Brian's sample desktop configuration

This is a sample of one of my current desktop configurations. Click the image to see it full size.

The system is Mandrake 7.1 with GNOME running Sawfish (aka Sawmill).
I've selected the stock 'shinyblue' theme and tweaked it a bit.

I replaced the 'bar_normal_active' image with 'bar_hilited_active'. This gives the current active window a title bar with a nice light blue accent. That highlighting compliments the solid light blue background.

I have the frame border set to one pixel. This better aligns the window with the title bar, resulting in a cleaner look.

The gnome terminal settings are transparent background and scroll bar on the left. This is set in the gnome terminal preferences.

Netscape requires a modification to ~/.Xdefaults to place the scroll bar on the left-

         Netscape*scroller.scrollBarPlacement:	BOTTOM_LEFT

I'm left-handed, so I prefer to have scroll bars on the left when possible. I always feel like I'm reaching all the way across the screen when the scroller is on the right.

The floating panel on the left contains the CPU load, Network load, disk usage, sound monitor and clock applets. The colors for the CPU, network and disk monitors have been changed to shades of blue.

The task bar panel along the bottom edge is set to auto-hide, but for purposes of the screen shot, I raised it. This panel has launchers for Gnome config, Netscape, Gnome Terminal, and the GIMP. There is also a two-by-two desktop pager and the print applet.

The desktop itself is sparce, with only icons to launch Midnight Commander on $HOME and a VNC session to a VMware system on the network.

These screen shots were captured using xwd, convert and the Gimp, following this procedure from Steve Litt at TroubleShooters.com. THANX Steve!