Installing and Using Themes and Icons in LL

[l337n1nj4]

[NOTE]: I'm posting this thread for those new to theming and/or for those who've never thought of theming their LL/XFCE desktop. I recommend checking out XFCE-Look or GNOME-Look for themes and icons that you may want to try out in this tutorial. I'll be using the MediterraneanNight theme for this series. (You'll understand later.)

First and foremost, we have to create two new folders in our user's directory. This can be found as soon as you open the File Manager [Thunar is the default file manager for Linux Lite, so that's what we'll be using here]. First, click View at the top of the page, and then click "Show Hidden Files". This will allow us to see the new folders we will be creating. Next, you'll want to right-click anywhere in the file manage, and choose "Create Folder". Name the first ".icons". This will be where you'll place downloaded icon themes. Next, create another folder, and name this one ".themes". This will be where you'll places your alternate themes.


This is what your folders will look like. Notice the ".icon" folder in the top-left, and ".themes" in the bottom-right.

For the next part, we'll need to get an alternate theme. I went to GNOME-Look and picked up the Mediterranean Night theme set because it includes the darker version of the standard theme (MediterraneanWhite for Appearence, MediterraneanNight for Window Manager) of Linux Lite. Find a theme you like and download it, or you can follow along with this tutorial and grab the MediterraneanNight Series from the link provided above.

Once downloaded, check your Downloads folder as it will be there (unless you've designated a different target folder for the download to go to. In that case, go to that folder instead).


My Downloads folder, containing the "MediterraneanNight-2.03.tar.gz" file.[i]

Next step is to right-click your downloaded file (.tar,.tar.bz, etc.) and select "Extract Here".  In this example, I get approximately 12 new folders, each being a different variation of the MediterraneanNight Series theme. To make things easy on us, we'll want to look to the left panel where it lists our "Places". Right-click on your username, and select "Open in New Tab". You should now see Downloads and USERNAME tabs above your files, like so:



In order for your computer to be able to use the theme files, you'll need to move them over to the .themes. Right-click and copy the theme files that appeared when you extracted the compressed file (in my case, MediterraneanNight-2.03.tar.gz). Next, go to your user tab (mine is l337n1nj4 in the pic above), navigate to the .themes directory, and Paste them into the folder. You should now be able to use these themes for your panel and window manager!

Here's the easiest part. Open the Menu, go to Settings, and click Appearance. This will give you a window that will list all of the themes available to use (including the ones you just dropped into the ".themes" directory). Select which one you'd like to use, and then click Close at the bottom when you're finished.

To change the Window Border at the top to match the rest of your window and panel, click on the Menu, click Settings, and then scroll down and click Window Manager. Choose a style from the list, and then click Close when finished. That's all!


[i]My window using MediterraneanDark for the Appearance and MediterraneanNight for the Window Manager

To install a new icon theme and use it, do the same as above. Download the icon theme from your choice website, extract it's contents, and move the contents to the ".icons" folder. This time, however, you'll want to choose the Icons tab in Appearance, as shown below.



You can then choose which icon theme to use and click Close when finished. You've now officially themed Linux Lite to your own personal taste, good job!  ;D

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to comment on this thread and I (or someone else) will be happy to help you!

[Scott(0)]

Excellent information, thanks for the tutorial.

[N4RPS]

Hello!

Thanks for the tutorial. How does one get the icons in the notification area to correspond to the color of the taskbar?

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

[l337n1nj4]

Hello!

Thanks for the tutorial. How does one get the icons in the notification area to correspond to the color of the taskbar?

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

Hey N4RPS, thanks for liking my first tutorial! I've noticed that if you change your theme to one that is a different color than the original, the icons in the notification tray can look out of place. For example, this is what happens when I change Appearance from MediterraneanWhite to MediterraneanDark:



Usually, what I would do is simply log-out and log back in for the theme to take effect, but some themes won't cooperate. I don't know exactly how to fix this problem, sadly. However, when I change my theme to MediterraneanDark, I noticed that if I change to MediterraneanDarkest instead, I get the same color scheme but the notification tray icons blend nicely without a restart (as shown below).



For some people who have a theme series installed, this would be a quick and easy fix, but I do understand that there are certain themes that do not come in a series, or the user prefers the original to the others in a series. I'll look further into this problem when I have some spare time. Hope I can solve this for you!

[Valtam]

Awesome contribution l337n1nj4

[l337n1nj4]

Thanks, Valtam!

[anon222]

[quote author=N4RPS link=topic=668.msg3519#msg3519 date=1406690333]
Hello!

Thanks for the tutorial. How does one get the icons in the notification area to correspond to the color of the taskbar?

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

Hey N4RPS, thanks for liking my first tutorial! I've noticed that if you change your theme to one that is a different color than the original, the icons in the notification tray can look out of place. For example, this is what happens when I change Appearance from MediterraneanWhite to MediterraneanDark:



Usually, what I would do is simply log-out and log back in for the theme to take effect, but some themes won't cooperate. I don't know exactly how to fix this problem, sadly. However, when I change my theme to MediterraneanDark, I noticed that if I change to MediterraneanDarkest instead, I get the same color scheme but the notification tray icons blend nicely without a restart (as shown below).



For some people who have a theme series installed, this would be a quick and easy fix, but I do understand that there are certain themes that do not come in a series, or the user prefers the original to the others in a series. I'll look further into this problem when I have some spare time. Hope I can solve this for you!
[/quote]
Hi ninja,
Have you tried using solid color for your panel background?
Another option is to make a small image in GIMP and use that as a background.

[l337n1nj4]

Hi ninja,
Have you tried using solid color for your panel background?
Another option is to make a small image in GIMP and use that as a background.

Simple solution, thank you!  ;D

Side-note: I'm considering writing up a more thorough, more well-planned and understandable tutorial. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[anon222]

[quote='l337n1nj4 link' dateline='1406915886']
[quote]
Side-note: I'm considering writing up a more thorough, more well-planned and understandable tutorial. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
[/quote]
I have a few ideas for this tutorial.
I think there should be a part on changing window manager theme. Tutorial would be more complete with that.
There is a keyboard shortcut control+h to show and hide hidden files. I think that's easier than view > show hidden files, but that's just me. You should add that as a bonus.
I usually use Xarchiver and extract themes directly to the .themes directory, and icons to the .icons directory, but your way does the job too.
My advice for you is: If you want to to write a tutorial for an average windows user, and that is the group of people LL is targeting, add more pictures and less text.

[Kirkx]

1) I would suggest to start the tutorial with examples how to install icons and themes using standard repositories in Synaptic , then explain how to do it from a ppa, and only then move on to mention .tar.gz files (those can really scare off less geeky users migrating from Windows).

a) examples of icon themes available in Synaptic: human-icon-theme, tangerine-icon-theme, oxygen-icon-theme, and many more.

b) Windows XP theme available from Noobslab ppa:

http://www.noobslab.com/2014/01/windows-...e-for.html

2) In the first post it was suggested creating ~/.icon and ~/.theme directories. The default system location should also be mentioned:

/usr/share/icons
/usr/share/themes

3) Here are two useful links:

http://web.archive.org/web/2010030522015...IconThemes

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Icons

Creating a custom icon theme is actually quite easy, as long as you don't try to build it from scratch. I didn't like Faenza icons for partitions, folders and text files so I replaced them with icons from Human and Oxygen icon themes: