Guest ramped Posted June 14, 2003 Report Share Posted June 14, 2003 I have just chucked Mandrake 9 back on my system for another play (as i am still a linux newbie i like to play and learn) and have one question. I want to make MDK look sweet! what is the best way to do it? i have seen some themes on KDE-Look and i guess thats a start, but i also want things like anti-aliasing and anything to make it look cool. does anyone know of a tutorial like this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liquidzoo Posted June 14, 2003 Report Share Posted June 14, 2003 As far as I know, anti-aliasing for KDE (I assume that's what you're using) is only supported in 3.1 or later. I would suggest installing KDE 3.1.2 first. If you have texstar as a urpmi source, just type in a console (as root) urpmi kdelibs-3.1.2 and it should install everything you need to upgrade. As for a new look, I really like slicker and I use it on both my laptop and desktop as I am running KDE 3.1.2 on both. There are some great tutorials on that site explaining how to install it. I knot that at least one if not more of the members of this board are involved in the project (great job guys!) but I can't remember exactly who at the moment. Anyway, hope I helped you out at least a little. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted June 14, 2003 Report Share Posted June 14, 2003 I'm not a big fan of KDE or Gnome. I use Enlightenment. Try it sometime. It's on CD2 of MDK 9.0 and 9.1's install. There are some really good skins for enlightenment at: http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/60/?topic_id=60 Skins for other WMs including KDE http://themes.freshmeat.net/ and a must have to have a good looking desktop is a background. And for those you can't go past. Look at the abstract section. Brilliant www.deviantart.com Hava a look at my desktop at http://iphitus.netfirms.com/ I have all the wallpaper for it there for download. I got themes at Freshmeat and Wallpaper at DeviantArt. I've got two new themes as well i haven't uploaded. And a goodlooking MP3 player is a must. If XMMS is your choice, you can use Winamp 2 skins with it (not 3). http://classic.winamp.com/skins/ good luck James email if you want to know any more rcxau[at]yahoo.com.au Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glitz Posted June 14, 2003 Report Share Posted June 14, 2003 KDE has had antialiasing since at least 2.2.1. The first thing you want to do to make the desktop look nice is use some half decent fonts. There are two types of fonts. Bitmapped and scalable. Bitmapped fonts do not scale well or look good when antialiased. My advice is DO NOT USE THESE FONTS. The default helvetica font is one of these so you'll want to change it. These are changed in control center under fonts. You'll find the antialiasing checkbox there too. Note that you have to restart KDE if you change the antialiasing status. Second, the 75dpi fonts are a left over relic from the time when screens were 14" and had resolutions of 640x480. It is a real shame that in this day and age they are the default font size. What you really want is 100dpi fonts for any monitor 17" or larger and a resolution of 1280x1024 or more. It is a bit trickier to change this since you will have to change to root and put a line in your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file in order to do this. You have to add a line similar to the following in your 'Section "Monitor"': DisplaySize 320 240 But replace 320 with the horizontal size of the visible portion of your screen in mm and replace 240 with the vertical size of the visible portion of your screen in mm. Whatever values you choose, make sure that it amounts to >= 100dpi in the final analysis. DPI=size in pixels / size in inches By the way, X11 seems to use the default resolution (the one that first comes up) as the "size in pixels". Even if your screen is not quite 100dpi then fudge the size so that it is. They still look better than the 75dpi fonts. Once you make this change you will have to change all the fonts in control center since they will now point to an awful font called A.D. Mono. Now back to the subject of picking fonts. You can tell if a font is scalable or not by selecting it (the choose button) and then scaling the example font in the choose window to a large number like 24 or 32. If the example text is perfectly smooth then it is a scalable font. If the edges have visible pixelation then they are bitmapped. Only use the scalable fonts with antialiasing turned on. I use the following fonts: General: ArmNet Helvetica 12 iso8859-1 (regular) Fixed width: Courier 10 iso8859-1 (regular) Taskbar: ArmNet Helvetica 11 iso8859-1 (regular) All the rest: ArmNet Helvetica 12 iso8859-1 (regular) This is a good starting point but you will want to experiment. Good luck! Glitz. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted June 14, 2003 Report Share Posted June 14, 2003 rcxau: Clicking on any of your wallpaper links gives me a page that has a little image that says "Requested file exceeds 256K". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted June 15, 2003 Report Share Posted June 15, 2003 oops there must be a limitation on my file sizes. I'll upload then elsewhere sometime. They're all from DeviantArt. you might be able to search for the name to find them. They're worth it. I'll let you know when i upload them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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