Omploader Death & New Blog Design

Omploader – Down!

Hi guys, sorry about having disappeared for a while. Had to deal with a few personal tragedies and work related stuff kept me occupied. Anyway, I am aware that the beloved Omploader is dead. But I always had a hope that it would come back. It has happened a few times with Omploader. Sadly, I think this time it is for real 😦 I wanted to quickly mention this here because I had a few files hosted on Omploader –  some Fluxbox themes, XfCE4 themes and some configs. If you guys encounter a 404, do drop a comment here. I will re-host the files elsewhere.

Also, just wanted to mention a bit about my blog’s new design. I was getting a bit bored with my itunes 2 theme. It is one of my favorite themes and who knows, I may revert back to it in a few days. I currently dig the BonPress theme and like it’s very clean interface. I particularly like how the theme renders on my old Xperia E C1505 phone.

BonPress Theme on Xperia E C1505

If the viewing experience is not that good with this theme please let me know. I would revert back to itunes theme.

Color Me Bad Fluxbox Theme

On a related note, I released a fluxbox theme over at boxlook a couple of months ago or so. The idea was to make a theme that would merge with my Xdefaults colors then. You might have seen the old Xdefaults in action in one of my previous screenshots. And the colors are still available over at my dotfiles page, for anyone still interested. Anyway here is an old screenshot of my Color Me Bad fluxbox theme in action. Click on the thumbnail for full view.

For Openbox users, there is an openbox port of this theme available at boxlook as well. Rydgel ported my theme to openbox. Anyway here is the link for both the themes.

Color Me Bad – Fluxbox

Color Me Bad – Openbox

Note: People who downloaded my fluxbox folder from my previous post, need not download this theme again, since it is already available in the folder.

Collection of my Fluxbox Themes

Since I have had a request to share my fluxbox folder, I decided to do so, and make it available right here for other interested people as well. Fluxbox is my favorite *box environment, and is installed on all my machines, both at home and work. Its very easy on resources, and very easy to configure to one’s own needs. I have collected a lot of fluxbox themes over the years, right from the very old ones, to the very latest. There are some themes, that I made myself, and some that I heavily modified, and unreleased, but they are all available in this archive. Mostly I will take a theme and rework on it to gel with a certain gtk theme I will be using. As you might have seen in my previous fluxbox screenshots, I am currently using the Royalty gtk and fluxbox themes made by the amazing artist, lyrae aka thrynk. The only thing that I modified is the fluxbox toolbar, which you can see for yourself. Royalty is one of the best themes ever. It’s color neutral and unobtrusive and can go with any background, which is fantastic. Anyway have a look at the themes in the folder and hope you folks find it useful.

I would like to mention another thing. You should modify the main files in the folder, namely, overlay, and init to modify the setup according to your needs. Though you can make a certain theme use a particular font setup, I always use the overlay file to bypass the theme defaults, so that setup is uniform. So have a look in that file. As far as the init file goes, you can change the Workspace names and such in there, and do not have to use my Workspace names, that is unless you are a huge Cowboy Bebop fan like yours truly. Also check the keys file, mostly it is default, except for an entry I added for gmrun.

I archived my fluxbox folder and have uploaded it over at mediafire. Just follow the link below, download the file, unarchive the folder, dot.fluxbox should be the name I think. Then rename the folder to .fluxbox, and make sure that this folder resides in your home directory, i.e, ~/.fluxbox. Let me know if there is any trouble downloading the file, and if anything else is needed.

My Fluxbox Folder@mediafire

Xmonad for Life!

Another xmonad related post! Have been coding a lot these days and using the terminal most of the times. Xmonad has been extremely useful in that regard that I think it will be very difficult for me to go back to any desktop. I have a couple of computers at home and though I was using dwm and xmonad infrequently over the last few months, now have become a complete xmonad convert. I also find configuring xmonad so painless that I am trying out some new stuff with my old machine at home! But for starters, it would be ideal to have some minimal info displayed on the status bar. As you will see in my scree, there are workspace info, local clock, a world clock (though Tokyo alone is displayed), and weather updates. Will upload my config files tomorrow for sure. Being a console junkie that I am, it is natural that I use mpd to organize my music, and ncmpcpp to serve as a frontend for the same. Calcurse on the other hand serves as a great tool for organizing my appointments and plans. I belong to the school of emacs, and hence that takes care of all my text editing, primarily programming, and tex document processing! If there are some people thinking about moving over to a tiling WM, I think, you folks should check xmonad out! I know there are a lotta stuff out there, like dwm, ratpoison, awesome, etc. but each of ’em has their pros anc cons! I found out that xmonad is my cup of coffee, but its’ likely some of you might have the same feeling about, say awesome and so on. But the bottom line is, try out a tiling WM, and prepare to be amazed. Here is my latest screen by the way!

Apps running: emacs, ncmpcpp, calcurse

Wallpaper – The awesome Soccer Girls wall from DA

Screen 2

Firefox Theme – Dust; KDE3.5.10 – Dustonimo Domino Style, with Dust colors, and OS-K icons. Sidebar is baghira!

Elegant Evi Continued..

Sorry for the delay! Now here are the links for the relevant Elegant Evi files.

GTK2.0@Metacity – Elegant Evi@gnome-look

Icons – Powered Icon Theme by fratrip@DA

Wallpaper 1 – Desktopography

Wallpaper 2 – j3concepts@DA

Wallpaper 3 – Julian Mann@deb-art

Also take some time to go thro some of the finest walls at DA, customize.org, and desktopography for starters! You will find some amazing choices in addition to the aforementioned possibilities.

Fonts – Sometimes, the ideal font can make a lotta difference on the aesthetics! I used Aquabase in the previous screenshots, but I recently found out that Futura Condensed makes it much better. If you folks don’t find those fonts, just drop a comment. I will link them rite here as well!

Staying with Linux!

I uploaded a modified version of the amazing Elegant Brit theme at gnome-look a couple of days ago. This theme is just a way of thanking my girlfriend who has been instrumental in turning my life around for the better. So I just modified the color attributes of the Elegant Brit theme to pink/purple and uploaded it at gnome-look. I am not a fan of pink in general, but with right choice of the wallpaper and icons, sometimes such themes do look good. I am uploading a few screenshots of the theme in action. Will link my submission page and wallpaper choices in my next post. For the moment, here are the screenshots! Click on the thumbnails for a better view.

My Current Desktop!

It’s been a long time since I had posted anything here, but am planning to post some interesting stuff tomorrow! Anyway for the moment, here’s my current desktop set up! I call it the “GAIAfied Desktop” GAIA was originally a Mac visual style, which was then ported to Windows and then lyrae did the same for Gnome! Check out gaia’s official website for more details on the fantastic work done by a group of artists and the primary motivation behind the project on the first place! My salute to all of ’em! It’s just a pleasant experience to sit in front of your computer and work with this theme! Kicks butt, no doubt!

Click on the thumbnail for full size

Here are the details of the desktop as usual!

GTK2 – GAIA

Metacity – Gaia4Gnome

Icons – Somatic

Media Player – Banshee (Playing GiTS Stand Alone Complex OST)

Application Font – Segoe, Size 9

Special thanx to all the creative minds behind GAIA! Somatic Icon theme also roxx big time. pokemonjojo2 ported this theme, originally designed by the amazing David Lanham, who did this theme for mac!

WTF?

Ok this ain’t exactly funny, but I just thought it was kinda weird! So I was at kde-look sometime back, and was looking at the wallpapers section. Clicked on a recent Dark Debian WP submission and the ad on the bottom of the page was kinda unrelated! The biatch Paris Hilton showed up! It was right about the same time my boss walked in! :mad Talk about timing! Anyway it’s not over yet! Here are a couple of screenshots with proof!

Click on thumbnails for full size