Eye Candy For CrunchBang #!

Since my latest linux installation is CrunchBang and that is what I intend to keep for a near foreseeable future, most of my blog posts will be based on it. Snapshots, tips and tricks, hacks that I will add here are all based on my setup of CrunchBang but can just as easily be added onto other distros.

The Desktop

CrunchBang installation has a very dark theme and the default wallpapers are not that exciting. So the first activity might as well be to change them to something more interesting, colorful that suits you. I came across these wonderful images on DeviantArt and have come to believe that these are some of the best wallpapers that I have ever seen and used. Visit http://pyr0sky.deviantart.com/gallery/ for some really beautiful wallpapers for your desktop. You can use the Nitrogen application in Openbox to change the wallpapers.

Conky

The default conky settings are good but who really likes the information put up in a mundane way. I came across a wonderful conky manager application which has excellent themes preinstalled and are quite configurable. Conky manager can be found here. This makes it very easy to switch between themes and customize them to your hearts content. For those bold enough to dive into the conky configuration files, you would always tweak the config file as per your requirements. Detailed understanding of what you are doing would be expected here.

Openbox themes and Icons

Once again the default openbox themes are bland and very dark which do not suit my taste. Head over to box-look.org for many open box themes which you can install. Also flat themes are very popular nowadays. Check flatstudio and shaven two. I find these two themes to compliment each other very well. The widgets from flatstudio give a very modern look to the linux installation and the open box theme shaven two go well with the application windows. Check out these images from my machine.

Along with the themes, another eye candy is of course the icons. A lot can be found online. I have searched and finally settled down for few of these icon sets – Flattr, FS Icons and Faenza for crunchbang. Installing them is fairly simple and has a huge impact on the look and feel of #!

Also take a peek at my other post about LXLE. I came across couple more openbox themes and icons sets which will look great on Crunchbang as well.

Dockbar for launching applications

Cairo Dock is a very popular dock but on Crunchbang we’d like to keep things lightweight. And so a worthy alternative here is the AdeskBar which is a less flashy but very customizable dock bar for openbox. It is very easy to configure and add effect on mouse over for some extra eye candy. Edit : After using ADeskBar for some time, I switched to Cairo Dock, for a more eye pleasing experience.

Openbox menu

Openbox is designed to have all the applications in a menu which can be invoked by a right click. This menu and its sub menus are highly configurable and can be edited to suit your needs. You could add your application in here, browse disk contents from here, access the open box settings, conky settings.. all at the click of the right button. The open box menu file is an xml and someone with decent understanding of xml can work their by tweaking it as required. Right Click >> Settings >> Openbox >> Edit menu.xml. Restart Openbox from the same menu after making required changes.

That’s about it. A quick primer into converting an otherwise dull and boring Crunchbang desktop into something more vibrant and shiny. It makes using Crunchbang even more fun.

Tweak these options some more and you get a totally new desktop like this

So go ahead try these out and tweak #! to your hearts content!

Another screenshot showing few changes to icons and conky display font colors.

EDIT: Check out my other post about LXLE as well. While exploring open box themes for LXLE, I found few others which completely overhaul the look and feel. These would look excellent on Crunchbang as well. Check it out!