Another nice aspect is that there are plenty of themes available for the desktop. So with all of that said, let’s take a look at how to theme the E17 window manager.

Where to find themes

Before we go on it would be best to point out a couple of outstanding locations to find themes. There are two sites that house plenty of E17 eye candy (there used to be three main sites until Freshmeat dumped themes – BOO HISS!). Those sites are: Get-E and E17 Stuff. The latter has far more themes, but the former’s themes are much more interesting.

The files you are going to download are .edj files and contain every thing you need for your theme (including wallpaper). You can download them to any directory, so long as you have permission to access the directory. I would place them in a centralized location in your ~/ directory (like ~/Downloads). Once you have imported the theme you can them remove the .edj file from your directory.

Sift through these sites and download a few themes that you like.

The theme tool

Figure 1

If you open up your main menu in E17 (left click the mouse on a blank spot on your desktop) you will see the Settings menu. Click on that menu entry to open up the tool (see Figure 1) you will use to import and/or select your theme.

You will notice there are two radio buttons at the top left. Here you can switch from the system themes (pre-installed) or your personal themes (themes you have imported). When you import a theme you won’t have to make this switch.

With this tool open (and your themes downloaded) click on the Import button. When

Figure 2

you click this button a small window will open where you navigate around to locate theme you want to import. After you’ve located your theme click the OK button and you will see your theme instantly appear in the Personal listing of themes (see Figure 2). Select that them and then click the Apply button to make the change. The change in theme might seem to not happen at first. Give it a second or two and the change will magically happen.

Wallpaper

You can chose to either use your theme’s wallpaper or your own personal wallpaper. To make this change click on the Main menu and then on the Settings menu. In this you will see the Wallpaper entry. Click that to open up the Wallpaper tool (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

As you can see you can select Personal wallpaper (wallpaper you have downloaded), System wallpaper (default wallpaper installed with E17), or Theme wallpaper (wallpaper included with the them). Make your selection and click OK.

If you click the Advanced button it allows you to set which desktops the wallpaper will be assigned to.

Final thoughts

Themeing a desktop has never been so easy. With Enlightenment E17 your desktop can look fairly amazing with only a few clicks.

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From within the GNOME Appearance Preferences window most all customizations can be taken care of. Everything from theme, controls, window borders, pointer, and special effects can be configured here. So let’s dig into this and find out just how these customizations are handled.

Opening the preferences window

The first thing you need to do is to open up the preferences window. You will find this in the Preferences sub-menu of the System menu in the top panel of the GNOME desktop. In that sub-menu click on the Appearance entry to open up the window.

The main preferences window

Figure 1

When you open the Appearance Preferences window (see Figure 1) you will notice the various themes installed. You can quickly choose from one theme or another to quickly change the overall look of your desktop. But the customization shouldn’t end there.

One button you shoudln’t over look is the Customize button. When you click this button a new window will open that allows you to make more granular changes to the various themes. Within the Customization window (see Figure 2) You can change colors, window borders, controls, icons, and the pointer.

Figure 2

The most drastic change you can make is under the Controls tab. This change effects the look and feel of what is inside the window borders. Some of these changes are subtle, but some are fairly drastic. Think of the Controls tab as a way to fine-tune each particular theme. But it doesn’t have to end there. Once you fine-tune your theme you can take it further by clicking on the Colors tab and editing the colors of the theme.

There are four colors you can customize here:

Windows: This is pretty much the background of all of your windows.

Input boxes: Such as the background color of selectable lists.

Selected Items: The color that indicates an item that has been selected.

Tool tips: The background color of tool tips.

One of my favorite personalizations is the Window Border. Linux desktops have always been fond of having artistic window borders. From different shapes, to transparencies, to shades, and much more – you can really make your desktop yours within this tab. By default Ubuntu 9.04 ships with fifteen different window borders. There aren’t any really “out there” selections. Scroll through the selections and find one you like.

Fonts

The next step would be to adjust the fonts to your liking. This should be pretty straight-forward. If you’re looking to add more fonts to your Ubuntu system just place all of the fonts you want to use in a ~/.fonts directory and you should be good to go.

Interface

This tab allows you to configure if menus and toolbars will have Icons, text, or both. You can also configure GNOME to allow editable shortcut keys. The latter feature is really nice. With this selected you can then go back to a window menu (such as the File menu), select an entry, and assign a new shortcut by simply pressing the desired shortcut (while the entry is still highlighted.) You should see the shortcut entry change in front of your eyes.

Visual Effects

This setting will depend on if you have the video card to support the effects. If you are not sure try the Normal setting. If your card does not support the effects you will know right away.

Final Thoughts

Although the look of your machine doesn’t effect how it works, it can effect (in very indirect ways) your productivity. GNOME is a very configurable desktop, it just helps to know where all the different configuration options are.

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What I like about the setup is the simple lines and design despite the complexity and elaborate nature of the configuration. Despite my distaste of over-complex designs, I am impressed, because it functions as a “dashboard” should, it gives you a lot of at-a-glance information. RSS feeds from your favorite blog, the time and date with weather, and a whole bunch of other stuff, like the handy Gmail notifier.

While this may not appeal to the hardcore “clean desktop” people, I urge you all to give these setups a try, some of them might work. the reason I stray from them is that when I am working on something I tend to generate a lot of icons on my desktop which ruin the nice looks. I could of course use a different directory, but this is the most readily accessable place. if you know of any other cool desktop configurations like this be sure to drop us a note in the comments!

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Although no official objections where ever made to the companies and individuals selling services like premium WordPress themes I believe there was always a little controversy. Some free software proponents feel the effort put into these kinds of services would do better being put back into the whole WordPress community so everyone benefits seeing as the community was the ones who made this kind of business possible.

Personally I think these services have done nothing but good for the WP community. Better premium themes has inspired free theme creators to release better themes and to give credit where its due, most premium authors also release their themes for free in either basic version, separate complete releases or whenever they retire an older theme.

Interestingly though one of the biggest premium theme creators, Revolution themes, have decided that from now on they are changing their business model and releasing their themes for free.

In a move that would make any free software proponent proud they are instead betting on making their money through service subscriptions which you can purchase for several hundred dollars.

Their latest release of themes, Revolution 2, is a fantastic set of free themes and if you use WordPress for your blog I really recommend checking them out.

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Dark Kosmos thinks “trillian is MUCH better (and looks better)” and I must admit the from the Trillian screenshot he showed it does look pretty good. I used Trillian for a while and wasn’t too taken with it, although that was a while ago now so maybe I should give it another try.

I’ve been using Digsby since it was in beta. I managed to procure a key somehow and I was really impressed by it. I’ve always been a fan of clean chats, like google talk and irc, and Digsby really does well. It used to have a problem a while ago where if you closed peoples chat windows too many times, Digsby just stopped letting you open new ones, but a quick bug report later, and within a few days the problem was fixed. Angelo said “It used to have a problem a while ago where if you closed peoples chat windows too many times, Digsby just stopped letting you open new ones, but a quick bug report later, and within a few days the problem was fixed.”

I would have to say this is something the Digsby developers have been impressing beta testers with, rapid responses and fixes to any reported problems and bugs, and consideration of all suggested features. It’s a great way to build a community up as you can see by Disbies.org which just recently started up.

Digsbies is a place for the Disby community to discuss the application and download new themes and find tools and tips. It’s only small but I’m sure with time and a official public release of Digsby version 1 it will grow.

A couple of my favourite themes are the Digsby Alive theme, designed to match Digsby in with the Windows Live products and the AeRoyale theme to better integrate Digsby with the official Windows Royale theme.

Also find more emoticons, a Wiki and a log converter for transferring all chat logs from all the major chat clients including Trillian to Digsby.

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Since then all of 9 themes have been given the official signature; Luna, Silver, Olive, Classic XP, Royale, Royale Noir , Zune (modified Royale Noir), Aero and Classic Vista.

It’s not really a great selection and probably more the once you’ve wished you could give your desktop a nice new look. Luckily there is a way to get free 3rd party themes in Vista (and XP), although you’ll need to patch your system using a free tool called Vista Glazz. Once you’ve downloaded it’s as simple starting it up and pushing a button. You’ll need a reboot and then you should be able to install new themes.

For other changes you can use Vista Visual Master which is a great little application and can change icons, the boot screen and a number of other elements.

The best place to find Vista skins is of course on Deviant Art where you’ll find just about everything graphic related, although it may take you some time to sift through it all to find something you like. Icons, themes, Screensavers, wallpapers, screenshots… it’s all here.

For wallpaper images I suggest Social Wallpapering as maybe the best online resource for high resolution desktop images. It also has a voting system which is a good way to keep the standard of images high. Desktopography is a showcase of some of the greatest Photoshop artists and has an annual gallery, some of the images here are amazing, well worth checking out. You can find a few more at  Customize.org which also has some good archives of images.

For icons I would again recommend Deviant Art although you can get plenty more at VistaIcons, Jm Art Studio and this list of 50 places to get free icons.

If you know of any other good resources sound off in the comments below.

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The uxtheme.dll patcher that I had installed on my previous system was not working anymore because Microsoft seemed to have replaced the uxtheme.dll file with a newer version which had the result that the patch failed. A quick research on the Internet brought me to Rafael’s website that offered a patched uxtheme.dll that was compatible with the English Windows XP Service Pack 3 final.

I then used the small application Replacer to replace the existing uxtheme.dll in c:\windows\system32 with the patched one. Replacer displays a command window upon execution and all that needs to be done is to drag and drop the original file and then the new file into the window. Everything else will be done by replacer.

I was able to change the theme after the next reboot.

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Most of the downloads link to Javier’s page at Deviant Art where they can be downloaded. Wallpapers are usually available in different sizes. The visual styles can be downloaded in MS style or Windowblinds format. You do need a patched uxtheme.dll to use visual styles on your computer. I did explain the procedure in the article linked above. The icons are icon packs that can be simply used. They are available for Windows and Mac.

Javier explains exactly how users can apply the new visual styles, wallpapers and icons to their system. He links to various free programs that make it easier to change the icons or visual themes. Javier is also offering skins on his website for various applications like Winamp to match the visual styles for the system.

It was funny to realize that Javier actually created the Thallos visual style that I’m using on my system currently. It’s an amazing style.

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Users have to use different version of Summerboard to install the application depending on their firmware. An alpha version for firmware 1.1.1 exists, users with an older version have to use the Installer.app. Detailed explanations are available on the homepage mentioned above.

Many Summerboard themes have been posted on the installer apps website. I have selected three nice looking themes from the list of available themes. Just explore the website to take a look at all available Summerboard iPhone themes.

Click on this source link to find out how to add the themes to your Iphone.

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Expect Windows XP themes of Spiderman, Superman, Batman, Dragonball, The Simpsons, Fantastic 4 and The Flash. Let me explain how you install those themes. Once you have patched the uxtheme.dll you need to unpack the themes that you download into the Windows/Resources/Themes folder. When that is done double-click the .mstyles file which should open the Appearance tab in Display Properties. Click Apply and you are all set.

You sometimes have the choice between several styles for Windows and Buttons as well as Color Schemes. Use the pulldown menus on the left to see if that is the case for the selected theme.

Dragon Ball no off skin by ~teoiron on deviantART

Spiderman no off skin by ~teoiron on deviantART

Superman no off skin by ~teoiron on deviantART

The Simpsons no off skin by ~teoiron on deviantART

Batman no off skin by ~teoiron on deviantART

Fantastic four no off skin by ~teoiron on deviantART

The Flash no off skin by ~teoiron on deviantART

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I would like to introduce two methods of patching uxtheme.dll. The first method is automatic but sometimes not working. I would still suggest to use the Uxtheme Multi-patcher first if you use Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. Just unpack and start the application (no installation required) and click on Patch to patch uxtheme.dll. The software checks the operating system and asks if the findings are correct. If the information is correct click OK.

Windows File Protection will kick in which you have to cancel of course. File Protection would otherwise replace the patched uxtheme.dll with the original from the Windows XP CD which would have the result that you would not be able to use custom themes. Once that is done restart the computer once and check if you can add custom themes. If that is possible you have successfully patched uxtheme.dll. If not or if you are using Windows Vista read on.

Windows Vista users or users where the automatic patching failed can replace the file manually instead. They need the application Replacer for it which can be used to replace files with system protection. They also need the patched uxtheme.dll which they can find at Uxtheme Patches. Make sure to download the correct version for your operating system.

Start Replacer and follow the on screen instructions. Begin by dragging and dropping the original uxtheme.dll file which is located in c:\windows\system32 into the program window and hit enter. Then drag and drop the patched dll into the window and hit enter again. Follow the instructions until File Protection kicks in again. Make sure you cancel the file protection window so that the patched file is not replaced with the original one again.

Custom themes can be added after a restart.

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You simply use the right-click menu when you have found a link that leads to a theme or plugin for Wordpress that you want to install. Choose either to install a Theme or Plugin so that OneClick Installer places it in the correct directory. It works well with zipped plugins and themes which are automatically unzipped during the process.

The One Click Installer Wordpress plugin needs to be activated first and both the plugins and themes folder needs a chmod of 755 so that the Firefox extension is able to place the files in the directories.

You would then install the Firefox extension and right-click a theme or plugin to place it in the corresponding folder of your Wordpress blog. Plugin diagnostics tell you if everything is configured correctly which is a great way to check if everything is working correctly.

One Click Installer can be password protected to protect your Wordpress plugins and themes from being overwritten by other users and offers a so called Purgatory which offers a secure way of deleting plugins and themes.

It can also backup your plugins and themes and store them locally as zip files for later usage. The author is currently developing a version that makes it possible to auto-activate those plugins and themes as well.

found: Digital Inspiration

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Visual Styles can be changed in the Appearance tab in the display properties menu or by double-clicking the *.msstyles file. Using the patched uxtheme.dll gives us an advantage over softwares like theme xp or wincustomize because we do not need to run the software in the background.

Thalios


Longhorn Inspirat


Royal Inspirat


Klarheit


aes

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First you download Samurize from the homepage, then you decide which additional files you want. Categories include language files, graphics and skins (like new icons, images) and scripts & plugins (headlines, weather module, system information, visual plugins and the like).

This way you build your own custom system based on the files provided. You are free to create your own scripts and plugins, add your own background images and icons and the like. Very flexible system which needs some time to understand the relations. Once you get the hang you are free to create a customized system.

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