Install the “External Editor” Thunderbird extension

Download the “External Editor” plugin.

And install it to Thunderbird.

Configure the external editor

Option 1: use gvim

This is an easy method which use gvim.

In External Editor’s Preference, set the Text Editor to:

gvim -f

Option 2: use vim in gnome-terminal

If you prefer to use vim in a terminal as me, you may consider this option. Setting vim in the editor will simply fail. We may use ‘xterm -e vim’ as the editor, but xterm looks ugly in a modern computer compared to shells like gnome-terminal. However, we need a little trick to use vim inside gnome-terminal.

First, create a script “callvim”:

#!/bin/bash

gnome-terminal --geometry=80x40 --disable-factory -e "vim $*"

Save it to a directory in your $PATH, such as ~/bin/, and remember to give it executable by ‘chmod +x callvim’.

Then, set the Text Editor in External Editor’s Preference to

callvim

How to use it

When creating or editing email, invoke vim to edit it by the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+E.

Edit the email in Vim and save and exit. The email in Thunderbird’s editor is changed.

Customize Vim for editing email

We can customize Vim to be a better email editor by set email-specific configuration in ~/.vimrc. Below is my configuration in .vimrc which set the text width to 68 charactors, set automatic spell check, default file encoding to be iso8859-1 and utf-8. Abbreviation is also available, which may be frequently used in writing email.

My email configuration in ~/.vimrc

au FileType mail call FT_mail()

function FT_mail()
    set nocindent
    set noautoindent
    set textwidth=68
    " reformat for 72 char lines
    " normal gggqGgg
    " settings
    setlocal spell spelllang=en
    " setlocal fileencoding=iso8859-1,utf-8
    set fileencodings=iso8859-1,utf-8
    " abbreviations
    iabbr  gd Good Day!
endfunction

Let’s use Fedora 12 as the example to introduce how to use bytecode interpreter font rendering algorithm

1. Add rpmfusion repositories

Enable RPM Fusion repositories

2.Install freetype-freeworld

# yum install freetype-freeworld

3. Install liberation fonts

# yum install liberation-sans-fonts
liberation-mono-fonts liberation-serif-fonts

We may set the default font in Gnome’s “Appearance” configuration tools. We may also map “sans” “sans serif” and “mono” fonts’ default to liberation: Download my fonts configuration file, and save it to ~/.fonts.conf

4. Change Gnome’s font rendering

In “System > Preferences > Appearance”, select the font and rendering. “Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)” looks best on my latptop with LCD.

5. Restart X server

All the applications’ fonts should look much better now. Enjoy it!

Remember to backup data in the USB stick before proceeding the method below.

Command line method

Download the Fedora Live ISO image

We can download Fedora Live ISO image of different releases version can be found from: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

You can even download an boot.iso and netinst.iso with smaller size if you want to install from network of local image. The method in this part works with these images too.

Directly copy the image to USB media

We can use dd to make a direct copy from the image to USB media. Remember to backup your data on the USB media since all data will be lost after dd.

# dd if=./Fedora-Live-i686.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=8M

/dev/sdX is device name of the USB stick instead of the partition name (sdc is right, sdc1 is wrong).

Test the Live USB media

We can use qemu or other virtualization tools to try boot from the Live USB media we created.

# umount /dev/sdbX
# qemu -hda /dev/sdX -m 256 -vga std

/dev/sdX is the Live USB media’s device name.

Graphical method with liveusb-creator

This method can be used on both Linux and Windows. For windows users the liveusb-creator application can be downloaded from: http://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator

For Fedora users, liveusb-creator is already in the repository.

# yum install liveusb-creator

Run liveusb-creator and select the “Live CD image” path and the “Target Device”, and then click “Create Live USB”. The application will write the Live image to the USB stick.

After it finishes, we can also use qemu as described above to test the Live USB media.

—-

Update history
Apr. 2, 2011. Adapt it to not rely on specific Fedora version.

“free the fish”

1. Press Alt+F2 to open “Run Application” dialog
2. Enter “free the fish”
3. Hit Enter

“geglx from outer space”

1. Press Alt+F2 to open “Run Application” dialog
2. Enter “gegls from outer space”
3. Hit Enter

One annoying thing when using KDE desktop is that the theme and style of GTK applications differ from KDE’s. The gtk-qt-engine can let us select the theme for GTK applications in KDE desktop environment. But the mouse cursors for GTK application and QT applications are different if we set the cursor style in KDE’s setting tools. The cursor for GTK application changes to the default one when moving cursor from the desktop to GTK application such as Firefox. The is quite annoying. In this article, we will introduce a piece of tip to make the cursor the same style in both GTK and QT applications.

First, the gtk-qt-engine should have been installed to configure the theme for GTK application. If not, install it like this:

# yum install gtk-qt-engine

You can find the cursor icons which you are using in KDE under /usr/share/icons/. Let’s use “Oxygen_Blue” which is my favourite one as the example.

After installing gtk-qt-engine, there is one configuration file for it: ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde4. It may be a little different depending on the package version.

To set the cursor icon theme for GTK application to “Oxygen_Blue”, add this line into ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde4:

gtk-cursor-theme-name="Oxygen_Blue"

It can be changed to any icon theme’s name that we like. We may need to reload the KDE desktop after changing it. After reloading the desktop environment, try to open a GTK application and see whether the icons are the same in both kind of applications.

Screenshots

These are screenshots of my desktop.

How to set it up

This theme is a mixture of Mac OS X Bundle 2.1, iRaveH20 3 Icon Theme (Full Gnome/XFCE) Lights 3.0 and Oxygen-cursor-themes 4.4.4 which is originally designed for  KDE desktop.

Installation

The theme controls, the window border and the desktop background comes from Mac OS X Bundle. Download the package from the link in gnome-look.org and unpack it. You can get one picture and two tarballs. Then they can be easily installed by using the “install” button in Gnome’s “Appearance Preference” tool. For the background picture, just copy it somewhere.

The iRaveH20 Icon theme can also be installed by the “install” button. The Oxygen cursor theme is already in Fedora’s repository. If you use another Linux distribution that have KDE desktop environment which is the usual case, you can easily install the cursor theme which is a part of KDE. In my box, I can install it by:

# yum install oxygen-cursor-themes

Configuration

After installing them, select any theme in the theme window and then click the “customize” button. The “Customize theme” window will appears. Select “mac-osx-controls” in the “Controls” tab, select “mac-osx-window” in “Window Border” tab, select “iRaveH20 3 Lights Edition” for icons and choose “Oxygen_Blue” for cursor them. The background can be added by clicking “add” button and choose the picture stored before.

This the style of my favourite. It’s stable and making me happy with my terminal. Of course, there are lots of other combination of these themes or others. Choose the one that you prefer ;) Linux is free and open for everyone.

Update history
Oct. 17, 2010. Insert links to body; add titles

Let’s use my email address as the exapmle: eric[at]zhiqiangma.info
First add a new account in Pidgin. The configure the new account like this:
Basic Tab:

Protocol: XMPP
Username: eric (First half of Email address)
Domain: zhiqiangma.info (Second half of Email address)
Resource: gmail.com

Advanced Tab:

Connect port: 5222
Connect server: talk.google.com
File transfer proxies: proxy.eu.jabber.org

The screen shots:

How to install them:

Gtk engine:

# yum install gtk-murrine-engine

Icon theme:

# yum install gnome-colors-icon-theme

Theme:

Dowload from here: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Shiki-Colors?content=86717

Install it by Appearance Preference -> Install.

Configuration:

Appearance Preference -> Customize:

Controls: Shiki-Wise

Window Border: Shiki-Colors-Metacity

Icons: GNOME-Colors-Wise

Pointer: Bluecurve-inverse

Guake is very fast while stable enough for using! It’s the excelent quqke like drop-down terminal for gnome.

I used yakuake on KDE. It’s professional but a bit slow. I used tilda also on gnome. But unfortunately, there are too many bugs. Then after I find Guake, I am happy.

Guake is invoked with a single keystroke (F12 as default), and hidden by pressing the same keystroke again. Its design was inspired from consoles in computer games such as Quake and OpenArena which slide down from the top of the screen when a key is pressed, and slide back up when the key is pressed again.

There are three features that I like very much:
1) Fast. It’s for improving productivity, so the fast the better.
2) Stable. It has bugs. But from my experience of using Guake, It never crash.
3) It does not have a lot of function now. But the functions in 0.4.1 is enough for regular use. I can make it full screen by F11. I can create tabs by Ctrl+Shift+T. I can change tabs by keystroke.

Transparent background is cool. But efficiency is better. A screenshot of my style:

Metacity theme: Humanoid-OSX-Blend

GTK 2.x theme: OSX-theme-mod 0.9

GNOME Icon: OSX 3.3

X11 Mouse theme: MacOSX PantherX Mouse Theme[For Baghira] 1.1

Wallpaper: Elementary

The system:
Fedora 10
Gnome 2.24.3

Updated on 6 Mar. 2010. Screenshots added.