About

I started this blog as a way of sharing some of the modifications I have made to my Linux setups in the hope of inspiring others and also learning from others and gaining a better understanding of 'themes' and good UI design.

I have been using Linux for over 10 years.  My first forays were with a Knoppix live CD which I used to rescue my files from an XP desktop after the motherboard failed. I dabled with the early variants of Ubuntu, SUSE, SLAX and Mandriva before settling on PCLinuxOS 0.93a which saved my from Windows XP and finally converted me to Linux.

In the early, eager days, I dived head-first into it and had a few attempts at rolling my own distro respins/remasters which were mildly successful, but after an initial release I found each time that the expectations for improvement were such that it was taking me away from my family commitments and they sadly went into the increasingly large pile of Linux Distros that never made it.

(For completeness they were PCFluxboxOS and ChameleonOS, the latter of which I was very proud indeed and at least one distro I know of has copied my attempt to allow one-click changing of the complete desktop theme)

Work took me back to Windows in the form of Windows 7 and 8 which is now my bread and butter, but I have recently re-discovered my love of Linux but how things have changed since. When I last seriously used Linux, the community was in uproar about the state of KDE 4. Now KDE 4 is considered quite stable and elegant and the current furore surrounds Unity/Mir, Gnome 3/GTK 3.

I suppose what goes around comes around and although I have tried and like aspects of all the modern desktop environments, I find myself more comfortable at least for now with what I know and love - GTK2. My early experiments were with Fluxbox, Openbox and LXDE, but I do like what XFCE have done (albeit slowly and surely) over the years and my current distro of choice is Xubuntu.

Rather than get carried away and have a third attempt a respinning a distro, I just though I would share my experiments on this blog so anyone can try them on any system as long as you are running the desktop environment that the instructions are written for.

I have always been fascinated with UI design and I love trying to mimic other OS designs within Linux. My first attempt is to try to recreate the ChromeOS/Chromebook look which is interesting on a number of levels. The UI is clean and elegant, the taskbars are minimal and transparent and everything is of course geared around the Google Chrome browser which gets better all the time. I have often toyed with the idea of getting a Chromebook, but I find it hard to justify as the storage is very limited and you are completely reliant on Google or Chrome applications. So I thought it would be an interesting experiment to recreate the experience in Xubuntu where I can try and work as if I am on a Chromebook, all the while having the bonus of the Ubuntu software center as a backup and as much HDD space as I desire. I hope some other people have a go on their own boxes and share their thoughts with me.

Richjack

1 comment:

  1. So this was your first step towards Chromixium aka: Cub Linux? Its got me wondering if this could be adapted to something like the ProCore version of TinyCore? If it could, we could produce the "worlds smallest" Chromebook OS look a like :)

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