So you’ve installed Ubuntu and your system is rearing to go, but what next? How about we go adding a few bells and whistles? There are many things you can tweak on your Ubuntu desktop, let alone the applications, but a simple area that is often overlooked are the panels and their gadgets.
Unlike Windows, your get two panels on your desktop: top and bottom. The majority of the bottom panel is given over to the window selector for your running applications. For most users, this leaves the top relatively empty, apart from the Ubuntu system menus on the left and the date and time on the right. So let’s make use of that space.
Applets
If you right-click on the top panel and select ‘Add to panel’, you’ll be presented with a list of cool panel applets. There’s quite a few to play with, but here’s my pick of applets to add.
System Monitor
This displays helpful information such as CPU, dick or network usage. When it appears it’s just a single black rectangle and a tad short for what it displays, so do the following:
- Right-click on it and select Preferences
- Tick the Network and ‘Hard disk’ boxes
- Set ‘System Monitor Width’ to 60.
Now you should find three nicely spaced graphs for CPU, network and disk usage.
Weather Report
To set this up for Australia (wherever your location may be), right-click on it, select Preferences and under Location, drill down to your state and city. Under General, make sure the temperate unit is set to Celsius. Then click Close, right-click it again and select Update. Left-clicking on the applet will give you a detailed report.
Deskbar
This is one of those cleve utilities you can’t do without. Based on the same principles as Apple’s Spotlight, when clicked on, it will provide an input box — whatever you type will be matched against a command, email contacts, local documentation, dictionary search, internet search and more. You can use it to both find information and open or launch the references it finds. Right-click and select Preferences to expand the list of sources used for searching.
Eyes
This is just a bit of fun and actually a very old application from way back when Unix was something you would only find in server rooms. What does it do? Watch the eyes as they follow your mouse around!
Launchers
You’ll note Ubuntu already provides launchers for Firefox, Evolution and the help system; but you can add your own. To add something from the Ubuntu menus, simply scroll through the menus to your application, then left-click and drag it to the panel. If you want to add a program not in the menu system, first right-click on the desktop, select ‘Create Launcher’, fill our the details and then drag it from the desktop to the panel. You can move and arrange them by either left-clicking or middle button-clicking and dragging them. You can prevent certain launchers from being moved by toggling ‘Lock to panel’ when right-clicking.
Top Tip
Size it up
You don’t have to stick with the default panel sizes Ubuntu provides. On larger monitors the text and icons can be smaller, so enlarging them can help. Simply right-click on a panel and select Properties and then adjust size in pixels. It will happily expand to 120 pixels in height, but you’ll probably find a setting of 30-40 to be more amiable. The top and bottom panel can be sized independently, so you can keep the bottom task window smaller while making your program launchers and applets on the top bar larger.
