As a college student, I like to be able to wake up, look at my computer, and instantly know what the weather is like outside. I know I could simply look out a window or even open a window, but I’d rather use the computer.

An easy way to find out what the weather is like outside is to open up your trusty browser and go to weather.com. However, those of us using Ubuntu or another distro with gnome can get the weather forecast in the top bar (without having to open a browser). Here are two ways of getting the forecast in the top bar:

Way 1:

• Right click in the top bar
• Select ‘Add to Panel’
• Scroll down and find ‘Weather Report’ -left click and then click ‘Add’

Now you should have a new icon in the bar. Just right click on it and click ‘Preferences’ to set up your location. Once that has been set up you should have something that looks like this:

Just left click on the icon and you’ll get current conditions (like humidity, visibility, and even dew point) as well as a forecast.

Way 2: (This is new to Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) and puts weather info in with the date)

• Right click on the date and time icon (in the top right of your screen)
• Click preferences
• You should see the following box:

• Select either the ‘Show weather’, ‘Show temperature’, or both.
• Now click on the locations tab at the top to set up where you are; you’ll see that it looks like this:

• Just click the ‘Add’ button to select your location.
• The weather tab allows you to set up your temperature units (i.e. Celsius or Fahrenheit).

Now your bar should look like this:

Here is a screenshot of my desktop: I have both weather icons set up. I usually only have the first weather icon (way 1).  I like the first one just because I can left click on the icon and get more info. The second way (in the clock) doesn’t allow you to see that extra info.

It’s a link so click on it to get a better view:

In Gnome, you can set the top and bottom tool bars to be transparent, which is great if you wallpaper is a light color. The ‘Applications’ ‘Places’ ‘System’ buttons along with the date and time are all in the standard black font. I, however, like using a dark background as my desktop wallpaper. I didn’t like having white tool bars just so that I could read the text. Here’s how to change the text into whatever color you would like:

First, open the terminal and type:

gedit .gtkrc-2.0

Insert the following into the file that was opened:

style “panel”
{
fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
# fg[PRELIGHT] = “#000000″
# fg[ACTIVE] = “#ffffff”
# fg[SELECTED] = “#000000″
# fg[INSENSITIVE] = “#8A857C”
# bg[NORMAL] = “#000000″
# bg[PRELIGHT] = “#dfdfdf”
# bg[ACTIVE] = “#D0D0D0″
# bg[SELECTED] = “#D8BB75″
# bg[INSENSITIVE] = “#EFEFEF”
# base[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
# base[PRELIGHT] = “#EFEFEF”
# base[ACTIVE] = “#D0D0D0″
# base[SELECTED] = “#DAB566″
# base[INSENSITIVE] = “#E8E8E8″
# text[NORMAL] = “#161616″
# text[PRELIGHT] = “#000000″
# text[ACTIVE] = “#000000″
# text[SELECTED] = “#ffffff”
# text[INSENSITIVE] = “#8A857C”
}
widget “*PanelWidget*” style “panel”
widget “*PanelApplet*” style “panel”
class “*Panel*” style “panel”
widget_class “*Mail*” style “panel”
class “*notif*” style “panel”
class “*Notif*” style “panel”
class “*Tray*” style “panel”
class “*tray*” style “panel”

The top line that says:

fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”

changes the text color to ‘white’ or ffffff.

This is what it looks like:

If you want to change your text color to a specific color, you will need to get that color code and insert it here. Colourlovers.com has an excellent list of the HTML color hex codes.

Now click save and you should be finished. All you need to do now is type this command into the terminal to reload your gnome task bars:

killall gnome-panel