Topic: HOWTO - Have a Desktop terminal, and manage Terminator profiles
Hello,
First of all this not a duplicate of AlexelA's inspring HOWTO http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … wallpaper/
AlexelA's method is intended to have all terminals open on the desktop. This method allows either desktop or windowed terminals (with the added bonus of a desktop terminal running on startup).
At startup:
With a normal Terminator window:
STEP 1: Update your Terminator
The profile switching used in this HOWTO requires version 0.12 of terminator.
To install Terminator 0.12:
You can track the latest stable release by adding the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnome-terminator/ubuntu intrepid main restricted universe multiverse
once this is done, simply install or upgrade terminator using your favourite package manager.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgradeStep 2: Install Gnome-Terminal, and create some profiles
You only need to perform this step if you don't usually have transparent background windows
Although Terminator does not yet have the ability to have different native profiles (planned feature of the 1.0), it can make use of gnome-terminal profiles. Gnome-terminal uses the gconf system to store it's profile data, these files cannot simply be edited by hand. The quick fix is to install gnome-terminal and use it to generate the profile data (you might be able to remove it once you're done, but I haven't tried that yet)
Again using your favourite package manager, install gnome-terminal.
sudo apt-get install gnome-terminalNow open gnome-terminal and create a new profile (let's call it Desktop) with a transparent background. Once this is done, We are able to invoke a transparent Terminator without changing our beloved default settings:
terminator --profile DesktopStep 3: Create Desktop version of Terminator
Openbox can apply window settings on a per-window basis. it can do things like strip window decorations, put a window on the desktop define the window size etc.
First of all, we need to trick Openbox into thinking we have 2 different Terminators:
sudo link /usr/bin/terminator /usr/bin/terminator_desktopThis creates a symbolic link to the original terminator called terminator_desktop. If terminator_desktop is launched, terminator will be launched, but Openbox will see it as terminator_desktop.
Now let's configure Openbox:
leafpad ~/.config/openbox/rc.xmlnear the end of the file there are the application settings, edit it to look something like this (slightly above in the file are explanations about the different settings):
<application name="terminator_desktop">
<focus>yes</focus>
<layer>below</layer>
<desktop>all</desktop>
<skip_taskbar>yes</skip_taskbar>
</application>
</applications>
</openbox_config>We could have defined the geometry, and lack of window decorations in the above file, but we will use the terminator command line options instead (this is not necessary, only it is the way I did it). The following line should launch a desktop terminator (note -b rids us of the window decorations; the particular geometry is for my screen, and allows 24 pixels for my menu bar)
terminator_desktop --profile Desktop -b --geometry 750x576+0+24...most X programs accept a command line argument of the form -geometry WIDTHxHEIGHT+XOFF+YOFF (where WIDTH, HEIGHT, XOFF, and YOFF are numbers) for specifying a preferred size and location for this application's main window.
We would do well to add this to our .bashrc for convenience:
leafpad ~/.bashrcand add the line
alias terminator_desktop='terminator_desktop --profile Desktop -b --geometry 750x576+0+24 &'Step 4: Start the desktop Terminator on startup
Openbox runs a list of commands at startup, we will add our terminator_desktop to it:
leafpad ~/.config/openbox/autostart.shand add the lines
# Launch Desktop Terminator
terminator_desktop --profile Desktop -b --geometry 750x576+0+24 &If all went well, you should now be able to log out and log back in to find a Desktop Terminal awaiting your command.
Thanks for reading,
Donat
So, it turns out that I had the default values after all. Interestingly, since I changed them to the following in Openbox autostart config:
