Customizing Ubuntu

Learning to have your whole system so that it is beautiful, practical and easy to use.

What we are going to learn in this chapter of will help you prepare your system so that, in addition to being very attractive, it helps you have everything in the way that is most practical and effective for you.

We are going to learn some of the many features that Ubuntu will allow you to customize, not only in appearance, but also in configuration of behaviors and functionalities.

Often when talking about customizing the operating system, only reference is made to changing the desktop background or the icons of some applications. This, without a doubt, is important to feel comfortable using it, but it is not the only thing. If you join us for this installment of , we’ll use everything you already know about and about .

We’re going to take a few steps to make your everyday experience with Linux even more enjoyable and personal.

Usually, when we install a new operating system, the first thing we tend to look at is how everything looks and you are probably already thinking about how you can change the look of Ubuntu to make it more to your liking. The high degree of customization and configuration possible is something that often surprises people who are new to Linux.

But let’s not waste any more time and get started.

Changing the look: How to customize the “look” of Ubuntu.

The way to access the Ubuntu appearance settings is really intuitive. On the desktop, right-click and select change desktop background. These settings are also accessible from the General System Settings under the name Appearance or by pressing Super and typing “Appearance”.

From this window, we can customize various things about our interface, such as the desktop wallpaper, the general theme of windows and icons, and some launcher features.

To change the Desktop Background you have a drop-down menu on the right that gives us three options. We can use any of the backgrounds that Ubuntu incorporates with the installation, add our own files or generate a gradient background.

The desktop wallpaper you choose will also be the one that will be displayed when selecting your user’s session on the Ubuntu login screen.

Note: In case we decide to add our own images, it is highly recommended to maintain the organization we have for the rest of the documents in the system. That is, I recommend that if you are going to save files that you will use as wallpapers, you create a specific folder to save them. The best place to do it would be inside the Pictures folder itself present in your home or /home folder.

Another aspect that you can configure from here is the Theme of windows and icons that your system will show. You can select it from the four themes that Ubuntu has pre-installed.

Configuring the application launcher

You can also configure the size of the icons that appear in the launcher, which obviously affects the size of the launcher itself. This may just be for cosmetic reasons, but it can also be very useful if you’re working from a laptop. Especially if the monitor itself is not very large.

In the second tab of the Appearance window you can configure various parameters that refer to the behavior of the Application Launcher.

From these options, we will determine whether or not the launcher should always remain visible. In addition we can also decide the point in the area in which we will have to place the cursor so that it is shown again and the sensitivity with which the launcher will respond to the stimulus of the cursor.

Note: It is important to configure this parameter correctly, so that it does not become annoying that the launcher is displayed every time we move the mouse for something else. At the other extreme, we also don’t want it to not react when we want it to show up.

If we do not want to resort to installing any program, these are the main configurations that Ubuntu offers us to configure the appearance and some behaviors of our interface.

For many users, it is surely more than enough. However, for those who love customization and configuration of the entire desktop, we can still do much more.

I propose that, at this point, we go a step further and take full control of the Unity interface, even obtaining new options and possibilities.

My Unity: All the interface in your hands

My Unity is a program that allows very in-depth configuration of the Unity interface. Although it is not pre-installed on the system, it is very easy to install because it can actually be found in the repositories.

We can install My Unity from the Software Center or from the terminal ( Ctrl + Alt + T) by typing:

$sudo apt-get install myunity

Note: I would like to remind you that as it is an external application, the configuration options it offers may vary from one version to another.

More themes at your disposal

Something that attracts the attention of My Unity is that it multiplies, just by installing it, the number of themes available for your Ubuntu, far beyond the four that you have by default. Also the theme of icons can be selected independently from the theme of windows.

One option that Unity provides, and that is available in other desktop environments, is the ability to display an icon on the desktop for direct access to our user’s Home Folder or /home . Also through the same tab called “Desktop” you can enable the option of also having a direct access icon to all the units that you mount in your system. So you can easily access external devices such as a flash drive, player or memory card.

Four desks are not always enough

It is very common that when we are using our system, we have several applications open at the same time such as a text editor, browser, music player, Twitter client… In Ubuntu it is easy to handle this without having some windows hidden behind another, organizing tasks on desks.

By default, Ubuntu incorporates, as we have already seen, four desktops. Well, although you probably won’t get to use all of them, My Unity gives you the possibility of expanding your work area by up to eight desks horizontally and eight vertically.

I would like to change the launcher and panel (dash): How do I do it?

Through the My Unity options, the launcher becomes much more configurable than what we originally saw at the beginning of the article. You can configure the size, color, behavior, transparency and other aspects of both the launcher and the Dash, the panel that is displayed when you press the Super key.

Note: If you are using Ubuntu on a netbook or just a laptop that doesn’t have a very large monitor, I recommend that in the Dash tab, set the dash size to netbook mode. In this way, when unfolding it, it will make the most of the available space to be represented on your screen.

More configuration options

As you have already seen while exploring, My Unity has even more options than what we have explained. I invite you to experiment with them to leave everything to your liking. In all the tabs you have an option called “default settings” that will return everything to its original configuration.

Surely now your entire desktop will be something really personal. Not only because you find it more aesthetically pleasing, but also because you have been able to very easily configure the behavior of some Ubuntu tools that you will handle all the time. And all this with installing a single program that you have also been able to find in the Ubuntu repositories themselves.

In the next article we are going to take an even bigger leap to make Ubuntu truly yours. We will install and configure options that will make it very easy for you to do tasks such as controlling the temperature of your machine, configuring the behavior of the touchpad on a laptop or making searching for files faster and more effective, both on your own machine and on the Internet. Without losing sight of the fact that, as always, we will have it integrated with our entire system.