Open source

[shawnhcorey]

I just had a question. How can I take a peek at the open source code and if I wanted to modify it a little how do you do that? What programing language would I use.

You would have to use the language the project was written in. Find would where the community for the project resides on the net and make your queries there.

I have Ubuntu 12.10. I will soon be upgrading to 13.0. I have another dumb question. Is it possible to see closed source programs? I know its technically not legal to mess with it. I'm just asking if it's possible just to look at it.

Most closed-source projects do not publish the source, so no, it's not possible to view it, legally or otherwise.

[Tesseract007]

If I wanted to modify my GUI for Ubuntu what program could I use to do that? And what would be step #1,2,3,4 etc..

[Tesseract007]

If I wanted to modify the GUI for my desktop what program could I use. And what would be like step #1,2,3 etc? Ops I double posted sorry. You can delete one if you want I dont know how?

[lykwydchykyn]

If I wanted to modify my GUI for Ubuntu what program could I use to do that? And what would be step #1,2,3,4 etc..

#1: Decide which component you want to modify
#2: Download the source code to that component
#3: Modify it in whatever language it's written.
#4: Compile the code if necessary
#5: Replace what you've got with that code.

You're asking a very very vague question, there's no way to give you specific instructions.

[ofnuts]

If I wanted to modify my GUI for Ubuntu what program could I use to do that? And what would be step #1,2,3,4 etc..

If you are asking this question you very likely haven't got the beginning of the skills required... If you want to do that you have to:

- become fairly proficient in C/C++ (6months minimum)
- become very proficient with UI programming (and the relevant UI libraries, Qt, Gtk or other, depending on desktop manager used)(another 6 months)
- become familiar with the build tools
- become familiar with the Linux software installation setup

Then grabbing the source code of your desktop and modifying it to suit your needs becomes doable.

[lykwydchykyn]

If you just want to rearrange your desktop a bit, try a desktop environment like KDE. You can do considerable customization without having to code anything. Unity wasn't designed to be flexible, really.