rowtheboat - George Palmer

Two weeks ago my hard drive failed and as if by coincidence Ubuntu Hardy was due out the next day. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to take a day off (the now nearly finished) idlasso and install the newest Ubuntu. I have skipped a few versions of Ubuntu so was mightly impressed when everything worked out the box, no problems with wireless, VoIP phones or flash in the browser! I now believe that the distribution is sufficiently easy to use for a novice that if the Ubuntu team made it look really cool by default they could grab some good Windows/Mac market share. To confirm this point I refer to my sister who upon seeing my new setup was “like that’s so cool I don’t want windows anymore” - I fear she’s not the only one.

Introduction

Anyway this is just a round about way of saying two years ago I made my Ubuntu look like a mac and, after several requests, it’s about high time I blogged how to do it. It’s not the shortest tutorial in the world so here’s a finished screenshot to give you a little motivation to follow it through to the end :)

Getting started

We’re going to use the Mac4Lin project as the basis for the changes so head over there and download the main package, icons and wallpapers. Once downloaded move them to a new folder called macforlinux (this is just a temporary folder that’ll make cleaning up at the end much easier. I’ll refer to it throughout though so change the name if you use something different). Got those? Great, let’s start with the icons.

Icons

First of all you’re going to need to extract out two of the compressed files we’ve downloaded:

cd macforlinux
tar -zxf Mac4Lin_Part1_v0.4.tar.gz
tar -zxf Mac4Lin_Wallpapers_Part3_v0.4.tar.gz

Now goto the Gnome menu and choose System -> Preferences -> Appearance. Click the install button and navigate to the macforlinux folder, choosing the Mac4Lin_Icons_Part2_v0.4.tar.gz file. Dismiss any popup asking if you wish to change to the new theme. You can now click Customise, select the Icons tab and choose the Mac4Lin_Icons_v0.4. At this point you should notice some changes to icons on your windows and desktop (if there are any individual icons you don’t like you can replace them by finding the icons in your home directory under .icons)

Mouse pointers

Next up is the mouse pointer. Again click the install button and this time navigate to the macforlinux/Mac4Lin_v0.4/GTK Cursor Theme folder. Here there should be a tar.gz file that you can install. Again dismiss any popup and click customise. This time select the pointers tab and choose the Mac4Lin_Cursors_v0.4. With any luck you’ll see the change straight away.

Window theming

Now lets get the infamous red, yellow and green circles on the windows. Choose customise as before and this time navigate to macforlinux/Mac4Lin_v0.4/GTK Metacity Theme. You can install all 4 files and when clicking customise and going to Window Border choose the one that suits you best (my preference was Mac4Lin_GTK_v0.4, the menu version just gives a different coloured menu bar). This also installs additional options for the controls tab. You can choose the same option as for the Window Border but I found the really dark windows too much so went for the Ubuntu Human choice (I’m sure there are themes that work better with this look - leave a comment if you find a good one). Under the colour tab I also change the Selected Items colour to a blue to be more in keeping with the mac theme (try a RGB of #C2D9F8).

If you don’t like the strange bar along the bottom of the window (I didn’t) you can change its size by editing the theme file:

gedit ~/.themes/Mac4Lin_GTK_v0.4/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml

Change the distance tag with name “bottom_height” to have value 2 (of course you can customise other stuff whilst you’re in here). You’ll have to go back to the appearance options dialog choose another window theme and then go back to the theme you just edited to refresh your windows.

So now our basic theme configuration is complete let’s save it. On the main appearance screen the Custom theme is probably selected as we’ve made changes to the default. So lets click Save As and give it a name. This keeps these settings safe and you fine tune theme to your needs or revert back to the Ubuntu defaults if you change your mind.

Fonts

Next up is the fonts - I’m going to extract both the OSX and MSfonts as its useful to have both around on your system (note you can install the MSfonts via synaptic but I’m doing both the same way here for demonstration ease):

cd macforlinux
cd Mac4Lin_v0.4/Fonts
tar -zxf OSX_Fonts.tar.gz
mv OSX\ Fonts osxfonts  # folders with spaces in are bad in the linux world
mkdir msfonts # the msfonts don't have a folder so lets create one and move into there
cd msfonts
mv ../msfonts.tbz .
bunzip2 msfonts.tbz
tar -xf msfonts.tar
cd ..

Now we just need to move the fonts to the system font directory and refresh the cache

sudo mv msfonts /usr/share/fonts/truetype
sudo mv osxfonts /usr/share/fonts/truetype
fc-cache -f -v

If you wish to change your system to use the windows fonts by default (over the standard Ubuntu one) you can do:

bunzip2 fontconfig.tbz
tar -xf fontconfig.tar
cd /etc/fonts
cp alias.conf alias.conf.bck # Some of these may error but you should try so you have backups incase anything goes wrong
cp local.conf local.conf.bck
cp misc.conf misc.conf.bck
cp msfonts-rules.conf msfonts-rules.conf.bck
cp pathtomacforlinx/*.conf .

At this point you’re going to need to reboot. It’s the only point where you will need to, so I’ll see you in a few minutes.

Back? Cool now let’s configure our fonts. Below is a screenshot of the preferences that I used, although you may wish to tinker this slightly if running on a different resolution to 1280×1024. Go to the Appearance dialog again and select the fonts you want as appropriate:

Background

To complete the appearance section let’s change the backgrounds. First we’ll install the backgrounds to the system directory:

cd macforlinux/Wallpapers
sudo cp * /usr/share/backgrounds

Now goto the Gnome appearance dialog as used in changing the fonts & window and select the background tab. Click add and goto /usr/share/backgrounds. You can select all the backgrounds and click ok. I then chose the default leopard background.

The launch bar

Now its time to get setup with a cool launcher bar. First off you’re going to need remove the gnome bar along the bottom, right click on it and select ‘delete this panel’.

We’re going to use Avant Window Navigator as a replacement, which can be installed by:

sudo apt-get install awn-manager

Launch the avant window manager by going Applications -> Accessories -> Avant Window Navigator. Once loaded you’ll see a funny shaped object in the bottom middle of the screen, possibly with a few icons depending on what programs you have open. Right click on this and select preferences, goto Themes and click add. Locate your macforlinx folder then Mac4Lin_v0.4, AWN Dock Theme and select the tgz file. You can then choose the leopard theme by selecting the radio button and clicking apply (although I had to exit the preferences box and come back in to see the newly installed theme option). If you now have problems getting to the right click preferences menu aim for the back left of the dock, its easy to pickup there. Personally I like my icons a bit bigger so I changed my bar height to 50 and the arrow offset to 5 in the general preferences.

The Avant bar works like a mac one - if you have an application pinned to the bar it shows an arrow underneath to show its loaded. If you load an application that’s not on the bar it pops up on the right side of the bar until it’s closed. Also clicking an icon brings the window to focus rather than opening another instance. There are also a ton of extra options on what the icons do when you hover over them etc - it’s all rather neatly done.

OK we’re not too far off complete now. The new bar looks quite bare though - it needs some launchers. For these I used a combination of the mac icons we installed earlier, Nuove XT, d3a icons (which I can no longer find a working link to) and the icons that come with the application. For the mac, nuove XT and d3a icons I extracted copies to the /usr/share/icons folder. To add a program select launchers from the Avant bar preferences, click add, fill in the details and click the icon to change. You’ll be able to build up a bar of your most used software like my screenshot below:

To make sure the bar loads at startup goto the Gnome menu bar System -> Preferences -> Sessions, click Add and type ‘Avant’ as the name and ‘avant-window-navigator’ as the command.

The terminal

I’m a rails developer by day so like a good terminal to use. To roughly match the mac settings open a gnome terminal and go edit -> profiles. Create a new profile and under the colours tab choose white on black. Then change the background to around 75% transparency on the effects tab, save and change your new theme to be the default.

3D effects

To finish off it looks really cool if you can use the linux 3D effects. To do this you first need to install native graphics drivers - I won’t document how to do that here, there are plenty of good articles on the subject. Once they’re installed though you can do:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

This adds ‘Advanced Desktop Settings’ option to the System -> Preferences menu which you can click on to configure your desktop effects.

All done!

At this point I’m going to stop because that’s all the changes I like on my desktop. However if you check out the Mac4Lin project details there are several more tweaks you can make to the Gnome logon screen, Gnome splash screen and even the boot screen. Additionally you can get some plugins for Avant that change the icon depending on the state of the program (for example the very cool exaile plugin shows the cover art of the song currently playing).

All you need to do now is cleanup your macforlinux folder and you’re all done. Hopefully your desktop is looking something like these screenshots:

If you love your new desktop then why not add it to the flickr group I’ve just created? I’ll endeavor to post a follow up article with the best desktops and any other bits people find out/I’ve missed. Thanks to the Mac4Lin guys for all their hard work on the project (it was much harder doing this 2 years ago) and thanks again to idlasso for allowing me the time out to do this.

Now who said Linux couldn’t be cool?