Enigma ported to Linux

Inspired by the wonderful Enigma desktop by Kaelri, featured at Lifehacker, I decided to port at least some of the beautiful design to my Linux desktop.

The result is this:

Compared to the original theme:

My desktop features

• Simple calendar — I even considered adding google calendar events using gcalcli, but the desktop was way too crowded
• RSS news
• Remember The Milk tasks
• Weather Forecast
• and system stats

Almost everything you see is drawn on desktop using conky. There are however, few major drawbacks:

• With conky you get either full transparency, or no transparency at all. It's all or nothing
• Conky cannot draw pictures.

So how did I get the transparent sidebars and icons? Gotcha! They are part of the desktop background.

I also decided to omit the analog clock — this is certainly doable with gdesklets or screenlets, but I almost fainted when I saw the dependencies. My desktop stays lightweight, no matter what. I tried the lightweight adesklets but the result was disappointing.

To recreate this desktop you need:

• "Patched" background — I provide a GIMP layered image, you just need to replace the background layer for the image of your choice
• Conky and conky configuration files
• Weather fonts — fonts displaying weather conditions (included)
• RTM command line tool for the RTM task list
• I am using tint2 as the panel, but any transparent panel (such as gnome-panel) should do

Installing the RTM command line tool might be tricky, as the author notes, you need to install RTMAgent perl module first:

This package is split in two components:

• RTMAgent.pm: a Perl module that implements the low-level API. It provides a UserAgent object which lets you call all of RTM's API methods as normal Perl methods. You will need to install it from CPAN: cpan install WebService::RTMAgent
• rtm: a Perl script that uses RTMAgent to implement a command line interface. Just put it in your path.

It seems that there are two flavors of the cpan installation scripts, mine required the following syntax: cpan -fi WebService::RTMAgent, where -fi stands for force install, as one of the dependencies failed its unit tests. Your cpan scripts syntax might vary, check the corresponding manual first.

After installing the RTMAgent, run rtm --authorise, follow the generated link and allow RTM API access. This should be done only once, before the first run.

Don't forget to change your username and password in scripts/gmail.py and set your location code in scripts/conkyForecast.template. See the instruction for the weather forecast config.

That should be all. Both wallpaper and conky configs are designed for 1280x800 resolution, you'll probably have to move things a bit for different resolutions. Unpack the attached archive to ~ (archive contains hidden files, you have been warned), set the background, set up rtm, gmail and weather forecast and run ~/scripts/start_conky.

DOWNLOAD the background and scripts.

Credits:

• "ecqlipse 2" icons by chrfb
• Wallpaper - packed with original enigma, author unknown.
• Weather forecast script by kaivalagi
• RTM scripts by Yves Rutschle
• Gmail script by lvleph

I am aware, that the desktop still has some rough edges, but I am posting this in the spirit of

Release early, release often.