This month’s Xfce desktop:

icons: awoken
gtk+: axiomd
xfwm4: axiomd
background: The Crown of the Sun
cursor: Obsidian xcursors

The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper and conky configuration:

I built my environment around the wallpaper, an image of a solar eclipse, bringing out the haunting beauty of the sun’s corona. I cropped this photo from APOD to fit my screen dimensions.

With such a beautiful cosmic backdrop, I had to search for matching theme elements. I used the same window manager and gtk+ theme, axiomd. It’s nice and dark, with moon dust highlights.

It’s been a long, long time since I last installed conky. I decided to give it another go, now that it’s capable of doing beautiful things with Cairo and Lua. I was especially impressed by this configuration I found on the Arch Linux forums.

I made a few modifications to the ring meter scripts for conky. The end result is pretty decent, considering I haven’t done much heavy tweaking yet. You’ll need to emerge conky with the lua-cairo and lua-imlib USE flags set, or else the scripts won’t function.

The rings frame the corona, with just a touch of transparency to blend it into the deeper space backdrop. From left to right, the rings measure: CPU core 2 load, memory usage, /usr/portage, /, and CPU core 1 load. Adding, removing, shrinking, or expanding rings is pretty easy. The ring scripts are well-commented. The biggest obstacle I’ve run into so far is adapting the configs to my screen size, ensuring that items are placed just right. I could tweak the ring’s curvature to precisely match the eclipse, but it’s close enough as it is.

I picked up the icon set because it’s very attractive for both dark and light environments. It’s very flexible, with numerous alternative icon versions, extra standalone icons, many distribution logos, and a number of helpful scripts inside the tarball. I used one of the included Gentoo logos as my Xfce menu icon.

The mouse cursor theme is glossy and dark, yet it has a few blue animations to add a splash of color. To get it, run emerge obsidian-xcursors.

Applications

In the foreground, Decibel Audio Player is running in the “mini” mode, playing a beautiful track by Planet Boelex.

Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. An Xfce terminal displays an eix-sync operation.

Running in the panel are an assortment of application launchers, including customized dropdown menus for frequently used programs.

After the Xfce menu, launchers, and taskbar, the notification area holds the tray icon for Decibel Audio Player. Then a genmon applet that runs my lastsync.sh Portage script. After genmon, there are plugins for volume control, the Orage clock, and local weather.

Now that I’m using conky, I can probably find a way to integrate the weather, clock, and Portage sync script with the existing ring meters, or even run it in another instance off to the side. Anything to reduce my crowded top panel.