Themes in Ibex Guide

Anyone got a good guide for Themes in Ibex? It'd help if was "Themes for Dummies" cause my experience is on gnome look liked. I'd like to do everything like icons and the logon and stuff. I some I liked on gnome look and would like to get to know the plumbing of themes so if I want to change in the future I can. Thanks for any help.

 

It also depends what WM you're using. like if you're using Compiz, Emerald, Metacity, Openbox, etc.

 

Thanks for the reply. I'm not really using anything right now. Got a suggestion?

 

gnome-looks.org. Ususally you just have to go into appearance and use the install feature of the theme manager.

 

Well, metacity is the default. But when you minimize things there's the shadow of a black box shrinking down into the panel, which I find pretty ugly and annoying.

If you have an even semi-decent graphics card (which from your sig you seem to do), then compiz will add some nice fancy stuff. At least it'll take away the minimizing ugliness. It's a pretty solid WM offering window placement, multiple desktop shifting, animations, wobbly windows, window locking, and much more. It's got one or two non-critical quirks, though. I always use Emerald with it. Emerald is brilliant for themes and theme editing.

And then there's the various -boxes like openbox, fluxbox that are much lighter than compiz, but have their own advantages as well. I personally have used an Openbox/Gnome combo to much success. The boxes are mostly configured through xml (at least openbox is. But there is a front-end.), whereas Compiz is through the CompizConfig Settings Manager.

Just have some fun on your own and tweak around a bit.

Just remember than when you download themes, gtk themes are for metacity; emerald ones are for, uh, emerald. Like Ayle said, www.gnome-look.org is a pretty great place to start.

 

Is the Intel 945 all that great? This is one of the themes I found I like, but I don't have a clue as to how to "unpack the archive and merge the folders into your home-.gconf/apps".

If emerald is brilliant for themes and theme editing I'll have to give it a whirl. I take it it's in Synaptic? I can't look right now, my laptop's charging.

 

Don't worry about the graphics card bit. I've used compiz on by brother's T41 and it's still smooth. I'd expect 4 years to improve the graphics capabilities by at least a bit.

Emerald is in Synaptics. If you've selected the theme and it won't autoload, you'll have to run

Code:

compiz --replace

, but for my emerald it became automated, so you'll probably get it auto-refreshed as well.

 

I can't really understand what you're saying because your sentence structure is a little messed up in places, if English isn't your first language and you used Google Translate then I think it would be best if you simplified it a little bit and/or typed English as best as you can. In short, do you want to make themes or do you just want to install them?

 

English not first language. How u know? U so smart. To answer your question, I won't be creating any themes. I'm not that gifted yet, but I would like to install some.

 

Okay, that's a great help to know what you're looking for. I'm guessing since you were looking on gnome-look that you're using Ubuntu (Ibex can also mean Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu or any Ubuntu derivative just so you know). Open up the Menu Bar and then move to System, then click on Appearance and then drag the theme file that you downloaded from gnome-look (that is now on your desktop) over to the window and it should install.

If you couldn't understand a part of that then quote and highlight which part and I'll try and simplify it/help you understand. What's your native language? I might know it.

 

I actually speak Anglais quite well and have never learned a foreign language. I think I forgot the word installing in my OP, which has led to some confusion. On a more positive note, I found a theme I kind of like without having to install any of the theme managers.

 

Alrightie then, to simplify things you don't need to install compiz/fluxbox/emerald/etc. Just know that on Gnome-look if you see a compiz or other tag below the theme it's for that window manager (which is what you refer to as theme manager). GTK 2 themes are what you want to look around if you don't have compiz or all that other funky stuff installed and are just using bare gnome. Know that there is a difference between GTK 1 and GTK 2, you don't have GTK1 you have GTK 2.

So throw anything with GTK 1 on it out the window and forget about it or else you're looking for not so nice trouble. Mess with as many themes as you like, and mux them up as much as you want, you'll be able to go back if you screw up at any time by reinstalling a fresh theme. It's not like messing with your kernel or hardware drivers and having an un-bootable system (two things that happened to me recently, had to reinstall my entire system). That's my run-down on themes.

 

What's GTK1 for? The older Gnome versions?

 

GTK1 was the toolkit Gnome 1.x was based upon, IIRC, but there are still some lightweight programs developed for GTK1 nowadays because GTK2 is a bit heavy on resources for anything below a Pentium 3.

The most popular GTK1 app should be XMMS, but it can't be taken as an example because it has its own skinning engine to mimic Winamp.