I wasn’t sure whether I would post a screenshot for this month, as I thought it most likely that I’d be using a setup more or less unchanged from my second screenshot in October last year (“TheGrid” theme). However, it didn’t quite turn out that way…
My Eee Desktop - January 2012
If you’ve read the last post I wrote on this blog, you will be aware that I am eagerly awaiting the launch of the Raspberry Pi (an ultra-low-cost computer on a circuit board the size of a credit card, running on an ARM processor). To cut a long story short, I’m already thinking of software I could run under Linux on the machine, and the Fluxbox window manager (which I use on my Eee 701) is one possibility I have been considering.
With the above in mind, I thought I would try creating a Fluxbox “style” (theme) based on the Raspberry Pi logo and its colours. Not only would the theme aim to reflect this identity, but I wanted a Fluxbox style which would be clear, minimalist and uncluttered, and be usable and readable at a wide selection of screen resolutions (up to and including full HD (1920×1280), which the “RasPi” is apparently more than capable of).
This month’s “My Eee Desktop” shows where I have reached with the Raspberry Pi style. I created the wallpaper image in Inkscape—the RasPi logo has been made available as an SVG vector image, so I took this and placed it over a gradient-filled circle (to give the “halo” effect) on a black background.
The wallpaper image is set at 800×480 resolution (that of the Eee 701), but if a higher resolution is used, the image is centred on the screen and the background around it is also black, so the style is very adaptable. As I would envisage connecting a RasPi to an HD TV, I chose black as the most suitable background colour for looking at over a lengthy period (just in case!). The menu and window fonts are set a little larger than normal for my Fluxbox styles, to make them more readable at high resolutions, whilst still not taking up too much space on an 800×480 display.
The only other point to note (particularly for longer-term readers here), is the addition of a GKrellM plugin to add an analogue clock. This takes up slightly less vertical space than a WindowMaker dockapp (as do most of GKrellM’s “monitors”), which on a screen with only 480 vertical rows of pixels, makes plenty of difference!
That’s all for this month—see you in February with another desktop 
