Hardy Heron Desktop Cube

The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong One. ‘Do it yourself’. Yes, that’s it. ~ Linus Torvalds

I have always loved having Ubuntu running on my laptop along  with vista. I won’t be comparing the two in this post. What I am planning to do here is do a series of posts on Ubuntu and ways to beautify it. KISS (Keep is short and simple) is the philosophy on which the posts will be made.

Linux has come off ages in terms of graphics. And the first and the easiest post to begin the journey is by talking about how to achieve the famous 3D cube on your Hardy Heron machine. I must add few things before I begin.

1. This post assumes that you have a version of Ubuntu installed on your machine (whether as a dedicated install or dual boot with Windows)
2. For standardization, all the posts on Ubuntu here by will be on Hardy Heron, until a new release, which will be informed.
3. All the talks will be useless if you do not have a good graphic card on your machine, because most of the effects are dependent on your graphic card.
4. I am also assuming that you have installed right drivers for your graphic card. In case you haven’t your graphic card is as good as dead. Find out the graphic card you have and get the drivers installed.

Alright, I think we are good to go now. For enabling the famous cube, you’ll need to have CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) installed. To install it using Firefox, click the link below:

Install CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm)

Alternatively, you can also install it using synaptic package manager. Once you have it installed, go to:

System → Preferences → Advanced Desktop Effects Settings

Or just hit Alt+f2 and type ccsm and hit enter.

1. Enable, Desktop Cube.
2. Make sure you have 4 workspace. To do this go to General Options → Desktop Size → Horizontal Virtual Size and change the value to 4. Leave the other fields as they are.
3. Enable, Rotate Cube.
4. Enable Cube Caps.
5. Enable Cube Reflection.

That’s it! To see things in action press CTRL+ALT+Left Mouse click and move the mouse. I am sure now you’d love to play around more with CCSM. Here’s a great post by Forlong on how to configure CCSM on Hardy Heron.

How to set up Compiz Fusion 0.7.4