Hello, my name is Alan Pope and welcome to this short introduction
to customizing the Ubuntu desktop.
In this screencast we are going to go through making changes to your desktop,
such as changing the background, changing the theme and few other things as well.
This is a basic install of Ubuntu (Edgy) 6.10, the latest release.
First thing, as always, log on to the desktop.
Now this is pretty much what the desktop will look like on any flat install of Ubuntu.
The first thing we can change is right-click the desktop
and choose Change desktop background.
We get a list of images that have already been preloaded,
you can select one of these to change the look of our desktop,
such as this one
and you will see that it takes effect immediately.
There is also the option of having no desktop background image,
which will just use a solid color from our selection.
You can also add wallpapers, so let us have a go at that.
We go to Firefox,
There are numerous places on the web where you can get images,
we are going to go to art.gnome.org
and on the right hand side of the gnome art website there is a backgrounds link.
If we click that, at the top of the screen we can change the resolution,
because some images will not fit on our screen or will be the wrong aspect ratio.
Choose 1024x768 and click change,
then we see images that are available at the resolution that my screen is currently running.
He is a good image, a big picture of the Gnome foot
and you can see here, it's available in the resolution I am currently using.
I could right-click the image and do Save Link As... to save the image,
alternatively, if I just click on it, it will open the image
and then I can right-click the image and choose Save Image As...
When I save the image I get prompted for where I want to put it,
I have got a folder called Pictures,
there is my home directory called ubuntu, that's the name of this user
and within that there is a folder called Pictures and I will save that in there.
You see Firefox has now downloaded that image.
So if we close Firefox and go back to the desktop
and right-click and choose Change Desktop Background.
We can now click Add Wallpaper and go and find our image in the Pictures folder
There is our big blur foot, we get a preview over here
and if I click Open, it opens the image and changes my desktop background.
So that is the first thing, changing the desktop background.
The next thing we can look at is changing the screen resolution
Now here I only have a limited selection of screen resolutions available
and I can't actually change the screen resolution on this machine,
whilst I'm recording the video,
but you would be able to change that resolution on your machine
and you can make the default for the whole machine or just your user.
The next thing we need to look at is under Preferences,
we can see the Screensaver.
There are a number of screensavers pre-installed,
you can see there is quite a big list here.
We have got it set on blank screen at the moment
but if we choose random, it will pick one of these at random,
whenever the screensaver kicks in.
Let us just choose one and we will get a small preview on the right hand side.
I'm going to leave mine on blank screen though.
There's also a full-screen preview button here.
and you can change with this slider,
the duration of time that will pass before the screensaver kicks in.
With this tick box you can get it to kick in when the computer is idle
and you can get it to lock the screen,
so that when you walk away from your screen the screensaver kicks in
and your machine is secure.
Now you'll notice along the top of the screen
and the bottom of the screen are these panels.
If we right-click a panel, we can change some of the properties of it,
including we can change its location.
So if I change it to the left hand side of the screen,
you see that panel moves over here to the left.
and all the text appears on its side.
I can also place it at the bottom of the screen,
so I can have two panels at the bottom of the screen if I want to.
I'll put it back at the top.
I can also set the panel to autohide.
With autohide it will disappear when it's not being used
and when you hover the mouse over it, it will re-appear.
The is so that we can claim back some of the screen real estate.
And right-click and choose properties again,
and turn off autohide and turn on show hide buttons.
Now when I do this you'll notice if I flip this on and off,
at the ends of the panel you'll see these little arrows appearing
and if you click on the arrow the panel zooms away.
If you click the button, it comes back again.
I right-click, properties. I can switch that off again just by turning off the tick box.
You can also set a background color of your choice or a background image.
Along the same lines you can also configure a theme.
Rather than just configure the color for one of the panels,
we can change the whole theme of the desktop.
So if we go to System -> Preferences -> Theme,
you can see a number of themes that are already pre-installed
and the one called Human is the default one that you get with Ubuntu.
Now I'm just going to open another window with my home folder,
so you can see what happens when I change the theme.
We can scroll through the list of themes and just pick one at random.
I just pick Resilience.
You notice that instantly, as soon as you click it,
some of the icons change, the colors of the menus change, the toolbars change.
Lots of things are modified when you change the theme.
Let's pick another one.
This one changes even more dramatically, the High Contrast Inverse theme.
You can see it's optimized for people with poor eyesight.
And there's another one with some funky looks on the top of the windows.
So there's a limited set of themes available,
let's put it back to the Human theme.
One thing we can do is go and download some additional themes
and add those to our desktop.
So again we'll open our web browser and go to art.gnome.org
And on the right-hand side you'll see a link to desktop themes.
We click that link and scroll down until we find a theme that we like the look of.
There's a nice one, if we click this link,
you can see a kind of preview of the theme
and then we can download it.
Now you'll notice down at the bottom of the browser
it shows us a .tar.gz, it's a kind of zip file.
and we could right-click and save that.
Alternatively if we follow the instructions here it says
drag and drop this theme into the theme manager.
So if I double-click the top bar of the browser to make it smaller
and then grab a hold of the theme and drag and drop it into the theme manager.
We can see it starts downloading the theme
and once it's finished downloading it gives us the option of
keeping the current theme or applying the theme we've just downloaded.
and if I hit apply, you can see all the colors of everything change
to match the theme that I've just downloaded.
That's pretty groovy.
So that allows you to change the panels, the menus, the backgrounds and so on.
Lots of colors change when you change the theme.
Now you'll notice there are some icons in the panel and we can add to those icons.
Say for example we use this Ekiga Softphone software,
if we right-click it in the menu, we can say Add launcher to panel
and we now get an icon for that software.
I could do the same for any other icon,
right-click Gaim, Add to launch panel.
And we can also right-click and choose Add to desktop.
If you're familiar with having icons on the desktop, then you can add them..
and you can delete them again by just pressing the delete key on the keyboard.
You can in fact add entire menus to the panel,
if you right-click and choose and choose entire menu,
add this draw to the panel.
You'll now get an icon, which matches the icon you get for the menu that you just added.
So it matches the icon for the Internet menu.
And if we click on it, we get the individual icons
that make up the applications that are in the Internet menu.
And then there's a little button where you can shrink it back down again.
So that'll give you fast access to some of the applications.
And you can remove that draw as well by right-clicking and choosing remove.
We can also move the icons around,
slide them around to arrange them in whatever order we want to.
And we can also modify these menus.
Under System -> Preferences -> Menu Layout,
we can see here the layout of the menu.
The little ticks indicate which of these menus are active
and I can highlight individual entries and move them around.
So for example I can move the Internet menu up.
It's now moved up within the menu, above Graphics.
Or I can grab a hold of it in the menu layout
and move it right up to the top, if I want to.
So now under Applications, Internet appears at the top.
So that takes effect straight away.
You can also add items and add new menus within there.
We can also add to the panel, little applets.
We can add this little applet here to lock the screen
and now we get a little icon appearing on the panel.
Let's add another one.
A little funky fish on the toolbar.
Some of these are more useful than others.
So now we've added an icon to the panel.
We've got one to lock the screen, if I click that icon,
it does exactly what it says on the tin, it locks the screen.
So now I have to type in my password to unlock the screen.
That's useful if you walk away from your desktop.
If you get your password wrong it kind of wiggles about a little bit
and if you get your password right then it should unlock the screen.
That's a useful feature, being able to lock the screen straight away.
Now also under Preferences there's an About Me.
And under About Me we can set some settings about yourself,
which will be picked up by other applications.
You can also change your password in here.
And in the top left there is an option to add a picture.
So if we click that button and go and find a picture of me.
There's a good one, I happen to already have.
So that's a picture of me, which will be used in a number of places within Ubuntu,
including when you lock the screen.
So if I lock the screen again
and then wiggle the mouse,
you can see it shows my pretty face in the unlock dialog.
Isn't he handsome?
On the subject of your picture, there's another place that that can be used.
If we go to System -> Administration -> Login window,
we can customize the login window that every user sees when they logon.
Now because we are changing this for everyone,
we have to enter our password,
because this is going to affect other users.
Everything else we've done up to now has only affected my user.
So here's various different login dialogs that we can use, that are supplied.
The default one being the Human one.
If we choose a different one, such as the Happy GNOME with Browser
by ticking the little radio button on the end.
Then this will provide a list of users that can be clicked on.
And the list of users you can see in the users tab,
comes from this file /etc/passwd,
which is a file that contains a list of users.
So every user will be listed there.
Now you're not going to see that until we log out.
Another thing you can change here is the workspaces.
Now it doesn't really make much difference when I click on these workspaces
until I open some applications.
So I'm going to open Firefox
and I'll also open my home folder.
What I'll do is click in the top-left hand corner of my home folder
and choose Move to Workspace Right.
What that'll do is shift that whole window on to a different workspace
and I can toggle between the different workspaces
by using the workspace switcher down in the bottom-right hand corner.
So I click to one desktop and click to another desktop.
This allows you to separate your work out.
So you might have one desktop for browsing the web
and another one for reading your email.
If I right-click and choose Preferences,
you can see here that we have two desktops
and they're called Desk 1 and Desk 2.
I can change those names and give them more meaningful names for me.
Call one of them Web.
and maybe call the other one Mail.
And this allows me to separate out my web surfing from mail.
And if I tick the box at the bottom then it shows the names within the workspace switcher.
I can have more than two.
If I increase using this little push button here,
I can have more than two desktops or workspaces
and I can change the layout of them as well.
The default in this version of Ubuntu is two work spaces,
you can have as many as you like.
And that's it for our introduction to customizing the Ubuntu desktop,
I'll log out now and you should see the change to the login screen.
So now we get the logon screen, with the pictures on the left hand side
and all the user does is click and then type in their password.
Thanks for watching.
You can visit our website, ubuntu-uk.org
or email me alan@popey.com if you have any questions.