Handy shortcuts in the bash shell

You may have noticed that I've pushed the use of the command line (or, to give it the proper name, the shell), over graphical utilities much of the time. This is deliberate - the shell is a fast, flexible and powerful interface. Once you've got a bit of experience, most things can be done a lot faster from the shell. Now that I'm used to apt-get and apt-cache, I almost never use Synaptic to install anything in Ubuntu as it's so much quicker and more efficient to use the shell.

There are several different shells available for Unix-like operating systems, such as the original Bourne shell, the C shell, the Korn shell (used in Sun's Solaris operating system, among others), the Z shell (which was used in early versions of Mac OS X), and others. Linux uses the bash shell (in common with more recent versions of Mac OS X and OpenSolaris), which stands for Bourne Again SHell. This is a free software rewrite of the Bourne shell, but with many of the more advanced features of other shells incorporated into it.

Bash includes a number of very handy shortcuts that really make a difference. Don't you hate having to type out filenames in full, such as package-0.8.1.tar.gz? Me too, but bash has an answer - autocompletion.

To use autocompletion, start typing a command, then press tab. If bash has enough to confirm what you're typing, it will automatically fill in the rest. For example:

sudo apt-get upd

Press tab here, and there's enough for bash to autocomplete to this:

sudo apt-get update

But what if you enter this:

sudo apt-get up

Here, there's more than one option. The final word could be update or upgrade, so bash doesn't know how to complete it. Instead, when you press tab, you'll hear a bell to show that bash can complete it. But press it again and you'll be shown a list of possible options, as in this example:

matthew@morpheus:~$ sudo apt-get up
update upgrade
matthew@morpheus:~$ sudo apt-get up

Note that although the line you were on ends, what you'd entered is copied to the new line so you don't have to retype it.

This works for filenames and commands, so you could use autocompletion in this example with the file package-0.8.1.tar.gz:

tar -xzf pack

Assuming there wasn't another file in the current directory whose first four letters were pack, this would autocomplete fine. You can also use autocompletion to fill in the names of folders. If you had a path to a file like this:

/usr/share/doc

You could type one or two letters for each folder within the path, and press tab to fill in the rest of the folder name.

Autocompletion is a very handy feature in bash that can save you a lot of time, and makes using the shell a lot quicker and easier.

There are some other handy keyboard shortcuts you might want to be aware of. I've mentioned in a previous post that if you've started a process and would like to cancel it, you can press Ctrl-C and the process will stop dead.

Another handy shortcut is Ctrl-D, which acts the same as the exit command ie. it closes down the shell you've been using. However, it's possible to have one shell running inside another so this doesn't necessarily mean it closes the terminal emulator. For instance, if you open the terminal, you have one shell running. If you then enter bash and press enter, this opens a new shell and places you in it (this would be a subshell). By pressing Ctrl-D here, you'd be returned to your original shell. Pressing it again would close the terminal.

Another is Ctrl-L, which clears the terminal. A similar effect can be had by entering the clear command.

If you want to repeat previous commands, you can use the up and down cursor keys to scroll through previously used commands in the current session. For example, if you entered ls, then less text.txt, you could press up twice to get ls again.

Finally, two things you may want to know are how to copy and paste. Copying is Ctrl-Shift-C, while pasting is Ctrl-Shift-V or Shift-Insert.

If you're interested in learning a few more shortcuts, check out this link for more details. I'd recommend you get familiar with at least the commands mentioned above as these are extremely labour-saving. Also, over the next few posts I plan to delve into the shell a little more and you'll probably find these shortcuts invaluable.

I'd also recommend that you find a good command-line editor as these are invaluable for editing configuration files. I highly recommend you take the time to learn Vim using the tutorial mode built into it (just open the shell and enter vimtutor), as although Vim may seem tough at first, it's one of those things like touch-typing - at first it slows you down, but soon enough you'll be faster than you ever were. It's also a great text editor for if you want to program - I'm currently learning Python and I find it incredibly useful. But if you try it and it really doesn't work for you, try nano instead. Even though it's a command-line editor, it's simple to use.

Finally, if you're really finding bash an uphill struggle and would prefer something that really goes out of its way to help beginners, why not try fish? Short for Friendly Interactive SHell, this is a good choice for newbies, and a great learning tool. But don't give up on bash! Use fish to learn the ropes if you like it, but bash is more powerful and flexible in the long term. You can get fish from the repositories:

sudo apt-get install fish

Then, to run it, just enter the following:

fish

This will set fish running as a subshell within bash.

Getting started with Wine

Ubuntu offers a huge range of software from the repositories that cover all kinds of needs. For any one piece of software you can name that you use in Windows, there's a pretty good chance that something else exists in Linux that can do the same job, often for free. OK, some of them may not be as well known as their Windows counterparts, and they may require a little adjustment, but this is fairly trivial. For most people, Ubuntu can do everything they use Windows for.

But what if you absolutely need to use a specific application? Or you have other software that you bought for Windows and would like to be able to run? Or even those games you may still have?

Well, the answer is Wine. It stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Essentially, it allows you to run many Windows programs on Linux. Wine recently released a stable 1.0 version after 15 years in development, and although it's by no means perfect, you may be surprised at just how good it is. I have successfully run two of my favourite games on it (Homeworld and Homeworld 2, the second of which doesn't seem to work in Vista!), and many other games are well supported and will work straight away. For some others, you can get them running with a little work - the website features a search engine so you can check the compatibility of something before you try it. If you have some Windows games you haven't been able to run, why not dig them out and give them a try?

Wine is in the Ubuntu repository, but unless you're already running the next version, Intrepid Ibex, this version may not be very up to date. It's probably better to go with the official version.

To install the current version of Wine, you need to add another repository. Open a terminal and enter the following:

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

This will download the APT key for the Wine repository. Now, to add the repository to you /etc/apt/sources.list:

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

This is the version for Hardy Heron. For Intrepid Ibex, you need to enter this instead:

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

Now to update it:

sudo apt-get update

And to install Wine:

sudo apt-get install wine

Now, Wine creates its own entry in your applications menu, as shown here on my Kubuntu Hardy system:


This is how it looks in Kubuntu with Tasty Menu, but any Ubuntu variant should show the same four items for a newly installed copy of Wine: Notepad, Uninstall, Browse C Drive and Configure Wine.

Wine works by creating a folder in your home directory called .wine. This is then set up to trick the applications into thinking they are running on Windows. Choosing the Browse C Drive option lets you open a folder inside .wine called drive_c, which emulates the C drive (the main hard drive) on a Windows install. This is where anything you install using Wine will reside.

Notepad is a clone of the Windows version, and Uninstall is essentially a copy of the Windows Add/Remove software dialogue. That leaves Configure Wine, which comes up with this:


This dialogue lets you configure Wine to help make things work. For instance, you can specify for it to emulate different versions of Windows - even to the point of being able to run one as XP, another as Vista, and a third as Windows 98, for example! This gives you huge scope to tinker and get software working.

For the most part, getting something working is easy. For a Windows EXE file, I find that whether you're using Gnome or KDE, you can just click on it as usual and it will run. You can also run it from the command line with something like this:

wine setup.exe

Other types of files are generally just as easy to run. If you have an application on a CD or DVD that you wish to install, it won't usually autorun the way it does in Windows, but instead you have to browse through the disc yourself and locate the appropriate file (which is usually setup.exe, autorun.exe, or something similar). Follow the installer's instructions as usual and it should install fine.

For more information about using Wine, I'd suggest going to their website and having a good look around. Nearly every piece of software you can think of has been tried with Wine, and they give ratings for how well it works in Wine, often including instructions.

Now, I won't claim that Wine is perfect. Not everything will work on it, and not everything that does work on it works well. But you may be surprised at how well it does do, and it's improving all the time. If there's one or two applications you use in Windows that are keeping you from making the switch to Ubuntu, why not try Wine to see if they will run?

Tar files

It's quite likely that if you've been using Linux for any great length of time, you'll have discovered tar files. If you go to a website and download something which is offered as the Linux version of an application, the chances are it will be a tar archive (although some offer separate RPM and deb packages for different distros). Tar files are widely used in Linux, as well as in other Unix-like operating systems.
So what are they? Well, if you've come from a Windows background, you should be familiar with .zip files. These don't usually contain an application, but instead contain a collection of files. The .zip format is simply a convenient way to store them as it rolls them into one file and compresses it, making it ideal for distributing these files across the Internet or storing them.
Well, tar files are Linux and Unix's equivalent. Tar stands for Tape Archive, and the term comes from backing up to a magnetic tape. Like .zip files, tar files are usually used as a convenient and easy way to store or distribute a collection of files. However, it's far more common for tar files to be used to distribute applications than it is for .zip files. If you download a non distro-specific Linux binary, that will usually be packaged as a tar file. Also, if you download source code for an application, you can generally expect it to be packaged as a tar file.
Although it's best to use a deb package in Ubuntu where possible, there are times when you can only get something as a tar package. So being able to deal with tar packages is a necessary Linux skill. In addition, they're ideal for backing up files in case something goes wrong.
Tar files aren't compressed by default. There are two utilities available to compress them: bzip2and gzip. Normally you'll be able to tell which one has been used from the file extensions used. This example is compressed using bzip2:

package.tar.bz2

While this is compressed using gzip

package.tar.gz

That's pretty simple to follow, but remember that unlike Windows, Linux doesn't rely on file extensions to ascertain what a file is in quite the same way, and someone can easily give a package a completely different extension. So you may see variations such as .tgz.

There are plenty of graphical applications available to deal with these packages, but as usual we're going to go the command-line route! For this example I'm going to use the Wordpress software, as this is available as a gzipped tar package, and is a mere 1MB in size.

Click on this link to download the current version of Wordpress. If the package winds up on your desktop, move it to your /home directory to make it more convenient to work with.

Now, to extract the contents of an uncompressed tar archive, you would enter the following:

tar -xf packagename.tar

The x tells tar that you want to extract the files, while the f indicates that the filename for the package follows.

But this won't deal with the compression. To make it work in this case, you need to tell tar to uncompress the archive as well. In order to do so, tar needs to know whether the package uses bzip2 or gzip compression.


In our example, the package uses gzip. To handle this, add a z to the options. So, to uncompress and extract Wordpress, we need to enter the following:

tar -xzf wordpress-2.6.2.tar.gz

This will create a new folder called wordpress, which contains all the files you need to get Wordpress working on your system. But we're not going to do that (at least, not until at least after the end of the lesson!). Instead, we're going to become familiar with the tar command by using it to both create and extract archives.

If you run ls, you'll notice the original archive is still there. Move it to another directory so it's out of the way, but still there in case you need it. Now, we'll use the wordpress folder you just extracted to create a bzipped tar file.

Now, because you're creating an archive rather than extracting one, you don't use the x option. Instead you use the c option. This is easy to remember as it's c to create, x to extract. You need to include the f option as again you need to specify the filename. The difference is, you also need to specify the path to the folder you want to create an archive from. This makes the default something like this:

tar -cf packagename.tar /folder

But as with extracting the archive, you need to add options to compress it. Fortunately, you can used the same option for each type of compression whether you're creating or extracting, so with gzip you would always put a z. For bzip2, you use j. So, to create an archive of the wordpress folder and compress it with bzip2, you'd enter the following:

tar -cjf wordpress.tar.bz2 wordpress

Notice that again, the original folder is still there. Remove it with the following command to get it out of the way:

rm -rf wordpress

Now, let's just extract this again, then create another archive using and you'll be familiar with extracting and creating both gzipped and bzipped tar files. Enter the following to extract your bzipped tar file:

tar -xjf wordpress.tar.bz2

That should extract the file once more as wordpress. Finally, lets turn it into a gzipped tar file:

tar -czf wordpress.tar.gz wordpress

That's it! Now you should be sufficiently savvy with tar files to be able to extract and create them as you wish!
There are many more options available for tar, such as v, which verbosely lists extracted files (so as it extracts files, it lists them), among others. If you want to know more, I suggest you study the man page for tar, using the following command:

man tar

One final note. Ubuntu does include the unzip utility, which enables you to extract Windows .zip files using the following command:

unzip file.zip

So if you need to transfer something across from Windows to Linux, it's fine to zip it up in Windows and extract it in Linux.
Dealing with tar files is necessary for installing any software that isn't specifically packaged for your distro. If you download a tar file for an application, to install it you need to extract the archive and look in the resulting folder for a text file called something like INSTALL or README. You will usually find something that will give instructions on how to install it. For source code, there will usually be instructions on how to compile the application from source.

Permissions

Something we haven't touched on yet is permissions in Ubuntu. The concept of permissions is highly important to how Linux works.
As you may know, Linux is a clone of the Unix operating system. Unix was originally designed to be used on huge systems which might have hundreds or even thousands of users, such as in universities, and it was therefore important to establish who was entitled to do what. The concept of groups therefore came about. By creating groups, and making individual users members of these groups, system administrators could set what users could do quickly and easily.
For example, refer back to the VirtualBox install article a while back and you'll notice that in order to use VirtualBox, a user needs to be a member of a group called "vboxusers". By adding a user name "fred"to this group, this shows that the administrator has given permission for the user fred to use VirtualBox. Now, to a certain extent this is a little redundant on a desktop system that will have only a handful of users, but it illustrates how Unix-like operating systems such as Linux handle files. In Ubuntu, a normal user will belong to a group based on their username, but other Linux distributions may instead have a group called "users".
A user account has limits. Each user has their own directory in the /home folder (so in this example, fred has /home/fred), in which they can save and edit files, but normally they can't save elsewhere. Users can move around, but some files are out of bounds. Some files (normally system files, such as your /etc/apt/sources.list), can be read, but not written to, so you could open it in a text editor, edit it and save a copy in your own home folder, for example, but you couldn't edit and save the original. This is enforced by the use of file permissions.
Each file or directory is owned by a user. For instance, if the user fred rips a CD using Sound Juicer and save it to a directory called Music in his /home directory, he will be the owner of the audio files created. He's therefore free to do as he wishes with these files. If he then logs out and another user, jane, logs in, she is not the owner and what she can do with these files will be subject to the permissions fred has set for these files. He can if he wishes make these files available for other users to edit or delete if they wish, or he can make them read-only. If he prefers not to share these, he can deny anyone else access to the files.
Another thing to note is the Unix philosophy that "everything is a file". This includes folders, so fred can also make entire folders read only, or can deny others access to them completely. So he could make his entire /home directory available for others to access or edit, or keep people from accessing it entirely.
There are three sets of permissions for each file or folder. There is one for the user, one for the specified group, and one for everyone else. To demonstrate this, open your file manager (Nautilus in Ubuntu, Konqueror or Dolphin in Kubuntu and Thunar in Xubuntu). Right-click on a file or folder and select Properties. Select the Permissions tab and you'll see something like this:


You may want to open this image in a separate tab so you can see it better. As you can see, each set of users has a dropdown box for you to set the permissions, and Group has an additional dropdown so you can set the permissions for each group. So far, this may have seemed quite technical, but hopefully this makes it a bit easier to understand!

There's three types of access you can set for a file:

• You can set out who is allowed to read a file;
• You can set out who is allowed to write to a file;
• And you can set who can execute (run) a file

Normally, a file in your /home directory which you own will allow you to read or write to it, but not execute it (this is just another one of the reasons why Linux is regarded as being more secure than Windows, as by default a freshly downloaded file can't be executed straight away). So, if you wanted to run it, you'd have to change the permissions on it. For instance, if you write a shell script to automate a task for you, you'll need to give yourself permission to run it.

One other thing to remember: Opening a folder is executing it, not reading it. So if you want to prevent other people looking in a folder, it should not be executable for others.

To illustrate the permissions on the files in a directory, run the following command:

ls -lh

You should see something like this:

matthew@matthew-laptop2:~/Demonstration$ ls -lh
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 matthew matthew 4.0K 2008-09-18 20:31 Example
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthew matthew 13 2008-09-18 20:30 example.txt
matthew@matthew-laptop2:~/Demonstration$

Now, pay attention to the string of characters at the start of each sentence. The d at the start of the Example line indicates this is a directory, while this is a dash for example.txt, showing that this is not a directory.

The next three characters give the permissions for the owner. The r shows this can be read, the w shows this can be written, and the x shows it's executable. As example.txt shows a dash instead of an x, it shows it's not executable, but the r and w show it can still be read or written to.

The next three characters show the permissions for the group specified (more on this a bit later). The format is the same. Then, the final three characters are the permissions for everyone else.

You'll notice there are two names afterwards. The first is the name of the owner, while the second is the owner's group. As stated previously, in Ubuntu each user has their own group. The rest is information about the file.

OK, so we've established what permissions are. Now, how can we change them? You can easily use a file manager to change these, as demonstrated in the screenshot above, but as usual I'm going to point you towards the terminal as the best way to do it.

First, to change permissions, you use the chmod command. In this example, to make the example.txt document available so that everyone can read and write to it, you enter this:

chmod a+rw example.txt

This is quite easy to follow - all users (a) add (+) read (r) and write (w) permissions. Another example:

chmod a-w example.txt

This means all users (a) take away (-) write (w) permission. You can edit permissions for just the user as follows:

chmod u+rw example.txt

Similarly, you can edit it for the group like this:

chmod g+rw example.txt

Or you can edit it for others:

chmod o+rw example.txt

Please note that you can leave out the first character, which means it will default to a (all), as in this example:

chmod +x example.txt

Now, say you've written a shell script called housekeeping to automate a common task for you. To enable this to run, you need to make it executable, like this:

chmod +x housekeeping

OK, so now you should understand how to change permissions for a file or folder. But what about changing the user who owns it? There's an easy way to do this, using the chown (CHange OWNer) command. Please note, this must be run using sudo for security reasons. So if fred wants jane to own his example.mp3 file, he should run the following:

sudo chown jane example.mp3

He can also change the group at the same time:

sudo chown jane.examplegroup example.mp3

Or, he can change the group alone with chgrp (CHange GRouP):

sudo chgrp examplegroup example.mp3

This is a fairly complex concept, so you may want to spend some time getting familiar with the idea of permissions.

Manipulating files and folders

Apologies for the delay since my last post - as I don't have access to the Internet during the week at present and my parent's Internet connection has been playing up, it's been hard to get any blogging done! Hopefully that will change soon!
Anyway, manipulating files and folders is something that you need to know about, seeing that Linux applies the Unix philosophy of "everything is a file". So I'll walk you through some basic commands.
First up is mkdir. This command makes a new folder. So, if you're in your /home directory and you enter the following:

mkdir Work

You'll create a new directory called Work. Never forget that Linux, unlike Windows, is case sensitive. Also, if you want to create a new directory anywhere other than in your own /home directory, you'll need to use sudo.
To remove an empty directory, you can use rmdir, as in this example:

rmdir Work

Now, to remove a file, you use the rm command, as in this example where we're deleting the document Example.html:

rm Example.html

Like most commands in Linux, rm has a number of options you can specify. A word of warning: watch out for the command rm -rf. The r option means remove things recursively (so you can remove a directory AND everything inside it), while the f option forces it, even if it gives a warning. You can specify the folder you want to delete with its path, so NEVER run the following command (unless you actually want to destroy your system!):

sudo rm -rf /

This means "delete the whole filesystem recursively, ignoring all warnings, with root access", essentially meaning delete everything!. I've tried this on VirtualBox installs of Ubuntu and it will destroy everything on your system! That said, the command rm -rf can be quite handy for deleting a folder and it's contents, but be VERY careful with it!
To copy a file, use the cp command, with the source followed by the destination, as in this example:

cp Example.html /media/USB

You can change the name of the destination by specifying the file name as well, like this:

cp Example.html /media/USB/Example2.html

Moving a file is similar to copying it, with similar syntax:

mv Example.html /media/USB

And again you can change the name, in the same way as with cp. Or you can use it to rename a file without moving it, like this:

mv Example.html Example2.html

Now, moving files and folders is all very well, but how can you show them? Simple, use the ls command:

ls

To show hidden files and folders as well, use this:

ls -A

As usual, if you want to know more about these commands, refer to the man pages for more specific guidelines. Hopefully this has given you enough to get started. I recommend spending a little time becoming comfortable with these commands, they'll give you a sound grasp of the fundamentals of using the command line.

Navigating folders from the command line

If you've followed the posts on this blog for a while, you should be reasonably comfortable using the command line to install software, edit configuration files and so on. You should also be aware of the layout of the Linux filesystem. However, you may not be aware of how to navigate it without using a graphical file manager such as Nautilus or Konqueror. So in this post I'm going to go through basic commands for navigating from the command line.

First of all is the cd command. This is short for "change directory". The default location for you to start is in your home directory, and entering the following:

cd

will take you to your home directory. You can also use the ~ character (known as a tilde) as shorthand for your home directory, which is useful if referring to your home directory from elsewhere. So, entering the following:

cd ~

will give the same results as the previous command.

You can also navigate up one directory as follows:

cd ..

And can go back to the previous directory using this command:

cd -

These commands can be used as part of longer paths. For instance, say you are currently in /var/www but want to go to a folder called Music in your home folder. You can go there with this command:

cd /home/username/Music

Or you can use this:

cd ~/Music

Now, say you want to go from there to another folder in your home directory called Pictures. You can enter this:

cd ../Pictures

Then, to head back to the Music folder, you can enter the following:

cd -

And to head to the root of the filesystem, just enter the following:

cd /

Now, how can you see where you are? Easy, just enter the pwd command (short for Print Working Directory). Here I'm in the Desktop directory:

/home/matthew/Desktop

Got that? I recommend you spend a little time getting comfortable with these commands as they are the first building blocks in becoming proficient at the command line. Next time I'll go into creating and deleting files and folders.

Recreating my Ubuntu desktop

I've been asked how to recreate the desktop I showed in the previous post in Ubuntu. For those who haven't seen it, here it is:


OK, first of all there's a number of applications you need (I'm assuming you're working from a fresh install). So run the following command:

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator awn-manager compizconfig-settings-manager emerald gnome-do gnome-do-plugins

Strictly speaking, Gnome Do isn't required as it doesn't contribute to the appearance, but it's a very handy application launcher.

Once these are installed, you'll need to remove the bottom panel. Move any applets you want to keep up to the top panel, then right-click on the bottom panel and select Remove This Panel. To set Avant Window Navigator to run when you start up, go to System>Preferences>Sessions and select Add. Then enter Avant Window Navigator as the name, and /usr/bin/avant-window-navigator as the command. You can put anything you like for the description (I put "Mac OS X-style dock bar").

Now to grab the packages you need:

1. Genesis Emerald Theme
2. Blue-Joy GTK Theme
3. Oxygen Refit 2 Icon Theme
4. Peace Wallpaper
   

Now open System>Preferences>Appearance. From the Theme tab, click on Install. You'll be able to browse your filesystem for the theme packages you just downloaded. Use this method to install the Blue-Joy GTK theme and the Oxygen Refit 2 icon theme. For the background, go to the Background tab, click on Add, and select it using the file browser. You might want to copy it to your/usr/share/backgrounds so all users can have it - this can be done with the following command:

sudo cp (insert name of image here) /usr/share/backgrounds

Finally, to install the Emerald theme. Go to System>Preferences>Emerald Theme Manager. Click on Import, select the theme package, and click on Open. You should then be able to select the theme package from the list of those installed.

However, it won't have any immediate effect as Emerald isn't running. To start it up, enter the following command at the terminal:

emerald --replace

To make Emerald always be the default window decorator, open CompizConfig Settings Manager and look for Window Decorator under Effects. Check the box, then click on the icon to adjust the settings. Replace whatever is in the Command box with emerald --replace.

If you now log out, restart your X window server using the Options menu from the login page, then log back in, Emerald and AWN should be running straight away. You can then add whatever launchers you want, but by default AWN only has the launcher applet. If you want to add Ubuntu Tweak so you can add more applets to AWN, please refer to my previous post.

If you're interested in recreating the dock bar I've got, here it is from left to right:

1. File Browser applet
2. Firefox launcher
3. Exaile music player launcher
4. VLC media player launcher
5. GIMP launcher
6. Evolution launcher
7. Pidgin launcher
8. Jokosher audio editor launcher
9. Kino launcher
10. F-Spot launcher
11. Skype launcher
12. Last.fm launcher (not the Last.fm applet, I couldn't get that to work)
13. XChat IRC client launcher
14. Time Vault launcher
15. Ubuntu Tweak launcher
16. Gnome Terminal launcher
17. Showdesktop applet
18. Stacks Trasher applet

I personally really like this desktop. I'm normally more of a KDE guy (I have a separate Kubuntu install on another computer, while this computer is dual-booting Vista and Ubuntu), but I really enjoy working in this kind of environment. I've added two more virtual desktops so as to get the cube effect, and the whole thing looks amazing.

One problem with using this theme is that a lot of things are black that aren't normally (such as the paper in OpenOffice!) and I haven't yet found a way round this, so this might be a problem. I'm hoping the theme's author will be able to resolve this.