By popular demand, I decided to push the limits of Xfce’s customisability even further. This time, I would make it look like Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”.
Despite efforts like Mac4Lin, this task proved more difficult than trying to make it look like Windows Vista. Though I haven’t achieved the same degree of perfection as I did when replicating Vista, I still think I came pretty close.
First of all, you will need to download Mac4Lin and extract it somewhere. There’s a lot of material to use in there, but since I have already discussed it in part 1, I won’t elaborate here on how to change your wallpaper, font (to Lucida Grande), GTK theme, icon theme and xfwm4 theme or, for those who use Compiz, Emerald theme. Removing the bottom panel, setting a background image and resizing the top panel have also been discussed. In order to replicate the looks of OS X as close as possible, though, there still is a lot to be done.
Dock
One of the most noticeable things about OS X is its dock. Unfortunately, by default Xubuntu does not include such a dock by default. To have this functionality provided for, we will install Avant Window Navigator (AWN). Luckily, excellent instructions for installing AWN on Ubuntu 7.10 are already available, with the only difference being that we use Xubuntu and thus need to look in Applications->System instead of System->Administration.
Do note that, in order to use AWN, you need to have Compiz installed or have enabled Xfce’s own display compositing by checking “Enable display compositing” under the Compositor tab in Applications->Settings->Window Manager Tweaks.
You can run AWN through Applications->Accessories->Avant Window Navigator. In order to have AWN ran every time you log in, you will also want to add AWN in Applications->Settings->Autostarted Applications.
The next step is making AWN replicate the OS X dock, which can be done through Applications->Settings->Awn Manager. If you click “Themes” on the left-hand side, you will get an overview of installed themes. By clicking “Add” you can install the AWN Dock Theme included in the Mac4Lin package you downloaded earlier, which you can then select and apply.
We then click “General” on the left-hand side to configure the looks in the Bar Appearance tab. I disabled round corners, set an angle of 26°, a height of 52 pixels and an offset of 14 pixels.
With that set, you can start adding applets to the dock by clicking “Applets” on the left-hand side. There are a whole range of applets to choose from, but for my OS X-like setup I opted for “Launcher/Taskmanager”, “Shiny Switcher” and “Stacks Trasher”.
The next step was adding program launchers to the dock (well, technically, to the “Launcher/Taskmanager”). This can be done easily by opening a Thunar window (Applications->Accessories->Thunar File Manager) and browsing to /usr/share/applications. You can then drag applications to the dock to add them. Right-clicking on a launcher allows you to change its icon.
Firefox
Also included in the Mac4Lin package is a Firefox theme, to make the Firefox experience similar to that of Safari. To install this, you open up the Add-ons window in Firefox from Tools->Add-ons, then click “Themes” on top. You can then drag the file FireFox Safari Theme - Vfox2.jar from the Firefox Addons folder into the Add-ons window. Another window pops up allowing you to install the theme. After the installation is finished, you will be asked to restart Firefox. After you have restarted, you can select “Use Theme” through the Add-ons window, after which you have to restart it once again.
To install the extensions, you just select the extension file, copy it (Edit->Copy), then paste it in Firefox’s address bar on top (Edit->Paste). Again, an installation window will pop up, and you will be asked to restart Firefox when the installation has finished. Upon the next start, the extension will be installed.
Cursor theme
An interesting option which we didn’t explore in part 1 was the ability to change cursor themes. Conveniently, the Mac4Lin package also contains a folder named GTK Cursor Theme. Similar to how you installed icon themes, you extract the theme archive to /home/yourusername/.icons.
You can then open Mouse Settings (Applications->Settings->Mouse Settings), where the cursor should be located in the Cursor tab. Selecting the theme will warn you that the theme might not be applied until the next time you login.
Final thoughts
During the process of making my desktop look like OS X, I slowly started to appreciate the approach Apple has taken with its operating system. Instead of replicating the steps of the industry leader, they dare to be different. According to some, this has even led the industry leader to follow in Apple’s footsteps!
Unfortunately, all this innovating does not make creating a lookalike any easier. The most noticeable inaccuracy is in the GTK theme: because of its use of the pixmap engine, button images need to be stretched both horizontally and vertically, so they often look very odd compared to their OS X counterparts. Other themes such as Leopardish also come close, but no cigar.
That said, the result ended up quite nice. When compared to the Vista “clone”, a world of difference can be found. Clearly, an extensive range of customisation options is available to Xfce users, which emphasizes that Xfce really does not lag behind GNOME nor KDE when it comes to customisability.
Those interested in moving application menus to their panel will be interested to know that it is possible, with support for Xfce’s panel. However, this is a very hackish solution and therefore strongly discouraged! As you’ll understand, I take absolutely no responsibility if it happens to end up in a disaster.
So what do you do when you write a story that gets popular? You write a follow-up and hope people will once again Digg it
hey vincent, go and look at your site. you don’t want people digg this entry
Perhaps you could put up an iso image of this running xfce? (Xubuntu?)
I’ve always wanted a Leopard looking Desktop, but could never follow the directions right.
Nice work buddy
Keep it up 
@igungor - thanks for the notification. Unfortunately I posted this entry before I went to bed last night so I haven’t seen the porn picture. It seems to be gone now
@Chris062689 - unfortunately, I can’t, because you need copyrighted OS X material to make it look as close as possible. Sorry
@Dark Star - thanks, it’s always nice to receive comments like those
Didn’t make it to the Digg frontpage… Ah well
Cool, both the vista and leopard make overs! I’d stick to gnome’s human theme tho! Both Vista’s and Leopards interface remind me to much of the disadvantages they bring.
Interesting, esp. that people would want to get the cheesy OS X look. If i would use Xfce i would try to reduce everything to the max. (Because this isn’t possible in OS X) … Well, i’m using OS X now. But the UI is lousy.
The OSX icons are tricky for most layout engines because, in OS X, buttons and icons usually get their reflectivity illusion from blending icons with a selection from a high-resolution sphere image. This is how the appearance can change when the user edits the toolbar to regroup icons.
Personally, I am pretty tired of all the compiz_stuff out there.
I know OSS is about choosing, still… I think resources should be reassigned in order to make a better “world” when it comes to free software an computing.
My .002
This is a great writeup.
DreamLinux also comes very close as far as looking like a Mac and has a dock as well.
Why do you bunch of hipis always want to try to mimic OS X and Windows ? If you can’t make it original, then why bothering ? Anyway, you will never ever be able to get even close to OS X. Fucking Linux will never take over Windows and OS X. Fucking hipi OS that will never live.
because we can.
@djhfsjbjhd
1) It’s spelled “Hippie.”
2) Have you ever considered anger management therapy?
@Article
Wow, this is great! I have an MPB and a desktop Gentoo system running XFCE. I still have difficulty adjusting to the differing functionality between XFCE’s dock, and Mac OS X’s. Thanks to your article, I’m now checking into AWN.
Keep up the good work!
ok thanks
@everybody who liked it - thanks!
@djhfsjbjhd - you probably won’t ever read this and if you did you’d probably not care, but I feel like writing it down anyway
I’ve received a few of those comments on my previous article too. Those comments demonstrate no understanding of the purpose of this article. The article was written to test the boundaries of Xfce’s customisation, and to help people customising it to their liking. This is not my default setup.
Also, while it’d be nice for a Linux distribution to be more popular than Windows, I do not expect it. This, too, was not the purpose of the article. This article was written for those who do favour choice and are willing to invest in having choice. It lives
@Red Icculus - yup, DreamLinux looks very nice too. I didn’t quite like it in usage but it’s definitely a nice option to have
Request: next could you make it look and feel like fluxbox or WindowMaker? And could you mimic the memory usage as well?
@djhfsjbjhd: your name indicates that you’ve been using Microsoft’s spell checker.
I must be missing some files because I can run AWN but cannot run the AWN manager to change the themes. Or am I missing a step. Thanks for your help in advance.
I would sure like this to work on my EeePC (I am a Mac User primarily)
Teacher
Lorenzo, sorry, I hardly know how those look. It probably is possible, but it definitely won’t be as fast as Fluxbox or WindowMaker. On the other hand, you can’t make those look like Xubuntu
Teacher, what happens when you enter
awn-managerand press enter in a terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal)?I came across this lifehacker article regarding a mac-style global menu in ubuntu: http://lifehacker.com/359571/use-an-os-x+style-global-menu-in-ubuntu
Think there’s any chance of getting it working in XFCE? It could probably be a great addition to this article.
Apollo, I already mentioned that in my article:
So yes, it can work in Xfce but I absolutely do not recommend it as it is a very hackish solution. However, if you want to give it a try, you can
This is an even more interesting article than the former one! Especially since I’ve been interested in the Avant Window Navigator since it hit the Debian repositories (now I need to find all those awn applets. They don’t seem to appear in my AWN manager…).
I’ve reached the end of my curve again and am trying Xfce again after months staying with GNOME. I’m slowly reconfiguring things again to my taste and hope this time I will manage to stick to it.
Well, Christophe, if you ever need any help, be sure to contact me
(Either throught my About page or via email, I suppose you got my email now that I’ve commented at your blog…
Oh, and as for those AWN applets - how did you install AWN? I have avant-window-navigator-bzr installed, and IIRC, that included all those applets.
Great theme, thanks.
How does one modify the xfce ’start’ menu? edit menu doesn’t list all the apps… what am i missing?
Unfortunately, Xfce only provides a half-baked implementation of the freedesktop.org menu standard, which is the reason that not all applications are listed. An inconvenient workaround is to install a menu editor like Alacarte. Unfortunately, installing Alacarte also installs a lot of other packages, but if you really want to edit your menu without messing with configuration files, that’s the way to do it.
(Btw, if you’d entered a real email address I could’ve notified you that I’ve posted this reply, now I can only hope you’ll read this…
thanks vincent,
guess I’ll hope that xfce comes up with a fix for this sometime soon. Other than this, I really like xfce. (though i did install konqueror as thunar doesn’t have the options i prefer, like split window.)
ps - is there an ‘unknown known’ that techies aren’t allowed to discuss politics? There are so many tech blogs- if they all united on ‘the internets’, they could expose the sham US government. Bush is not working for us, and neither is congress- it’s one big scam while they loot the country- tanking the dollar and sinking future generations into extreme debt. They seem to be following Orwell’s 1984 like a playbook… it’s not just about Big Brother spying, it’s about terrorizing the populace into accepting perpetual war.
The simple truth is that all of those DC politicians swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution. They have all failed to do so. What does that mean for us? For future generations if we allow it to continue?
/rant (;
thanks again
Well, to be honest, I’m quite active politically. However, I find that Americans often forget the internet is international - I live in the Netherlands
Still, I don’t think the government would really change course just because a few blogs call for it.
Well, to be honest, I’m quite active politically. However, I find that Americans often forget the internet is international - I live in the Netherlands
Still, I don’t think the government would really change course just because a few blogs call for it.
Vincent, thanks for offering your help (and for reading my blog!). I actually tried to switch back to Xfce, but it somehow seems to mess up with GNOME (when I try to use Xfce, both thunar-volume-manager and gnome-volume-manager are turned on, which creates weird issues when I plug in a USB stick or a SD card, but if I stop gnome-volume-manager in Xfce then it messes up with Nautilus when I try to log again in GNOME), so I’m back to GNOME for now.
As for the Avant Window Navigator, it created weird focus stealing problems when I tried using it with Xfce, so I think I’ll just wait until the program gets a bit more mature.
I haven’t noticed a package named avant-window-navigator-bzr. I use Debian Unstable proper, with only very few third-party repositories. Maybe I just missed it. I’ll check again later when I do my weekly upgrade.
Again, thanks for offering your help. If I ever find out how to stop Xfce from messing up with GNOME, I’ll try it again and will be sure to contact you.
By the way, I live in the Netherlands as well. Small world!
Ah, I assumed you were using a *buntu, and that you had followed the Visual Install Guide to add the Ubuntu repository.
You might want to check out the installation instructions for Debian. The arealax packages include
avant-window-navigator-trunk, which might work. On the other hand, I could understand reluctance to add third party repositories (as I usually have that), but if you really want it to work, this might help.Perhaps you found this blog through Planet Ubuntu NL?
Vincent,
I’ve found out the the awn-applet package is in the pipeline to get into Unstable soon, so I’ll just wait for a bit. Anyway, I’m afraid I’ll have to wait to try Xfce again. I have far too many issues with it (it just screws up with GNOME, for some unknown reason, and I have no idea who’s the culprit, Xfce, GNOME, or myself for doing things without always completely understanding the consequences). The good news is that GNOME 2.22 has hit the Unstable repositories, with the composite-enabled Metacity, so now I have the Avant Window Navigator on my GNOME desktop. When I have some time and stabilised my tweaking, I’ll post a screenshot of it on my blog. It looks already very good. Slightly MacOS X-ish, but not too much. More than good enough for me anyway
.
And no, I didn’t find this blog through Planet Ubuntu NL, but just by googling
.
Cool
It’s a small, small world
This is great. I learned very much from the two “design your own desktop” tutorials.
Thank you. Just keep posting such stuff about Xubuntu please.
No, thank you, for the comment. Those are what keeps me motivated
The next post might be a while though - final exams are coming up…
i cannot get the compiz minimize, close, or open animations to work in xubuntu. they worked fine in ubuntu…any ideas on how to get this to work??