shankar_ganesh
Journeyman
[SOURCE]
I have noticed that many people try to imitate Mac OSX Tiger's look with their current operating system. No matter is it Windows or Linux. I'm one of those people and this is my atteption to make Ubuntu Linux look like OSX Tiger. I use Ubuntu simply because it is the best distribution of the best operating system. Ubuntu uses Gnome as it's desktop environment. For this reason the guide is for only for Gnome users. It you are using some other distribution, this guide is still valid in most cases. This guide tries to be as spesific as possible, so that even newbies can follow it easily! Rabiller Yann translated this guide to France.
Why should I modify my desktop to look like OSX?
Well, it's all up to your taste actually. If you don't like OSX's look then you shouldn't, but there are many people who think that OSX is simply beautiful. Personally I don't like Ubuntu's default brown theme or it's icons (Update: dapper has beautiful icons). They are just not for me. The good thing with Ubuntu (and linux in general) is that it's possible to modify everything you want. This allows us to have good operating system with nice personalized look.
Screenshots - What will you get
I'm sure you're already thinking "Okay, but show me some screenshots!". So here are some Before and After shots. Before shots are taken from Official Ubuntu website.
Ubuntu desktop before any modifications
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/before_thumb_1.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/before_thumb_2.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/before_thumb_3.jpg Ubuntu desktop after applying this guide
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/after_thumb_1.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/after_thumb_2.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/after_thumb_3.jpg Table of contents
Let's start with some basic concepts. Gnome desktop has three different themes, which you can change. These are Icons, Controls and Window decoration. Even only by changing them, you can get a very nice desktop. There are many themes available and you can find most of them at Gnome-look. You can of course use any theme you like, but in this guide we are making OSX look-a-like and we must select the best ones for our purpose.
Changing themes and icons
Download the following themes from Gnome-look. The first one includes the theme for window decorator and for controls. And the second one has a lot of OSX style icons.
Wallpaper
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/background_selector_thumb.png Wallpaper is a basic element of the desktop environment. In Ubuntu you can change your background by clicking right mouse button on your desktop and selecting "Change Desktop Background" from the pop-up menu. Now you should see the background selector (See the image on right). You can add new wallpapers to the list simply by clicking "Add wallpaper" button and browsing to the folder where you keep your wallpaper images. Ok this all is very intuitive and simple, but where to get OSX looking wallpapers? Right here or just click my thumbnails below and download images to your computer. After that you can use them as described above. I use the the center one on my desktop, but the choice is yours! For more wallpapers, look at my link list at the end of the guide.
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/wall_thumb1.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/wall_thumb2.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/wall_thumb3.jpg Desktop icons
I have only few icons on my desktop and they are pretty big as you can see from the screenshots. I use Innex icons theme on desktop icons. I also recommend you to download OS-L iconset even though it's for KDE. It still contains many nice icons which you can use in menus or in your application launchers.
Fonts
Fonts are rarely thought as an eye-candy, but well selected fonts can make the difference on how your deskop looks. With fonts it is also important that they are readable! Do not use too complicated or artistic fonts. Keep it simple!
I use the font called HandelGotD, which is a very nice looking font, but yet simple. Unfortunately it's not a free font and you have to pay for it. That's why I can't put it here. Another good option is to use the same fonts that real OSX uses. These fonts are available at osx-.com and they are free to download. Of course, Ubuntu's default font is beautiful as well, so the choice is yours once again.
Next we will install downloaded fonts, so that they can be used in gnome. Open Gnome-terminal from the "Applications ->Accessories -> Terminal" and move to the folder that contains your fonts (if you downloaded Mac fonts from osx-e.com, you have to unzip the package first). Then give the following commands. These commands just copies the new fonts into the fonts folder of the system.
sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf
sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf
sudo cp *.TTF /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf
After applying these commands I recommend you to log out and log in again to make sure that fonts are in use. Now we have fonts installed, but we still need to make gnome use them. Go to "System -> Preferences -> Font". Click the buttons to change font and select your new font from the list and give it the size you like. I'm using font size 9, but it might be a little small for most of the users. Mac's default font is Lucida Grande and Lucida MAC (size 10). Change Application font, Desktop font and Window title font, but do not change Terminal font. That's it! Now you can close the font-configuration window. You may need to restart your session once again to make changes effect every application. By restarting session, I mean login out and in again.
Gnome panel customizing
Gnome panels are those grey things on the top and the bottom of your screen. Panels can contain menus, taskbars, clock, application launchers etc. Next we will study how to get the top panel look more like OSX panel and also how we can make OSX Docker look-a-like from the bottom panel. There are also other ways to imitate OSX docker, but they are not discussed under this topic.
Bottom panel
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/bottom_panels.jpg Let's begin with the bottom panel. Our aim is to have a panel which contains only application launchers. The first step is to remove all the other elements from the panel. In default ubuntu installation there are Recycle bin, Taskbar, desktop switcher and show desktop -button. These are added later to the top panel so don't worry. You won't lose them forever! You can remove these elements by clicking right mouse-button on them and selecting "Remove from panel" from pop-up menu. Now you have empty gray panel. Next click right mouse-button on the empty panel and select "Properties". Change the Size of the panel to 50 and remove all the ticks form the selectionboxes (See screenshot). Then change to Background tab and select "Solid color". Change the Color to white, if it's not already, and move "Style" slider like in this screenshot. Now the panel is ready. Next we just add icons (application launchers) to it. You can simply drag and drop the icons from the desktop. Another way is to click right mouse-button on the panel and select "Add to panel...". Select "Custom application launcher" from the window and fill Name, Command and select some beatiful icon. You can also write a short comment about the program, if you will. (See screenshot)
There is also a very nice new dock-application called cairo-dock. It's in very early stage of developement, but it looks really promising project. It doesn't support PNG icons yet and there not really a lot of OSX looking SVG icons, so it's probably not the best option yet, but I suggest you to stay tuned. It will be great!
Top panel
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/top_panels.jpg The Top panel is little more trickier than bottom panel. I think that at the moment it's not possible to get it as beautiful as I would like to. Nevertheless, there are still some improvments that we can make. There are three things to do. Let's first change the distributor logo. That's the ubuntu logo of the application menu. Download this icon to your home folder and give this command (in your home folder) to install it.
I'm not sure is this the right directory for Dapper!
sudo cp apple.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/distributor-logo.png
Now, the next thing is to set a background image to your top-panel. Because I'm lazy there's no download for that, but you have to do it yourself with GIMP for example. It's not that hard. Just create a new image and set width to your resolution width (for example 1024 pixels) and height to 24 pixels (this is the height of the panel). Then use gradien tool to create a gradient from light grey to dark grey. Now after that, you can just paint few pixels from upper corners to black so that it looks rounded.
Now, open panel properties by clicking right mouse button on panel and selecting Properties. Check that Size is 24 and then go to Background tab. Select Backgroung image and browse to image you just created with GIMP. After that you can close the properties window.
The third thing is those notification area icons. There is no one folder which would contain those icons. Notification area icons are application spesific and that's why there's no easy and short way to change them. I list here few folders you might want take a look at. If you want to change icon you can just overwrite those PNG files. Here are the folders:
/usr/share/pixmaps/gaim/icons
/usr/share/rhythmbox/art
/usr/share/gnome-bluetooth/pixmaps
/usr/share/icons/Human/22x22/status
Window shadows and transparency
Window shadows and transparency brings the real eye-candy to your desktop! These effects can be achieved by using Composite Manager. There is a very nice guide about Composite Manager available at the official Ubuntu forums. This guide is written by Poofyhairguy and all credits go to him!
Customize your applications
Firefox web-browser
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/firefox_title.jpg I have updated my Firefox to 1.5 as instructed in this guide. If you don't update your firefox before applying my guide, there is a change, that something doesn't work as intented. And it's a lot faster than 1.0.7 anyway!
Let's begin with the theme. Install iFox Smooth theme from here and activate it at Firefox theme manager. You have to restart Firefox after that!
Next we will remove menubar from the browser. This can be done with the help of CompactMenu extension. Install it from here and restart your firefox once again. Now, click your right mouse button on Toolbar and select Customize... from the pop-up menu. Remove the whitespace from the menubar (the most top one) and after that drag all the sfuff from navigation toolbar to the menubar (see screenshot). Add CompactMenu button also to the menubar (see screenshot).
After that you can close customizing by clicking Done. Now your Firefox should look something like this. Click right mouse button on toolbar again and remove tick from Navigation toolbar. You can also remove bookmarks toolbar the same way if you want to. Use CompactMenu button whenever you need to access Firefox menus. I also removed status bar from the bottom of the browser. You can do this from Firefox's View menu.
Gaim - Instant messenger
Gaim is the default instant messenger of the Ubuntu. It allows you to change smiley themes from the properties, but you can also change it's icons and other graphics by overwriting the existing files. Let's beginning with smiley themes.
You can get more smiley themes for Gaim easily from the repositories. Just give the following command and after that restart your Gaim.
sudo apt-get install gaim-themes
Now open the preferences window of the Gaim messenger. It can by found under Tools menu. Navigate to Smiley Themes and select your favourite. After that you can close the window. I actually didn't like any of the existing themes, so I ported my favourite theme from Kopete to Gaim. I suggest you to check it out. If you like it, download the package and navigate to your download folder with nautilus. Next open the preferences window of the Gaim again (if it's not already open) and navigate to smiley themes. Now you can simply drag and drop the packet that you downloded to the list. See the picture.
Next we will change the icons of the program itself. Before that we should take a backup copy of the current icons. So run this command in your terminal.
sudo mv /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim_backup
Next download(Under construction) my theme and extract it temporarly to your home folder. Now give the following commands in gnome-terminal.
cd ~
sudo mv gaim /usr/share/pixmaps/
Finally you need to restart your Gaim messenger.
How to uninstall OSX-Gaim theme
Just in case if you don't like it. Give the following commands in gnome-terminal and after that, restart your Gaim messenger.
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim
sudo mv /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim_backup /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim
Gnome Configuration Editor
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/gconf-editor.jpg This is just a minor improvment, but it's all about details.
This improvment changes the icons of the application to have a mac-look. This can be done (Again!) simply by overwriting the existing icons with the new ones. You can download my Configuration Editor icons here (sorry, not available anymore). After that open the terminal and move to the directory where you just downloaded the icons. Then give the following commands.
tar zxfv gconf-editor-icons.tar.gz
sudo mv /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor_backup
sudo mv gconf-editor /usr/share/pixmaps/
Now the icons should be changed when you start the application next time. If you don't like the new look, you can always roll-back to default icons. Just give the following commands in terminal.
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor
sudo mv /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor_backup /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor
Where to go next?
Hopefully you found this guide useful. Next you might want to download more icons, wallpapers, themes and other eye-candy from the internet. Below is a nice list of the websites, which I have used to get most of my resources. These sites have absolutely stunning icons and wallpapers, so you really should take a look!
I have noticed that many people try to imitate Mac OSX Tiger's look with their current operating system. No matter is it Windows or Linux. I'm one of those people and this is my atteption to make Ubuntu Linux look like OSX Tiger. I use Ubuntu simply because it is the best distribution of the best operating system. Ubuntu uses Gnome as it's desktop environment. For this reason the guide is for only for Gnome users. It you are using some other distribution, this guide is still valid in most cases. This guide tries to be as spesific as possible, so that even newbies can follow it easily! Rabiller Yann translated this guide to France.
Why should I modify my desktop to look like OSX?
Well, it's all up to your taste actually. If you don't like OSX's look then you shouldn't, but there are many people who think that OSX is simply beautiful. Personally I don't like Ubuntu's default brown theme or it's icons (Update: dapper has beautiful icons). They are just not for me. The good thing with Ubuntu (and linux in general) is that it's possible to modify everything you want. This allows us to have good operating system with nice personalized look.
Screenshots - What will you get
I'm sure you're already thinking "Okay, but show me some screenshots!". So here are some Before and After shots. Before shots are taken from Official Ubuntu website.
Ubuntu desktop before any modifications
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/before_thumb_1.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/before_thumb_2.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/before_thumb_3.jpg Ubuntu desktop after applying this guide
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/after_thumb_1.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/after_thumb_2.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/after_thumb_3.jpg Table of contents
- Let's begin to customize our desktop!
- Changing themes and icons
- Wallpaper
- Desktop icons
- Fonts
- Gnome panel customizing
- Window shadows and transparency
- Customize your applications
- Firefox web-browser
- Gaim - Instant messenger
- Gnome Configuration Editor
- Where to go next?
- Links
Let's start with some basic concepts. Gnome desktop has three different themes, which you can change. These are Icons, Controls and Window decoration. Even only by changing them, you can get a very nice desktop. There are many themes available and you can find most of them at Gnome-look. You can of course use any theme you like, but in this guide we are making OSX look-a-like and we must select the best ones for our purpose.
Changing themes and icons
Download the following themes from Gnome-look. The first one includes the theme for window decorator and for controls. And the second one has a lot of OSX style icons.
- T-ish for Clearlooks by Tmilovan.
- OSX iconset by Kiddo.
Wallpaper
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/background_selector_thumb.png Wallpaper is a basic element of the desktop environment. In Ubuntu you can change your background by clicking right mouse button on your desktop and selecting "Change Desktop Background" from the pop-up menu. Now you should see the background selector (See the image on right). You can add new wallpapers to the list simply by clicking "Add wallpaper" button and browsing to the folder where you keep your wallpaper images. Ok this all is very intuitive and simple, but where to get OSX looking wallpapers? Right here or just click my thumbnails below and download images to your computer. After that you can use them as described above. I use the the center one on my desktop, but the choice is yours! For more wallpapers, look at my link list at the end of the guide.
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/wall_thumb1.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/wall_thumb2.jpg *www.taimila.com/images/osx/wall_thumb3.jpg Desktop icons
I have only few icons on my desktop and they are pretty big as you can see from the screenshots. I use Innex icons theme on desktop icons. I also recommend you to download OS-L iconset even though it's for KDE. It still contains many nice icons which you can use in menus or in your application launchers.
Fonts
Fonts are rarely thought as an eye-candy, but well selected fonts can make the difference on how your deskop looks. With fonts it is also important that they are readable! Do not use too complicated or artistic fonts. Keep it simple!
I use the font called HandelGotD, which is a very nice looking font, but yet simple. Unfortunately it's not a free font and you have to pay for it. That's why I can't put it here. Another good option is to use the same fonts that real OSX uses. These fonts are available at osx-.com and they are free to download. Of course, Ubuntu's default font is beautiful as well, so the choice is yours once again.
Next we will install downloaded fonts, so that they can be used in gnome. Open Gnome-terminal from the "Applications ->Accessories -> Terminal" and move to the folder that contains your fonts (if you downloaded Mac fonts from osx-e.com, you have to unzip the package first). Then give the following commands. These commands just copies the new fonts into the fonts folder of the system.
sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf
sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf
sudo cp *.TTF /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf
After applying these commands I recommend you to log out and log in again to make sure that fonts are in use. Now we have fonts installed, but we still need to make gnome use them. Go to "System -> Preferences -> Font". Click the buttons to change font and select your new font from the list and give it the size you like. I'm using font size 9, but it might be a little small for most of the users. Mac's default font is Lucida Grande and Lucida MAC (size 10). Change Application font, Desktop font and Window title font, but do not change Terminal font. That's it! Now you can close the font-configuration window. You may need to restart your session once again to make changes effect every application. By restarting session, I mean login out and in again.
Gnome panel customizing
Gnome panels are those grey things on the top and the bottom of your screen. Panels can contain menus, taskbars, clock, application launchers etc. Next we will study how to get the top panel look more like OSX panel and also how we can make OSX Docker look-a-like from the bottom panel. There are also other ways to imitate OSX docker, but they are not discussed under this topic.
Bottom panel
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/bottom_panels.jpg Let's begin with the bottom panel. Our aim is to have a panel which contains only application launchers. The first step is to remove all the other elements from the panel. In default ubuntu installation there are Recycle bin, Taskbar, desktop switcher and show desktop -button. These are added later to the top panel so don't worry. You won't lose them forever! You can remove these elements by clicking right mouse-button on them and selecting "Remove from panel" from pop-up menu. Now you have empty gray panel. Next click right mouse-button on the empty panel and select "Properties". Change the Size of the panel to 50 and remove all the ticks form the selectionboxes (See screenshot). Then change to Background tab and select "Solid color". Change the Color to white, if it's not already, and move "Style" slider like in this screenshot. Now the panel is ready. Next we just add icons (application launchers) to it. You can simply drag and drop the icons from the desktop. Another way is to click right mouse-button on the panel and select "Add to panel...". Select "Custom application launcher" from the window and fill Name, Command and select some beatiful icon. You can also write a short comment about the program, if you will. (See screenshot)
There is also a very nice new dock-application called cairo-dock. It's in very early stage of developement, but it looks really promising project. It doesn't support PNG icons yet and there not really a lot of OSX looking SVG icons, so it's probably not the best option yet, but I suggest you to stay tuned. It will be great!
Top panel
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/top_panels.jpg The Top panel is little more trickier than bottom panel. I think that at the moment it's not possible to get it as beautiful as I would like to. Nevertheless, there are still some improvments that we can make. There are three things to do. Let's first change the distributor logo. That's the ubuntu logo of the application menu. Download this icon to your home folder and give this command (in your home folder) to install it.
I'm not sure is this the right directory for Dapper!
sudo cp apple.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/distributor-logo.png
Now, the next thing is to set a background image to your top-panel. Because I'm lazy there's no download for that, but you have to do it yourself with GIMP for example. It's not that hard. Just create a new image and set width to your resolution width (for example 1024 pixels) and height to 24 pixels (this is the height of the panel). Then use gradien tool to create a gradient from light grey to dark grey. Now after that, you can just paint few pixels from upper corners to black so that it looks rounded.
Now, open panel properties by clicking right mouse button on panel and selecting Properties. Check that Size is 24 and then go to Background tab. Select Backgroung image and browse to image you just created with GIMP. After that you can close the properties window.
The third thing is those notification area icons. There is no one folder which would contain those icons. Notification area icons are application spesific and that's why there's no easy and short way to change them. I list here few folders you might want take a look at. If you want to change icon you can just overwrite those PNG files. Here are the folders:
/usr/share/pixmaps/gaim/icons
/usr/share/rhythmbox/art
/usr/share/gnome-bluetooth/pixmaps
/usr/share/icons/Human/22x22/status
Window shadows and transparency
Window shadows and transparency brings the real eye-candy to your desktop! These effects can be achieved by using Composite Manager. There is a very nice guide about Composite Manager available at the official Ubuntu forums. This guide is written by Poofyhairguy and all credits go to him!
Customize your applications
Firefox web-browser
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/firefox_title.jpg I have updated my Firefox to 1.5 as instructed in this guide. If you don't update your firefox before applying my guide, there is a change, that something doesn't work as intented. And it's a lot faster than 1.0.7 anyway!
Let's begin with the theme. Install iFox Smooth theme from here and activate it at Firefox theme manager. You have to restart Firefox after that!
Next we will remove menubar from the browser. This can be done with the help of CompactMenu extension. Install it from here and restart your firefox once again. Now, click your right mouse button on Toolbar and select Customize... from the pop-up menu. Remove the whitespace from the menubar (the most top one) and after that drag all the sfuff from navigation toolbar to the menubar (see screenshot). Add CompactMenu button also to the menubar (see screenshot).
After that you can close customizing by clicking Done. Now your Firefox should look something like this. Click right mouse button on toolbar again and remove tick from Navigation toolbar. You can also remove bookmarks toolbar the same way if you want to. Use CompactMenu button whenever you need to access Firefox menus. I also removed status bar from the bottom of the browser. You can do this from Firefox's View menu.
Gaim - Instant messenger
Gaim is the default instant messenger of the Ubuntu. It allows you to change smiley themes from the properties, but you can also change it's icons and other graphics by overwriting the existing files. Let's beginning with smiley themes.
You can get more smiley themes for Gaim easily from the repositories. Just give the following command and after that restart your Gaim.
sudo apt-get install gaim-themes
Now open the preferences window of the Gaim messenger. It can by found under Tools menu. Navigate to Smiley Themes and select your favourite. After that you can close the window. I actually didn't like any of the existing themes, so I ported my favourite theme from Kopete to Gaim. I suggest you to check it out. If you like it, download the package and navigate to your download folder with nautilus. Next open the preferences window of the Gaim again (if it's not already open) and navigate to smiley themes. Now you can simply drag and drop the packet that you downloded to the list. See the picture.
Next we will change the icons of the program itself. Before that we should take a backup copy of the current icons. So run this command in your terminal.
sudo mv /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim_backup
Next download(Under construction) my theme and extract it temporarly to your home folder. Now give the following commands in gnome-terminal.
cd ~
sudo mv gaim /usr/share/pixmaps/
Finally you need to restart your Gaim messenger.
How to uninstall OSX-Gaim theme
Just in case if you don't like it. Give the following commands in gnome-terminal and after that, restart your Gaim messenger.
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim
sudo mv /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim_backup /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim
Gnome Configuration Editor
*www.taimila.com/images/osx/gconf-editor.jpg This is just a minor improvment, but it's all about details.
This improvment changes the icons of the application to have a mac-look. This can be done (Again!) simply by overwriting the existing icons with the new ones. You can download my Configuration Editor icons here (sorry, not available anymore). After that open the terminal and move to the directory where you just downloaded the icons. Then give the following commands. tar zxfv gconf-editor-icons.tar.gz
sudo mv /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor_backup
sudo mv gconf-editor /usr/share/pixmaps/
Now the icons should be changed when you start the application next time. If you don't like the new look, you can always roll-back to default icons. Just give the following commands in terminal.
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor
sudo mv /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor_backup /usr/share/pixmaps/gconf-editor
Where to go next?
Hopefully you found this guide useful. Next you might want to download more icons, wallpapers, themes and other eye-candy from the internet. Below is a nice list of the websites, which I have used to get most of my resources. These sites have absolutely stunning icons and wallpapers, so you really should take a look!
