This guide works for the gnome desktop manager (used by Ubuntu and other Linux distributions).

First we go to Gnome-looks. This is a large collection of themes and other artwork that can be used to make gnome look any which way you like. From there we select and download a theme. Since many people have asked what theme I use, I chose my theme, SlicknesS-black, for the example. Once we’ve downloaded our theme and saved it to the desktop, we will then extract it to the desktop.

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Let’s enable the desktop cube in Compiz, this tutorial will show you how:

From CCSM under Desktop click to enable Desktop Cube (and then disable Desktop Wall), and enable Rotate Cube. Under Effects enable Cube Reflection and Deformation (and resolve the conflict by disabling Next Slide) and 3D Windows.

Now we click on Desktop Cube and then the Appearance tab, and click on Skydome (Skydome is the image displayed behind the cube, on the “sky”). From here we click on the first checkbox to enable the background, and then Skydome Image to browse to the picture we want to use. Note - if you click “Animate Skydome” the background image will rotate when you rotate the cube.

Going then to Cube Reflection and Deformation and choose Appearance. Here we’ll set the top and bottom images, or “caps.” Just click New and browse to the images wanted, and you can then remove the default images by clicking on them then clicking Delete. Then we choose the Reflection tab and click on the Reflection Mode, then Distance. Next we choose the Deformation tab and then Sphere for a spherical “cube,” Cylinder for a cylindrical one, and None for a normal cube. Note - Aspect ratio will make your sphere look more round or more squished (oblong?) depending on what you put there.

CTRL-ALT-leftmousebutton is the default for rotating your sphere.

Next we will install the compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported. Open up a terminal and enter the following command:

$ sudo aptitude install compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported

When that is done enter CCSM and enable Snow under Extras, for a little freezing fun. Super/Windowskey-f3 starts and stops the snow falling.

Have fun!

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Last week I showed you how to turn on some neat desktop animations using Compiz Fusion (formally beryl) - you can watch last week’s tutorial here. Today I will show you some of the useful productivity enhancements that Compiz has to offer, such as multiple desktops (workspaces), moving windows between desktops, expo (preview and choose from all your desktops), resizeable window previews, and scale (display and choose from all your open windows at once). I even throw in some wobbly windows for good measure!

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People with disability who relied on built-in TTS (text to speech) application in OSX or Vista will be disappointed with the fact that most popular Linux distributions does not have any TTS applications installed by default. While researching for a friend in need, I bumped in to Festival, the de-facto TTS project for Linux Systems. Fedora and Debian based distro users can install festival or flite package from their respective package manager. These are both CLI apps.

For a more practical usage via a proper UI, you can check out KDE Accessibility package which comes with KTTSmgr a front-end GUI manager for festival with very extensive options and kmouth a GUI for text to speech.

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