The Junk In My Trunk

screen shot of opensuse 11 with 3d desktop effects, linux terminal in desktop, and 3d wallpaper

I am the kind of person who is minimalistic. For the majority of the past 11 years, I’ve had nothing but a black desktop, with no wall paper, no desktop effects, and everything functional. I had two reasons for this: 1) It was fast and didn’t slow my computer down. 2) It was easy on the eyes - easy to find a white mouse on a black desktop. (I’m visually impaired.)

But since I’ve installed OpenSUSE 11 on my computer and enabled 3d Desktop Effects, my computer has actually been MORE functional, not less. And it still runs even processor intensive applications very easily without slowing down. So I thought it was high time for me to break the black and take the plunge into a graphical desktop wallpaper. But I’ve never liked anything I’ve ever found on the internet, and finding a premade wallpaper that fits my dual monitor setup without stretching is slim pickings.

So, I made my own. This is a simple black background with a dark gray gradient and the OpenSUSE logo with a drop shadown. It doesn’t look like much in the picture becuase you are probably viewing it on a single monitor, but if viewed on a dual monitor setup like I have, it looks great because the logo is on the bottom left corner of the right monitor.

Also, I have 3d desktop effects enabled. You can’t see them here, but I have 3d cube with 6 virtual desktops, a zoomed out mirrored image of all 6 virtual desktops if you move your mouse to the top left corner of the screen, and a card deck view of all open windows accecable with a keyboard shortcut.

What you can see here is my terminal window that is “embedded” in my desktop on my right monitor. Again, it looks silly in this screenshot, but on a dual monitor setup, it looks great and makes a lot of sense. Also, it appears on all 6 of my virtual desktops. I put embedded in quotes because technically it’s not embedded, it just appears to be. I’m using compiz to make the window appear that way.

Over all this setup is extreamly functional, and also visually pleasing. Thus my reason for sharing it.

I also have to use Harvest for work, so I’m in the process of setting up a script to use conky and some icons to keep my harvest timesheet right on my desktop. I’ll update that if I get it working. (Right now, harvet’s api isn’t working right.)

Oh, and I’ve also written a custom cron script to check my gmail account every 5 minutes and display a little popup notification on my screen if I get new email. I think gmail has a notifier for linux now, but I wanted to write my own so I could customize how it works. It stays on the screen until I click it so that I notice it. (I have limited periferal vision, so I don’t always notice it right away.)

UPDATE:
I just found out that harvest doesn’t allow api access with their free accounts (I have a free account because that is all I need). So, the harvest thing wont be happening I guess. Too bad.