How To Make An Ubuntu 11.04 Classic Desktop Resemble A Mac (With Elementary, Docky & Gloobus-Preview)

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
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This article shows how you can change the appearance of your Ubuntu 11.04 desktop (with the Ubuntu Classic interface, i.e., GNOME instead of Unity) so that it resembles a Mac. This can be achieved with the help of Elementary, Docky, and Gloobus-Preview. Elementary is a project that provides a popular icon set and GTK theme; Docky is an interactive dock (like the one you know from a Mac) that provides easy access to some of the files, folders, and applications on your computer, and more; and Gloobus-Preview is an extension for the Gnome Desktop Environment designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file or directory.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Preliminary Note

Please note that I'm using the Ubuntu Classic desktop (GNOME) here instead of Unity. This tutorial will not work if you use Unity!

Docky requires that you use a compositing manager on your desktop. If you've enabled Compiz Fusion (e.g. as shown in this tutorial: Enabling Compiz Fusion On An Ubuntu Classic 11.04 Desktop (GNOME) (NVIDIA GeForce 8200)), then you're good to go. If your hardware doesn't support Compiz Fusion, you should enable the metacity compositing manager.

 

2 Installing Elementary, Docky, And Gloobus

Docky is available as a package in the official Ubuntu 11.04 repositories, but Elementary and Gloobus-Preview are not. Fortunately there are packages available on Launchpad, so we have to add software sources to our system so that we can install these packages. Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager:

In the Synaptic Package Manager, go to Settings > Repositories:

Go to the Other Software tab and click on the Add button:

Add the following repository in the APT line field:

ppa:elementaryart/elementarydesktop

Then click on the Add Source button:

Click on Close in the Software Sources window afterwards:

Because of the new repositories, the system's package database needs to be updated...

... to do this, click on the Reload button in the Synaptic Package Manager:

Now the package database is being updated:

If you get an error like W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net natty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 4D17133CFC5D50C5...

... open a terminal and run the following two commands:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 4D17133CFC5D50C5
gpg --export --armor 4D17133CFC5D50C5 | sudo apt-key add -

(Replace 4D17133CFC5D50C5 with the string that comes after NO_PUBKEY in the error message.)

Back in the Synaptic Package Manager, select the following packages for installation (you can use the Quick filter field to search for them):

  • elementary-theme
  • elementary-icon-theme
  • docky
  • gloobus-preview

Gloobus-Preview allows us to preview files and directories in Nautilus by marking an item and pressing the space bar on our keyboard. But this works only with a special version of Nautilus which is also available from the repositories that we've enabled in this chapter.

To install this special Nautilus version, upgrade the following (already installed) packages by selecting Mark for Upgrade:

  • libnautilus-extension1
  • nautilus
  • nautilus-data

Click on Apply to install the packages:

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