I've recently discovered the Awesome window manager and so far it's really living up to its name. It's one of those things that when you start using it you can't imagine ever doing without it. It's like the vim of window management - super fast, highly customisable, and just so... smart. I saw this on the Awesome themes page and thought it looked gorgeous:
It reminds me of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. After a bit of hacking I got my Awesome set up like that.
How to do it I've put together this guide, like most of the stuff on this site, mostly for my own use, so when I distro-hop or bork my system, I can get Awesome back the way I like it. Maybe it will be of some use to someone. If you don't have Awesome already, you can install it with apt, and select it as your session at log-in. To get your own config to play with you need to copy /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua to .config/awesome/
The WWII theme The first thing I did was copy and paste the code for the theme into a file called theme.lua in
~/.config/awesome/
update: with Awesome 3.4.11 (Ubuntu 12.04) you need to change theme.wallpaper.cmd line to theme.wallpaper_cmd = { 42 } for this theme to work. More info here
Then I edited ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua to use the new theme I'd created, by changing the beautiful.init call:
beautiful.init("/home/daniel/.config/awesome/theme.lua")
You can restart Awesome to see the effects with Win + Ctrl + r.
Next, the font That gorgeous font in the image is called Profont. I followed the these instructions to install it. I increased the size by modifying ~/.config/awesome/theme.lua:
theme.font = "Profont 15"
Win + Ctrl + r to see the result. This made the menus too small to fit the text so I needed to double the width and height values in theme.lua like this:
theme.menu_height = "30" theme.menu_width = "200"
Transparency To get terminal transparency I needed to install the hsetroot package. Then setting the transparency in my terminator allowed me to see through to the wallpaper (note you'll need to have set a wallpaper).
Windows not maximising fully? I had the problem that maximising a window with Win + m left gaps at the bottom and on the right-hand side of the window. Finding the section awful.rules.rules section of your rc.lua and adding size_hints_honor = false fixes this. Again, you need to Win + Ctrl + r to see if it worked