Themes

I found the subject of themes in Gutsy Gibbon confusing at first. Summoning up the /system/preferences/appearance applet from the menu presented no issue. And I had no trouble finding sites like http://www.gnome-look.org and http://www.compiz-themes.org. But it wasn't immediately apparent what I was supposed to do in order to install the additional theme packages I found at those sites. To compound the problem, I wasn't sure whether 'metacity' or 'compiz' was the appropriate category for me, now that I had installed Compiz desktop effects.

So I turned to Help. I found the topic 'Theme Preferences' and then section 8.2.4.2. To Install a New Theme

You can add a theme to the list of available themes. The new theme must be an archive file that is tarred and zipped. That is, the new theme must be a .tar.gz file.

To install a new theme, perform the following steps:
1. Start the Theme preference tool.
2. Click on the Install Theme button. A Theme Installation dialog is displayed.
3. Enter the location of the theme archive file in the drop-down combination box. Alternatively, to browse for the file, click on the Browse button. When you have selected the file, click OK.
4. Click on the Install button to install the new theme.

The mistake I made first time around was to extract the tar file. The 'Appearance Preferences' applet didn't seem to recognise the theme once I'd extracted it. Then I wondered why the theme wouldn't appear as one of the theme options in the 'Appearance Preferences'. I did discover after some trial and error that if I chose to set the freshly installed Metacity package as the current theme, it would appear as a custom theme in the 'Appearance Preferences' applet. Then I was able to rename it. The crux of the matter is that what I had installed was not a theme, but rather one element of a theme. Those Metacity packages are in fact merely window border styles. Later I discovered that even if I don't elect to apply a freshly installed Metacity package to the current theme, it is nevertheless installed, and can be accessed and implemented via the customisation tab of any existing theme.

The other point to note is that 'Metacity' is the category I needed for window border styles. The window border opacity settings that I set for the default Human theme (see previous blog post) apply to all Metacity window border styles, it seems.

The next thing I wanted to try was changing icons. I couldn't find anything pertinent in the Ubuntu Help file, so I did a search on "icons install" in the Ubuntu form at http://ubuntuforums.org and found the following:
"If you're using Gutsy you can go System>Preferences>Appearance and drag and drop the archive right into the theme manager."

This forum poster was true to his/her word. This worked even when the archive had been extracted. I dragged a folder of glass icons on to the current theme and lo and behold the icons were installed. A custom theme was created, which I renamed by combining the names of the theme and the icon set.

To summarise, the way that you create new themes is to download and install new theme element packages - Metacity, GTK, icons etc and then mix and match them by choosing an existing theme and customising that. Using this method I was able to set up several themes combining the imported window borders 'Gilouche Express', 'Scaled Black' and ''Simply elegance' with the imported icon sets 'Dropline Neu', 'Nuove XT' (1 & 2) and 'Glass'. Further refinement of the resulting themes was possible by clicking the customisation tab and selecting a different set of controls.