss out) you see this colour in between your gnome session loading and you loging in.

Click close to save the changes.

Splash Screen

To change the splash screen download the splash image to a folder called .gnome in your home directory
This folder already exists and contains gnome files. To find this folder you will need to switch on “View hidden folders” in the View menu on your file browser download your splash image to this folder.

figure 2

Then, you need to edit the preference that tells gnome what splash file to use. Do this by using a program called gconf-editor, if you do not have it installed (it’s not installed by default on ubuntu) you will need to install it.
In a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) do:
sudo apt-get install gconf-editor && gconf-editor & exit

now using the tree in Configuration editor expand: “apps”, “gnome-session”, “options”.

Right click on splash_screen and select “edit key” in the value box in the Edit key dialog put in the full path to the splash screen that you want to use. This is easiest done by right clicking on your downloaded splash image (figure 2) and viewing the properties , copy and paste the file name into the value box then give it a prefix of “~/.gnome2/” so the value would look something like this: “~/.gnome2/newsplashimage.png” click “Ok” and you’re done.

There is one last bit of brown you might want to get rid of in ubuntu - the system boot up screen. You can change it to look like this instead:

For this you will need to follow the instructions detailed on this forum post. http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=447474&postcount=1

If there is anything i’ve missed out or you would like added please comment.