Problem
I have never been a big fan of the default Brown/Orange GNOME themes that ship as standard with each new Ubuntu distribution. Although they are fully functional, they seem quite dull and uninspiring and certainly don’t have any ‘Wow’ factor. Definitely not a way to win over windows/mac users to use Linux.
For a while then, I have been trying out various different GNOME themes from Gnome-Look on my computer with varying degrees of success. There are indeed a good number of attractive themes available for download – but the biggest problem I have encountered is that of consistency. Whilst the theme itself may be attractive, it is often hard to find a good icon set which doesn’t clash completely with it. Likewise, the theme is installed, chances are you will feel obliged to go searching around for some matching wallpaper – and the perfectionists among you will also insist on finding a colour coordinated GDM theme to finish off the job. All in all, what should be a quick, simple desktop personalisation task can take quite a few hours – and you won’t necessarily be 100% happy with the result either.
A solution is at hand
The truth is, getting a nice colourful desktop theme with matching wallpaper, icons and GDM doesn’t have to be this complicated. It turns out that there is a brilliant project called Gnome-Colours that has set itself the task of dealing with this problem.
From what I have seen from just a couple of days use, I believe that it has the potential to completely revolutionise your GNOME Desktop and make Linux a much more attractive and user friendly Operating System.
The Gnome-Colors is a project that aims to make the GNOME desktop as elegant, consistent and colorful as possible.
The current goal is to allow full color customization of themes, icons, GDM logins and splash screens. There are already six full color-schemes available; Brave (Blue), Human (Orange), Wine (Red), Noble (Purple), Wise (Green) and Dust (Chocolate).
Themes, Icons, GDM and Wallpaper
Gnome-Colors currently provides matching themes, icons, GDM login window and desktop wallpaper in 6 different colours. These are all inter-compatible and are designed to blend together nicely giving your desktop a seamless and consistent feel – a bit like using a Mac! Furthermore, thanks to the power of GNOME, you can mix and match between different colour schemes – so you could have a green theme with blue icons, a purple login window and an orange desktop wallpaper and it would still look pretty damn good!
What it looks like
Enough talking, lets have a look at what this setup actually looks like. In the examples below I am using the Brave (blue) theme on Ubuntu 9.04 – but as mentioned above, there are a total of 6 colour schemes to choose from.
Arc-Colors -GDM login window complete with user list and picture
Arc-Colors – GDM login window with standard text input
Shiki-Colors – Six different colourful GNOME themes
Shiki-Colors – An example of what Shiki-Colors looks like running on Ubuntu (the dock at the bottom is GNOME Do)
Arc-Colors – A selection of colourful GDM themes to choose from
Gnome-Colors – Six different icon sets to choose from
Getting it up and running on your system
Of course, you’re now probably wondering how you can get such a lush GNOME theme up and running on your own desktop. There are in fact two ways of going about this.
1. Download and install manually from Gnome-Look
The gnome-colors themes, icons, GDM window and wallpapers are all available separately on Gnome-Look for download and installation and can then be configured as mentioned below.
Official Gnome-Colors Repository
Of course, the above method is a tedious and long winded approach to installation – and your themes and icons won’t be updated automatically when changes are made upstream. By far the best way of installing Gnome-Colors is to use their official PPA repository.
Add the Repository:
To do so, open up a terminal and paste the following:
sudo echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnome-colors-packagers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnome-colors-packagers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gnome-colors.list
Make sure you change the “jaunty” in the above to your current ubuntu version (hardy, intrepid etc) if you are not running Jaunty 9.04.
Add the key for the repository:
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 2d79f61be8d31a30
Update Repositories:
sudo apt-get update
Install packages:
sudo apt-get install gnome-colors shiki-colors arc-colors
Configure your GNOME Desktop to use Gnome-Colors
In the Ubuntu menu, open:
System --> Preferences --> Appearance
You can select the Gnome-Colors wallpaper of your preference in the “Background” tab and you can choose one of the newly installed Shiki-Colors themes in the “Theme” tab. The Gnome-Colors icons will be selected automatically depending on the colour of the theme.
Now open:
System --> Preferences --> Login Window
You can select an Arc-Colors GDM theme in the “Local” tab.
Summary
Gnome-Colors is looking like a very promising theme pack for GNOME and one of only a few that provide a PPA repository for regular updates. Whilst it may not be for everyone, I would certainly recommend that popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora seriously consider including it as an option in their official releases as it really does enhance the Linux user experience and brings along a lot of eye candy to an operating system that has for quite some time fallen behind in the aesthetics department. I have to say a big thank you to the developers – and I look forward to seeing what else there is to come!
