Desktop environments use user interface toolkits to develop menus, panels, and applications
Desktop Toolkits: GTK and Qt
- GTK: Cinnamon, GNOME Shell, Xfce, and Unity
- Qt: KDE Plasma, Enlightenment, and LXQt
Themes control the desktop appearance. Theme tool provides a list of currently installed themes, organized into three components: controls, window border, and icons.
- Controls -> Covers the window appearance and dialog controls (buttons & slide bars)
- Window border -> controls the display of title bards, borders, and window buttons.
- Icons specify the display of all icons on the desktop
- Color Panel -> To set the background and text color for windows, input boxes, and selected items.
- Managing Fonts -> It is easy to manage fonts Using fontconfig method like adding, selecting, resizing, and configuring.
On Large monitors with large widescreen and high resolution like 1900 x 1200, text size becomes small and hard to read. To overcome the issue, the font-size increased using System -> Preferences ->Look & Feel -> Fonts
fc-list – to create a listing of all available fonts
The customize button opens the Theme details window with panels of different theme components. A user can select various elements to create a customized theme, which a user can save by clicking the Save Theme button.
GNOME Themes
GNOME is the default theme. Download additional themes from art.genome.org.
To Change Theme: GNOME Tweaks tool -> Appearance tab and change the themes
The themes, icons and fonts (True Type Fonts TTF and Open Type Fonts OTF) installed are placed in the /home/<user_name>/.themes, /home/<user_name>/.icons and /home/<user_name>/.fonts directories in the user's home directory. To share them with all users, move them to /usr/share/themes, /usr/share/icons and /usr/share/fonts directories, and change ownership to the root user.
# chown -R root:root /us/share/themes/new-theme
network-admin tool displays a Network Settings window with panels for Connections, General, Hosts, and DNS. The Connection entry lists possible connections like Wireless, Hardware, and Modem.
- The Connection entry lists possible connections like Wireless, Hardware, and Modem. Active connections have checkmarks in their checkboxes, uncheck to deactivate a connection. To configure a connection, select, and click Properties, a settings window would open for a connected interface to select configuration like DHCP, Static IP, zeroconf.
With Static IP, the user needs to enter an IP address, Netmask, and Gateway address. - The General panel: lets the user set the hostname and domain-name
- DNS Panel: specify DNS servers and search domains
- Hosts Panel: lists all manually specified hostnames on the network. A user can add or delete entries.
Linux Zero Configuration Networking is free, open-source, and derived from Apple Bonjour zeroconf implementation is used by GNOME virtual file system. Distributions like Debian and Ubuntu implements full zeroconf network support.
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