Thanks for the picture, I think your terrarium already looks pretty good! I love seeing a sweet old-school TV cabinet being put back to work. The acrylic lip in front is a great idea to keep all the sand from draining out. Some pet stores (the kind that carry snakes and lizards) have decent looking "backgrounds" you can get to add a little depth to the scene and cover the square hole in the back of the TV, if you don't already have plans to decorate the interior. As to your specific question, fluorescent lighting and HID lighting (like sodium or mercury arc lamps) are the only options for growing succulents indoors. Although they are cheap and easy to work with, fluorescents have very low intensity, and therefore must literally be mounted within inches of the plant to really work well. More than 12" away and it is almost useless... HID systems are far more intense, and can allow you to mount the lamps a considerable distance from the plant and still get good results. Unfortunately the HID stuff is unlikely to work for your application since it's generally more complicated to work with and bulky (not to mention pricey). With enough determination you are clearly capable of getting either system working, but both approaches seem like they would sort of overwhelm your project. In the end it's the *whole thing* you want noticed, not just a couple succulents getting blasted with light! I think you are left looking for low-light plants that you can keep alive, or at least only kill slowly, or plastic. If you want to skip the plants entirely, that would certainly be a natural setting for your gecko. You could go to a landscape supply yard a get a nice selection of rough, "dramatic" rocks and make a tiny bit of a rocky hillside inside your terrarium. Probably better to avoid using river rocks if you really want an authentic look; not a lot of rivers in that part of the world! As for the gecko itself, whatever you do, be careful not to raise the substrate temperature too much. Being nocturnal, the gecko will just hideout during the day so the intensity of the light itself isn't really a danger for the gecko. However, light will heat the substrate and with a really high power lighting system, you could easily cook the poor little guy.

In retrospect, I probably should have cleaned the glass first :P Pleurothallis grobyi Malaysian Cat Gecko

The Mimosa would require a great deal of light to do well (they grow in full sun in dry areas here in the USVI) but the "banyan" might do alright. I don't know what species it is, but I've had good success with Ficus citrifolia... i glued it to the underside of an angled piece of driftwood and it immediately began wrapping roots around the driftwood and sending down aerial roots. Very exciting! I think Florida has F. citrifolia and F. aurea... both good stranglers. I would suggest looking in the cracks of old stone walls and on rooftops, etc... they like to germinate in such areas and yanking a little baby from there with some roots attached will make your life much easier.

Most of my reptile experience comes from herpetology class in college. Sadly there's not much in the way of geckos in Oklahoma. Funny thing is there's a tropical gecko, the mediteranean gecko, that has a breeding population on the campus of OU in and on the zoology building. Seems a grad student's project escaped and now they live off the bugs around the lights and overwinter in the walls and ceiling of the old building. Very cool little guys and not easy to catch! My only other experience was with a Tokay gecko. DO NOT...i repeat...DO NOT...make the mistake of getting one of these. I'm sure they're cute when babies but when the grow up they are vicious! They are really strong and have a bite like a snapping turtle. I'll spare you the details of when we fed a 'pinky' to the classroom tokay. yikes! What about skinks? We have lots of them in Oklahoma and they can therefore take extremes of temps and conditons plus they're really cool.