So you’ve just installed Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick. Some geek mate of yours has been raving about Ubuntu to you since forever. You’ve been impressed by the ease and speed of the installation. You boot it up for the first time and, it looks like this:

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Default

Sweet. Jesus.

Fortunately, you will need to look at this aesthetic disaster for no longer than a few minutes while you fix it.

Step 1: Install the Bisigi themes

Open up a terminal window (applications>Accessories>Terminal) and type in

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bisigi/ppa && sudo apt-get update

You’ll be prompted for your password

Now, to install all the themes, type next into the terminal

sudo apt-get install bisigi-themes

Alternatively to the above, specifically I am after just the Bamboo Zen theme so for me, this suffices:

sudo apt-get install bamboo-zen-theme

More info on the bisigi project can be found here and further installation instructions here.

Now, go to System>Preferences>Appearance and select the theme you wish to use. Click it and all should be done!

Step 2: Fonts

Still a bit… BIG… isn’t it? I change most of the fonts to ‘Droid Sans’ which is a nice font designed (obviously, Google Android) for mobile devices and hence space-saving. Open up the terminal again and type:

sudo apt-get install ttf-droid

You should now be able to go to System>Preferences>Appearance, ‘fonts’ tab and change those fonts down. This is how I have mine set:

Font Settings

Font Settings

One last thing on fonts, you may notice I’ve used Inconsolata as the mono font. It’s a free version of the Microsoft Visual Studio font, Consolas. It’s available to download here.

Step 3: Compiz Effects

System>Preferences>Appearance, ‘Visual Effects’ tab

For this you’ll probably have had to accept the proprietary drivers for your graphics card to get it to work. Depending on how good your graphics card you can choose the default setups of “None”, “Normal” or “Extra”. This can be customised further by installing CompizConfig but personally “Extra” suits me fine. Wobbly Windows for the win.

Now, everything should look much better:

Bisigi Bamboo Zen

Bisigi Bamboo Zen

Much more attractive and useable :-)

A few more words…

Next up I head to the Ubuntu Software Centre and get rid of Empathy, Evolution, Rythmbox, Shotwell and Tomboy. The first three I replace, the last two I just don’t need. I then install everything I need for my day to day computer useage.

My software recommendations:

Docky – Mac like application launching dock

Thunderbird – the Mozilla email client counterpart to Firefox

Banshee – a decent media player

Emesene – Think msn messenger circa 2003.

GIMP – Like Photoshop, but no way near as good :-) . Suits my needs fine, though.

Wine – Windows Emulator. I only use this for Spotify. instructions can be found here. That said I believe it supports a lot of stuff, Warcraft, Starcraft II, Counterstrike and Photoshop for example. See here for more.

XChat IRC – Decent IRC Client

Eclipse – For Java / Android dev

FileZilla – FTP client

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Final Screenshot

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Final Screenshot

All done :-)

I said ten minutes in the title, but I did spent a further hour fighting the Android Plugin and Mercurial plugin for Eclipse… Not relevant to the post, mind :-)