Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

I just changed the wallpaper and changed the Icon Set for my Arch Desktop. Screenshot included below.

Wallpaper from InterfaceLift.com

Icon Set from Gnome-look.org

I’ve been busy for the past few days ( read as slacking off). Anyway I thought of sharing this video of me using Compiz Fusion on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Desktop. To record the movie I used the software called gtk-recordmydesktop. Then used the command ffmpeg to convert my video to a size which I cold upload easily. Although converting it did come with a noticeable degrade in quality of the video. But in my defense theres no way I’m ever going to be able to upload a 300 MB video for 5 minutes on my Desktop. You can also access my video here.

Heres the steps I used for the process. First lets install both the required software.

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

Once you have them installed you can record your video by clicking Applications > Sound and Video > gtk-recordmydesktop.

You can change the filename by clicking on Save As and then settign the location and the file name to your choice. Now all you have to do is click on record and it will record anything that happens on your desktop to the file. Once you are done recording then you can start recording by clicking on the record button. You can end the recording by clicking the little button which is now in your system tray (or whatever it is called in Ubuntu ). You can see the button in the below image.

Once you do that you should get the screen shown below.

You do not want to close this screen. If you do close this screen out you will lose the video that you were just recording and the encoding stops. Once the encoding is done you should find the file at the place where it was set to be saved at or in your home folder. You will see that if you were recording your whole desktop the size will be quite big. you can convert the video to a smaller size by using the command ffmpeg. For my video I used the following command.

ffmpeg -i compiz.ogg -s 4cif to.mpg
You can check the man pages for detailed help about the ffmpeg command.

The effects in the Video I have used above are given below.
Compiz Fusion Effects
Splash
Compiz Benchmark
Desktop Cube
Rotate Cube
Cube Reflection
Cube Caps
Expo
Scale
Animations
3D Windows
Water Effect
Wobbly Windows
Snow
Window Preview
Scale
Ring Switcher
Shift Switcher

Recently I’ve noticed quite a few asking for methods changing the looks of the Ubuntu Desktop to make it a bit more appealing. Personally I don’t like the brown theme Ubuntu has going on at the moment But its really not hard to change anyway . Well I’m going to show you how you can customize your desktop to get it to look a bit better ot at least give you shove in the right direction.Heres two of my desktops that I customized.

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