Michael Wood

The defualt Browns for ubuntu are fine for a while but I find it’s something that I always change post install. I’ve looked around on various ubuntu sites/other blogs and there arn’t any very good guides to getting rid of the brown.
Topics covered: Changing gnome theme, changing backgrounds, changing login theme, changing splash image and changing the ubuntu boot splash (usplash)

Change your Gnome theme

Open up the theme editor:Do this by going to System > preferences > theme. The Theme Details tab will allow you to make
your own custom theme
figure 1
Open up http://art.gnome.org/ - Use art.gnome.org rather than any other site if you can help it as all the content gets properly moderated and tested before it gets published
On the Right hand side of the art.gnome.org website you have several menu items:

• 1. Application themes - how the controls looks e.g. the scroll bars, the menus, buttons etc.
• 2. Icons are all the icons which are used in gnome e.g. file system folder icons.
• Login manager themes are themes for the gnome login (gdm) .
• Splash Screens themes are the images which come up when you sucessfully login to gnome showing up while gnome is loading.
  
• 3. A Window Boarder is the edging for all the windows on your desktop e.g. firefox, file browser, confirm dialogs etc.
• GTK engines are the software which you need to render the themes onto the applications that you are running - you don’t need to worry about these as the ones that are needed come with gnome/ubuntu.
• 4. Backgrounds - The background image for your desktop

Browse through the categories downloading any Application themes/Icons/login manager/Window boarder/Backgrounds

Installing Gnome Themes

For Application themes (controls), Icons and Window boarders the neatest way of installing them is just to right click on the download button on the webpage : and select “Copy link location” then go to the window “Theme Preferences” window (see figure 1) and click “Install Theme” which will give you:

Simply do ctrl+v to paste into the location box, then click install. Once you have clicked install the new Application themes/Icons/login manager/Window boarder will appear in the lists that are in the three repsective tabs in the window “Theme Details” (see figure 1)

Installing Backgrounds

Simply download the background image and note the location you download it to, then right click on your desktop and select “Change Desktop Background”, select “Add wallapaper” and browse to your downloaded wall paper. Click open, then finish.
Installing Login Manager Themes

Firstly download the Login theme from the art.gnome.org website, noting the location you download it to.

Go To: System > Administratrion > Login Window

Select add 1. Browse to your downloaded Background. Click Install.

Then select the login theme from the list 2.

Important: 3. change this colour ! (this is something a lot of tutorials miss out) you see this colour in between your gnome session loading and you loging in.

Click close to save the changes.

Splash Screen

To change the splash screen download the splash image to a folder called .gnome in your home directory
This folder already exists and contains gnome files. To find this folder you will need to switch on “View hidden folders” in the View menu on your file browser download your splash image to this folder.

figure 2

Then, you need to edit the preference that tells gnome what splash file to use. Do this by using a program called gconf-editor, if you do not have it installed (it’s not installed by default on ubuntu) you will need to install it.
In a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) do:
sudo apt-get install gconf-editor && gconf-editor & exit

now using the tree in Configuration editor expand: “apps”, “gnome-session”, “options”.

Right click on splash_screen and select “edit key” in the value box in the Edit key dialog put in the full path to the splash screen that you want to use. This is easiest done by right clicking on your downloaded splash image (figure 2) and viewing the properties , copy and paste the file name into the value box then give it a prefix of “~/.gnome2/” so the value would look something like this: “~/.gnome2/newsplashimage.png” click “Ok” and you’re done.

There is one last bit of brown you might want to get rid of in ubuntu - the system boot up screen. You can change it to look like this instead:

For this you will need to follow the instructions detailed on this forum post. http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=447474&postcount=1

If there is anything i’ve missed out or you would like added please comment.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.