Welcome to elementary OS

So, you made the decision to switch to elementary OS? Great!

Now, maybe you are new to the elementary world and want to test some things out, tweak here-and-there a bit, install this, customize that...

Well, here are things you could do after installing elementary OS.

CUSTOMIZATION

After a fresh install, elementary already looks nice, but there are some nice tweaks you can do.

PLANK

So, why not give Plank another theme? There are many nice ones, but there are already some included in elementary.

It may look like this:

Here's how to install plank themes, and here is the Top 5 best Plank themes.

You may want to categorize applications, grouping icons in Plank. These look like this:

Here is the guide.

OTHER THEMES

If you don't like the grey-ish window (eGTK) theme of elementary, you may enjoy the dark elementary theme.

Find out more about it here.

Oh, and why not make Chrome fit in more in elementary?

ICONS

Some icons of 3rd party applications, such as Dropbox, look horrible in elementary. Thankfully, there are icons made by the community to fit them elementary's theme.

Dropbox Wingpanel icons 

Dropbox System Folders

Make LibreOffice look elementary-ish

You may also try a whole new icon set:

Nitrux Icons

El Faenza

APPLICATIONS

There are many cool and useful elementary-style applications that most people don't know about about. Here are some you may want to try out.

The Top 5 of the best elementary-Style 3rd party applications...

... such as Birdie:

You may also want to get stuff done... Pomidor Style.

"Gazette" by +Eduard Gotwig, is a news service for your desktop, showing current news, the local weather, and recently changed / used files.

And that's how you install it.

GENERAL TWEAKS

Besides applications you can install, and themes you can apply, there are also general tweaks you can do.

Maybe, you're often visiting Google+, so you want to easily visit it with a shortcut. For things like this, you can create web apps. Check out this 4 part web-app series.

Midori, elementary's standard web browser, does not have the ability to run flash, which is needed for things such as YouTube. Don't worry, you can easily add flash to Midori.

You can preview files, such as documents and photos with the application Gloobus.

You may also upgrade the Kernel to version 3.9 in Luna Beta 2. Just follow these kernel upgrade steps.

OTHER THINGS

Are you a gamer? Then you should read these popular articles by +Lewis Goddard.

Say "Hello!" to the community and check out other places, where you can find a community around elementary.

But that wasn't everything! There's still much you can do. Browse through elementary update and other places. And let us know when you find cool tweaks and things to improve the elementary experience.

Contact Us

Email

Describe yourself

• eOS developer
• eOS user
• app developer
• other

What's on your mind?

Thank You

Thanks for dropping us a line. elementaryupdate is a community effort. The more we care, the better this project becomes!

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Crowd-Funding Games Weekly #2

I'm back again, listing another three crowd-funding games for elementary (and Linux in general) with around two weeks of funding left, as well as some looking back on the projects we previously featured.

Son of Nor - The World is Your Weapon

Son of Nor looks set to be one of those terrifically geeky games, which also features a multitude of co-op opportunities (split-screen, lan, internet). Unfortunately, in my (fairly experienced) crowd-funding opinion, they probably won't get funded.

Son of Nor will be available for Windows, Max and Linuz, DRM Free (nothing about Steam keys, but they're on Greenlight all right) by pledging $15 on their Kickstarter for one of the early bird copies of the game (limited to 300).

Update: It looks like early bird copies are all sold out (there wasn't many left when I wrote this). It's now $20 for a standard copy.

Son of Nor on Kickstarter

AR-K

AR-K is a Saga that is looking to have the second, and maybe third and fourth episodes funded on Kickstarter. They have promised a linux version, but it will require some porting (from Unity 3.6 to 4) and while the first episode is already out (which you can get for free), there's been nothing said about porting that over to Linux.

Overall, this point-and-click adventure isn't for me (they rarely are), but I'm sure there are plenty of you out there willing to pledge $20 for the complete game.

AR-K on Kickstarter

Rawbots

Rawbots is a create'em, program'em, build'em, fight'em game (okay, I made that up). They describe it as a sandbox games, where you get to craft elegant or elephant robots, visually program them, and then basically do whatever you want. FPS, RTS, CTF, or just build as high as you can, it's completely up to you.

$20 bags you a DRM-Free copy, as well as a Steam key (when, and if, available), and 1 Online Multiplayer user. The limit of 15,000 for this "first call" has hardly been dented.

Rawbots is my favourite of this week, mainly because of the creative element. It's like Minecraft, but with Robots! Unfortunately, it is also the least funded of what has rapidly turned into a low-on-funds week (I know how they feel). All is not right in the crowd-funding world.

Rawbots on Kickstarter

Honourable Mentions

There are no honourable mentions this week, as Games on Kickstarter appear to have hit somewhat of a slump. Hopefully the three games i have lined up for next week will fare a little better than those of recent times.

Flashbacks

A.N.N.E has now reached it's Linux stretch goal of $80,000, and has just over two days of funding to go. During that time, you can still join the ranks of over three-thousand others and get a copy (and a Steam key!) for the fundraising price of $10.

Jagged Alliance: Flashback is just three days away from the end of the campaign. Unfortunately, it's beginning to look like this means it's just three days away from not getting funded. Remember, you can get the Classic Pack (that's 4 games!) and half-price off release for just $15, or pony up the full $25 up-front to grab yourself a copy of the game.

Realm site just below £80,000 of a £195,000 goal, with just over two days to go. £10 (~$15) gets you a copy and shows support for a beautiful game, or get two copies for £17 (~$26).

Among the Sleep was fully funded just yesterday, raising $248,358 out of a $200,000 goal from 8,110 backers. General release is slated for December 2013, but do remember that nearly three-quarters of Kickstarter Projects deliver late. In the mean time, you can try out the public alpha.

And finally, for just $5, you really can't go wrong. And Dog Sled Saga looks set to be adorable, as well as being within reach of doubling their goal of $6,000.

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Steam Icons for elementary os

Steam, unfortunately, ships with an oversized, blurry affair of an icon. There was a Bug (#11080517) intended to get this replaced in elementary, but it has been marked as Won't Fix as elementary does not provide icons for third party applications. Fortunately, designers have already created a replacement Icons for Plank and the Panel.

These two source, while much better looking, both have issues with ease of install. One wants you to be modifying icon paths, while the other wants you to execute commands to flush and recreate the icon cache. Individually I can live with it, but downloading and extracting two archives for one program to look a little (okay, a lot) better, just seems silly.

So, I consolidated these two packages into one archive, though you can still visit the earlier links and install them separately if you want. This archive contains a folder you simply have to copy to the root of your filesystem as an administrator, and edit Steams .desktop file, to change the icon name to match.

Download

To edit the steam.desktop file, run the following in the terminal, supply your password, and change Icon=steam to Icon=steam_eos

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop
That's it! Log out and back in or restart to see your shiny new icons.

Credit for Icons: pincolpallo and gazornonplat.

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Dropbox System Folders

Because the elementary team has made a philosophical choice not to support third-party applications, it takes a bit of work to fully integrate Dropbox into Luna. We've already talked about the Pantheon-Files plugin and the Dropbox panel icon, but what about Dropbox system folders? Thanks to Steve Göhre, elementary users now have a solution. WARNING: Do not attempt this if you are using an active desktop in Luna. This solution makes use of the Desktop folder.

Different Options

This guide offers two different installation options: full and partial. The full installation will install the Pantheon-Files plugin, the panel icon, and system folders. This is the correct option for someone who hasn't used the guides mentioned above.

Full Installation
If you already have the plugin and panel icons installed (or you don't want/need them), you will want to do the partial installation option. This option will only install the system folders.

Partial Installation

Installation

Download the appropriate package above and unpack it.

With the terminal, navigate into your extracted folder. For example, if you unpacked your folder inside the Downloads folder, your terminal code will look like this: cd ~/Downloads/elementary-dropbox-integration/ Once you are inside your folder, run the installation. chmod +x install.sh ; sh install.sh You may need to logout and login for changes to occur.

Problems

There are a few problems. We think these are minor, but you will want to decide that for yourself.

The first bug is the spacing of the folders in the home directory. They appear pushed together. You can temporarily relieve this spacing issue by toggling CTRL+H. The problem is more likely to be a pantheon-files bug than a problem with the installation.

The second bug is found inside the open/save dialogue. As mentioned in our warning above, this entire hack makes use of the Desktop folder in an innovative way. Inside of the open/save file finder, the Dropbox folder is instead labeled Desktop. For more detailed instructions, head over to the unofficial elementary forum and read Steve Göhre's instructions. In fact, head on over to the forum anyway because it's a great service and needs more support!

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Nitrux Icons in elementary Luna

People enjoy Nitrux icons because of the clean, flat look and their 3rd-party application support. The following guide provides a special tweak of Nitrux for elementary. Here are a few screenshots of Nitrux in action.

The Desktop

Slingshot

Files

Because this tweak of Nitrux only affects applications, it leaves the rest of your system alone.

Install

To install, download the following file, extract it, and move it to ~/.icons. The folder, .icons, is a hidden folder inside of your home directory. You can show hidden folders by pressing CTRL+H inside of the Files application.

Download Nitrux Icons
To change the icons on your system, use Ubuntu Tweak or Gnome Tweak.

Credit

This icon theme was not created by elementary update. Be sure to thank the following people:

• Application icons: DevianTN7k1
• Pastie panel icon: satya164
• Dropbox panel icon: MrMagical

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Creating Web-Apps (Part 4)

This is the final article in a four-part series describing how to create web-apps in elementary OS. So far, we have looked into Fogger, Google Chrome, and Midori web-apps. We're ending the series by looking again at Google Chrome and taking full advantage of the Chrome Web Store.

Gmail

If you're not a fan of Geary, or need more features like search, check out Gmail Offline. It's a nice, clean interface with vertical panes and offline access.

Google Keep

Google Keep is one of my favorite Google apps. It allows you to quickly save, access and organize information. You can easily create a text note, add a photo, or type up a quick list. It's minimalist but gets the job done. If you are looking for an elementary-inspired icon, TraumaD91 designed a great one.

Distraction-Free Writing

Writebox is a distraction-free writing space, which syncs with Drive and Dropbox. When you go full-screen (F11), you are left with pure white and your text. Simplicity.

Honorable Mentions

Here are some other solid apps worth looking into!

• Feedly: With the immanent demise of Google Reader, Feedly is looking more attractive every day.
• JoliDrive: All your online data in one place.
• Evernote: Note-taking app.
• TweetDeck: Twitter app.
• NY Times or Huffington Post: News apps.
• Cloud Reader: Offline reader for ebooks.

Did we leave out some essentials? Share them with us in the comments!

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elementary Dark theme

Interested in a Dark theme for Pantheon-Terminal, Totem/Audience, and the private browsing instance of Midori?

Well you, my friend, have come to the right place!

This can be enabled with a few clicks of the mouse and a minimal amount of terminal work, thanks to a script.

Let's get the ball rolling by performing some obligatory backup work (in case you ever want to revert).

Open up a new Files window and navigate to /usr/share/themes/elementary.

Select the gtk-3.0 folder and copy it to your home directory (or where you like to keep your backups)

If for some reason you wish to revert back to the default theme, simply open 'Files' as an administrator, navigate to (/usr/share/themes/elementary) and delete the folder (gtk-3.0). Then copy and paste the folder we just backed up (gtk-3.0)to (/usr/share/themes/elementary) and select replace when prompted. Then login and log back out for the theme to take effect.

Now, time for the fun stuff.

1. Grab the elementary Dark theme from here. 
2. Extract it to your home folder
3. Navigate to your home folder and open the 'elementary_dark' folder (the folder we just extracted)
4. Open up terminal (don't be scared, she won't bite) and enter the following commands:

cd /home/[YOUR_USERNAME]/elementary_dark
chmod 755 install.sh
sudo sh ./install.sh And that's it! Login and logout for the theme to take effect! (This allows Gala to restart.)

Here are the final results:

Time to assign credit where credit is due. I did not design these themes, I merely wrote the script and packaged everything together. These files were given to me by +Sajith Edirisingne, so extend your thanks to him and anyone else unmentioned in the elementary community who worked towards this theme.

There has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding a 'Dark' theme for elementary OS. To clear up some of those rumors, I shot +Cassidy James (the community manager, lead writer, UX designer, and council member of elementary) an email and asked him what the plans were for the 'Dark' theme.

Below is Cassidy's response,

"The idea behind dark themes is that pro and/or media-centric apps would use them. For example, both an image viewer and an audio production app might sport a dark theme so the user can focus on the image being viewed or the sound being manipulated. We're currently planning to officially support dark themes for the L+1 release."

This made a lot of sense to me, and I personally cannot wait until the official themes are released.

Luckily for the impatient, we have this wonderful theme to hold us over!

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