This shortcut is actually the Location Context Menu in the Nautilus Actions tool. Thanks to that little feature you can create plenty of quick-access shortcuts which will start up those applications from the right-click menu. Let’s see how this is done.

Nautilus Actions Configuration

I have covered this topic before (see Nautilus Actions content on Ghacks) on Ghacks, so the idea of creating a Nautilus Action should be familiar. In case you haven’t read any of the other content, the idea behind Nautilus Actions is that you can create an action, based on location and/or MIME type. These actions are highly customizable and incredibly handy to use.

Usually these actions are created not only with the command to be executed, but with command parameters that are used to inform the command what it is acting on (for example: %M for space-separated list of full pathnames for selected files). We are going to NOT add parameters for any actions we create for the purpose of command shortcuts. Why? Because for the shortcut you are not going to be acting on any file or directory, it is just to start an application.

Create the action

Click on System > Preferences > Nautilus Actions Configuration. This will start up the Nautilus Actions Configuration window. Let’s say you want to create a short cut used to open the GNOME Terminal application. Here are the steps you need to use to do that:

1. Click the “Define a new action” button.
2. In the Action tab make sure you check the box for “Display item in location context menu” and enter “GNOME Terminal” in the Context Label area.
3. In the Command tab enter /usr/bin/gnome-terminal for the Command Path. Do not enter anything for the Parameters.
4. Click the Save button.

Your action has been created. Now, to make sure it will appear, you need to restart Nautilus. To do this you can either log out and log back in or you can open up a terminal window and issue the command nautilus -q.

Figure 1

After Nautilus has restarted right-click anywhere on your desktop and you should see an entry in your menu that looks like that shown in Figure 1.

Of course you can do this with just about any application you want. But know that this really wasn’t the intended use of this tool…but it is a handy way to create those shortcuts.

You could get very creative with this set up and create shortcuts for various commands and actions.

Final thoughts

One of the aspects of the Enlightenment desktop that I’ve always like was the ability to quickly access applications from a simple click of the mouse anywhere on the desktop. This little “shortcut” on GNOME will give you a similar feature.

For many of you this walk around might be pointless. But for those of you who need a basic introduction to a different desktop environment, this could be your first step in migrating to the Linux desktop. Read on!

What is GNOME?

Figure 1

First off, GNOME is a desktop environment. What this means is that all of the GNOME applications are aware of one another. Everything is integrated. That means you can open your file manager and drag and drop files into, say, Rhythmbox (a music player similar to iTunes).

GNOME has been around for quite some time and you will it to be the default desktop environment for many of the different Linux distributions.

Figure 1 shows the GNOME desktop in action. You will notice it has all of the typical elements of just about any desktop you have used. Let’s take a look at the more important, basic, elements one at a time.

Panel

A panel is a taskbar is a tray is a shelf. In GNOME you have two basic panels. The upper panel (at the top edge of the desktop) holds the Main Menus, Notification Area (aka System Tray),  Application Launchers, Clock, and User menu. The lower panel (at the lower edge of the desktop) holds the Winlist (where applications are minimized), the Pager (the tool that allows you to switch workspaces), and the Recycle Bin.

You can add various types of items to the panels by right-clicking a panel and selecting “Add to panel…”.

Menus

What is different about GNOME, versus WIndows, is that you do not have a single “Start” menu. Instead you have three main menus. These menus are:

• Applications: This is where you can launch all of your applications.
• Places: This is a menu that holds shortcuts for the various important folder locations (such as Home, Pictures, Music, Downloads, etc). When you click on one of these entries Nautilus (the file manager) will open to that particular directory.
• System: This menu is where you configure your system. The System menu has two very important sub-menus: Preferences (where you set all of your user preferences) and Administration (where you can open up tools for administrative purposes – such as Printers).

When you install a new application that new application will add its menu entry to the Applications menu.

Mouse menu

There is another menu that you should know about. If you right-click on the desktop you will see a menu that allows you to create Folders, Launchers, and Documents (you have to create new templates for this – a more advanced feature). From this menu you can also select to Change Desktop Background. This action is exactly what it sounds like.

Windows

I’m not talking Microsoft here. The windows I am speaking of are the actual windows that contain the applications you use. These windows interact in the same manner you have grown accustomed to. In the upper right hand corner (or upper left if you are using Ubuntu >= 10.04) are three buttons that allow you to minimize a window, maximize a window, or close a window. Sound familiar?

Now, if you right click the titlebar (that is the bar that runs across the top of your application window) you will notice a new menu. From this menu you can also send the window to a different workspace, set the window to always be on top, and more.

Run dialog

Let’s say you want to start an application but don’t know where it is in the menu hierarchy. You do, however, know the command to start the application. For this you can use the Run Dialog. Open the run dialog by clicking Alt-F2 together. This will open up a small window where you can enter your command.

GNOME Control Center

This tool is the heart of the GNOME configuration. You can open it up by opening up the Run Dialog and entering gnome-control-center in this window (see Figure 2) you will find every configuration option you can imagine for the GNOME desktop.

NOTE: You may not see every item in your control center that you see in Figure 2. This particular control center is from a Fedora 13 installation that has a number of applications installed.

Final thoughts

Although a very cursory glance at the GNOME desktop, I hope this has helped those of you who feel lost when trying to use the Linux desktop to become more familiar. My ultimate goal, of course, is to get those of you who are unsure to migrate from your current OS to Linux.

Why RGBA? If you are a fan of good old Transparency (like me) then you understand this is something Linux has needed for a long time. Yes it can sort of be done through Compiz with some tweaking…but not GTK+-wide. That’s what RGBA support is all about, allowing a themable transparency throughout the GTK+ widget set. The only problem I have found (outside of non-GTK+ apps not playing well with RGBA) is that certain features don’t want to accept the transparency as well as others. That and a need to give the desktop some finishing touches. And that is just what we are going to do here.

First things first

One of the things you are going to want to do, upon completion of adding RGBA support, is to install the Emerald decorator. Why would you want to do this? Because Emerald will give you the feeling of continuing that RGBA support into the window decorations, whereas the default decorator will not. I’ve covered Emerald before (see my article “Add Emerald for slick window decorations“) so installation shouldn’t be a problem. Once installed you want to use the right theme. For the Murrine themes I have found the Glassified Mac theme to work best. You can browse through the entire Emerald Themes page to find the one that matches your desktop perfectly.

One of the issues you might find is that you have to replace your window decorator every time you log out and log in. This can be a hassel. Instead open up the CompizConfig Settings Manager (click System > Preferences > Compiz Config Settings Manager), do a search for “decorations” (no quotes), select Window Decoration, and replace the command with /usr/bin/emerald. Now your default window decorator is Emerald.

The panel

Probably one of the biggest glitches is portions of the GNOME panel just don’t seem to want to work with RGBA. It took me a while but I figured out a “way” around it.

Figure 1

The biggest issue are the three main menus. No matter what you try you can not get them to work with the transparency. So what I found is to get rid of that applet (it’s actually one applet called Menu Bar) and replace it with the Main Menu Applet. Once you have done that you can then set the panel to transparent. You can’t set it to complete transparency, however, or you will have a bit of a disconnect with the notification area. There are still issues with some of the applets in the notification area…but they don’t stand out as much as the Menu Bar. Figure 1 shows the changes I have made. It’s not perfect, but it fits much better with the new desktop.

Figure 2

What does that new Main Menu applet look like when used with RGBA support? Take a look at Figure 2 for a sample.

Final thoughts

The addiction to eye candy is a rough one. You find yourself tweaking and tweaking until you think you can tweak nor more…until you find yet another tiny customization that looks better. The RGBA-enabled desktop is a fairly slick one. I hope you find it to be as eye-candy-tastic as I have.

To really push the limits of transparency you will need to have Compiz working. For more information on Compiz check out my articles: “Enabling the Cube in Compiz” and “Configuring the appearance of the Compiz Cube“. You might also want to check out my article “Add Emerald for slick window decorations” to get the full effect of transparent titlebars and window decorations. As well you can check out my article “Avant Window Navigator: OS X-like dock on Linux desktop” if you’re wanting to mimic my personal desktop.

The big picture

Figure 1

I thought I would start out by showing you the desktop I am working with so you can decide if this is something you want to achieve. Figure 1 shows the end result of the configurations (Click on the image to see the full-size version).

The tools to will use

In order to get the transparency you see in the image the following configuration tools will be used:

Compiz Settings

Panel properties

The following themes will be used:

GNOME: Dust Sand

Avant Window Navigator: Glass 3D

Emerald: Gabriel

Wallpaper: Awesome Wallpapers Ubuntu Charcoal

I am going to assume you know how to install the various themes and wallpaper used, so I won’t go over those topics.

Configurations

Figure 2

The first thing to take care of happens to be the easiest – the GNOME panel. You will notice I removed the bottom panel on my desktop and replaced it with the Avant Window Navigator. So the only GNOME panel to deal with is the upper panel. To set the transparency on this right click an empty spot in the panel and select “Properties”. When the Properties window opens (see Figure 2) click on the “Background” tab and do the following:

• Check the Solid Color radio button.
• Slide the Style bar to the left until it is as transparent as you like.
• Click Close.

Your panel should now be transparent.

Compiz

Figure 3

Now that your panel is transparent you don’t want to ruin the over all look by having solid menus and/or drop downs. So let’s take care of these pieces.  The first thing to do is open up the Compiz Settings tool. You will find this in the Preferences sub-menu of the System menu.  When the settings window is open you will want to click on the Opacity Brightness and Saturation section (see Figure 3).

What you need to do is add new Window specific settings. When you click the New button a small window will open where you add the type of “window” you want to set transparency for. When the window opens you want to add the following line to get Menus, Drop down windows, and popups set for transparency:

(type=Menu) || (type=PopupMenu) || (type=DropDownMenu)

Once you have that entered, set the transparency level to 67 (to match what you see in this article) or to whatever level you desire.

And that’s it. You should now have full-on transparency on your desktop.

Final thoughts

Of course you can take this farther. You can even set application windows as transparent as you like. The only problem with that is you need to be able to clearly see your work.

Fortunately Linux has grown up quite a bit so it’s not that difficult to start an application. In fact, I would argue that starting an application in Linux is easier than it is in Windows. How can I say that? Well, why don’t we examine the various ways you can start an application within Linux and you can make the judgment yourself.

Command line

We’ll start with the more challenging first. Not that the command line is difficult, but it’s not nearly as easy as finding a menu entry and selecting it.

If you’ve been following me enough you probably have read an instance where I have mentioned global commands. A global command is a command that is located within your users’ $PATH. NOTE: You can learn more about this in my article  “Adding directories to your $PATH“. To find out what directories are in your $PATH issue the command echo $PATH. What you see printed out at your prompt are all of the directories which contain commands you can run from anywhere on your system. There may be times when you do not install an application within your path. For those applications you have to enter the explicit path to the executable command. Let me explain…

Say you install the beta version of Firefox (for testing purposes) in the /opt directory. So now you will have a directory /opt/firefox and within that directory is the executable command firefox. Since /opt isn’t in your $PATH, if you execute only firefox what will start up is the default firefox on your system. In order to start up Firefox installed in /opt you will have to execute the command /opt/firefox/firefox.

Now let’s say you are looking for the apt command to add a gpg key but you’re not sure of the name. You are sure, however, of two things: It is in /usr/bin and it has the string “key” in the command. You could issue this command to find all matching commands:

ls /usr/bin/*key*

which will list all commands in /usr/bin that contain the word “key”. In that listing you will see apt-key. You now know the name of the command.

GUI

There are two main (and universal) ways to start up an application in Linux. The first, and easiest, is to look through your main menu for that command’s entry. Once you find that command you simply select it to open up the application. One of the issues that is not a universal truth in Linux is menu layout. All Linux desktops lay out their menus differently. But for the most part they hold true to some similarities (Primarily the grouping of applications into submenus like “Office”, “Networking”, “Graphics”, “Games”, etc.)

The next universal method of starting up an application is to open up your desktops’ file manager, navigate to the directory that contains the executable, and double click on the executable. This is much like it is in Windows. Most often you will be navigating to /usr/bin to find these executables.

NOTE: If a command requires a terminal to run you can not run it in this method. The only commands you can start up this way are graphical commands.

Run prompt

Figure 1

In some desktops you will have a “Run prompt” within your Start menu. In GNOME and KDE you can open up this dialog by pressing Alt-F2. In my favorite distribution, Elive Compiz, I set this to the Windows Key+F1. Figure 1 shows the Run Dialog in Elive. As you can see I want to start the game Torus Trooper. I start to type “torus” and the first matching entry pops up which I can click on to start up the application.

Final thoughts

Of course this is Linux so there are many more ways you can find to start up an application. You can create keyboard shortcuts for just about anything or, in some desktops, you can create desktop Icons. In some desktops you can create specific shelves for applications or add mini launchers. But, in general, the methods outlined above will get you through the day in Linux.