Cosmetic & Theming

This section covers mostly visual and cosmetic items. Things like custom wallpapers, getting the DE to look darker, tweaking settings so the screen does not feel as small as it is, as well as some terminal and console theming for a more retro vibe. I have a GH repo for the final files for this project here inclusive of scripts, assets, and 3D files.

Booting to Console & Require Login

Out of the box the RaspiOS - Full version will boot directly into a DE and log the user in. To stick with the theme of this build I wanted it to boot to console and have it require me to login. To do that run

sudo raspi-config

then navigate to System Options -> Boot -> B1 Console Text console and select Ok this will land us in a console environment on boot.

Then to require login on boot we will run sudo raspi-config again and navigate to System Options -> Auto Login and select No

So when I boot up now I will be required to login. Then to actually get into a desktop environment I can run labwc-pi which loads up a Wayland session specifically. Alternatively if I needed to boot into X11 for any reason startx can be used.

LX Terminal Console Colors

PiOS ships with LXterminal, and by default the colors are pretty dull and the font is far too small for me. I felt like attempting to stick with an old terminal vibe with some bolder and slightly larger orange font. This can be done inside the terminal preferences GUI itself, but the config file can be edited with sudo nano ~/.config/lxterminal/lxterminal.conf with the existing contents deleted and following pasted in:

[general]
fontname=FreeMono Bold 13
selchars=-A-Za-z0-9,./?%&#:_
scrollback=1000
boldbright=true
bgcolor=rgb(94,92,100)
fgcolor=rgb(255,190,111)
palette_color_0=rgb(0,0,0)
palette_color_1=rgb(170,0,0)
palette_color_2=rgb(0,170,0)
palette_color_3=rgb(170,85,0)
palette_color_4=rgb(0,0,170)
palette_color_5=rgb(170,0,170)
palette_color_6=rgb(0,170,170)
palette_color_7=rgb(170,170,170)
palette_color_8=rgb(85,85,85)
palette_color_9=rgb(255,85,85)
palette_color_10=rgb(85,255,85)
palette_color_11=rgb(255,255,85)
palette_color_12=rgb(85,85,255)
palette_color_13=rgb(255,85,255)
palette_color_14=rgb(85,255,255)
palette_color_15=rgb(255,255,255)
color_preset=Custom

Then Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X to save. It results in the below image. The left screenshot was taken over VNC so the colors look absolutely god awful in this picture. The panel itself is IPS and tends to look much better in real life shown on the right side image.

Edit: After using this little machine for a while and consuming some content I ended up increasing the panel's contrast settings via the OSD and wound up changing gcolor=rgb(94,92,100) to bgcolor=(36,31,49) and it resulted in a much better result after making this tweak

TTY Console Colors & Font

The login console is a bit different to make edits to. The goal was to try to emulate the look of the LXterminal settings above and match them to the tty console's scheme. First we can edit the font and font size with the following command sudo nano /etc/default/console-setup and make the following edits

FONTFACE="TerminusBold"
FONTSIZE="12x24"

As an option I could also set ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6] to -> ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty1 which clears up a small error after login, but I left this as is. Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X to save and exit.

And for colors the following needs to be added to the bottom of ~/.bashrc using sudo nano ~/.bashrc and adding the following

if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
    printf '\e[40m\e[37m'
    printf '\e]P0%s' '46444C'
    printf '\e]P1%s' 'AA0000'
    printf '\e]P2%s' '00AA00'
    printf '\e]P3%s' 'AA5500'
    printf '\e]P4%s' '0000AA'
    printf '\e]P5%s' 'AA00AA'
    printf '\e]P6%s' '00AAAA'
    printf '\e]P7%s' 'FFBE6F'
    printf '\e]P8%s' '555555'
    printf '\e]P9%s' 'FF5555'
    printf '\e]PA%s' '55FF55'
    printf '\e]PB%s' 'FFFF55'
    printf '\e]PC%s' '5555FF'
    printf '\e]PD%s' 'FF55FF'
    printf '\e]PE%s' '55FFFF'
    printf '\e]PF%s' 'FFFFFF'
    clear
    setupcon
fi

Then we can Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X to save and exit, reboot and it should result in something like the below picture after we login:

Edit: Similar to LXTerminal settings above, I wound up going a bit darker on the bg color after I had written this section. So I changed printf '\e]P0%s' '46444C' to printf '\e]P0%s' '0F0E12'

Disable Raspberry Splash Logo

In sticking with the console'esque theme I decided to disable the splash logo on boot so we can see the text scroll up the screen as the system starts. This is an easy change. Run sudo raspi-config navigate to System Options -> Splash Screen -> No

Custom Application Menu Icon

I figured since I came this far, why not add a custom menu logo in place of the existing Raspberry logo on the task bar. So I will go ahead and drop my start-here.png into /opt/nomad/assets. These directories were talked about in the System Config portion of this website. So with with sudo cp /home/user1/Desktop/nomad_items/start-here.png /opt/nomad/assets/start-here.png I will copy my prepared image over. This is a 96x96 pixel PNG file, it should scale down depending on which taskbar size is configured. The following will replace the existing Raspberry start-here logo for the PiXtrix icons that I am currently using and replace them with my custom logo and we will kill the panel process at the end and it should come back up with the changes

sudo cp /opt/nomad/assets/start-here.png /usr/share/icons/PiXtrix/24x24/places/start-here.png
sudo cp /opt/nomad/assets/start-here.png /usr/share/icons/PiXtrix/16x16/places/start-here.png
sudo cp /opt/nomad/assets/start-here.png /usr/share/icons/PiXtrix/32x32/places/start-here.png
sudo cp /opt/nomad/assets/start-here.png /usr/share/icons/PiXtrix/48x48/places/start-here.png
sudo cp /opt/nomad/assets/start-here.png /usr/share/icons/PiXtrix/64x64/places/start-here.png
sudo cp /opt/nomad/assets/start-here.png /usr/share/icons/PiXtrix/96x96/places/start-here.png

killall wf-panel-pi

The before and after below

Simple Odds & Ends

Just some rapid fire tweaks to actually get this device to look the way I want.

Wallpaper

I made a very basic 1024x600 Nomad wallpaper I will copy into my /opt/nomad/assets folder with

sudo cp /home/user1/Desktop/nomad_items/wallpaper.png /opt/nomad/assets/wallpaper.png

then it is just a simple Right Click Desktop -> Desktop Preferences and browsing to /opt/nomad/assets/wallpaper.png easy enough.

Taskbar & Theme

Two easy tweaks here in Menu -> Preferences -> Control Center and navigate to Taskbar -> Bottom and also set the Size to 24x24 and then navigate to Theme after and I set the Theme to Dark and the Hightlight Text Colour to White. This is a bit easier on the eyes and frees up a bit more screen real estate. Result below.

24h to 12h Clock

I can't do the 24h clock despite my efforts. To fix, Right Click the clock in the task bar Configure Plugin and set time format to:

%I:%M %p

Chromium Settings & More Screen Real Estate

I am a big fan of Firefox but have read Chromium is the way to go on these devices. It also comes pre-configured with an adblocker and some plugin that looks like it helps with video encoding. My tweaks:

Disable Bookmarks

• Ctrl+Shift+B

Enable Left Side Tabs

• Type chrome://flags in the browser
• Search "Vertical Tabs" in the search box up top and set this to "Enable"
• Restart Chrome
• Right click top bar and click "Show Tabs Vertically" and they can be slid over to thin them out

Disable System Bar and Borders

• Type chrome://settings/appearance in the browser
• Disable "Use System Title Bar and Borders"
• Optional while here, set the "Default Page Zoom" to 90% or so

All of the above tweaks are simply to free up any screen real estate we can on this small display. Below is a before and after: