On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 6:29 AM, Nathan Beaumont <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 10:19 PM, Sam <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Nathan Beaumont <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> I short question here, is there a default installed silver style theme >>> for Ubuntu I don't know about? >> >> No, but you can easily (read hopefully) find one on gnome-look.org >> > The best ones I found were direct OSX copies. Are ubuntu themes just > pictures and a text or XML file telling the pictures were to go, like in > firefox? > --
There's more than one way to write themes for Ubuntu and it's not immediately clear what's going on :) For a start, there isn't a single 'theme' file. A theme is made up of a bunch of components -gtk theme - changes the look of 'widgets' - buttons, lists, menus, scrollbars, etc -metacity theme - changes the look of the window borders - GDM theme - the login screen -icon theme - bootup theme - I don't know how this works anymore - I think it's different in Lucid https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/LucidBootExperience and then there are lots of other areas and aspects, such as individual applications' splash screens, themes for applications that don't use GTK, tweaks to icon themes, etc. This (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Blubuntu) is really old now, but it does at least attempt to break down a 'theme' in to the components required to make it feel complete. Having said that, a huge impact can be made on the system by changing just the GTK and Metacity themes. There's a lot of information on the Internet about these, and I am certainly no authority - I always find it helps to have a basic outline before you start trying to search for stuff, so here's an attempt: GTK themes are split in to 'GTK Theme Engines' and 'Gtk Theme files (gtkrc)' - the theme file is a description of the way any particular engine must behave when drawing the predefined GTK elements. In a fashion similar to CSS, it involves defining 'styles' that are then applied to certain types of element when they are drawn by the theme engine. For example, you could have the 'button' style that had a different colour when not selected to a 'menu' style. There are a range of engines that I see as falling in to two categories: engines that use images and engines that draw the widgets themselves. Of the first category pixbuf and eXperience spring to mind. As for the latter, clearlooks, murrine, smooth, xfce, nodoka and aurora spring to mind - I'm sure there are new ones these days. I hope that helps. This might also help: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/Tutorials Enjoy making a theme :) Who -- ubuntu-art mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
