Using GTK Themes

GTK+ is a graphical user interface library used by the SpeX Applications. One of the cool feature of GTK+ is its support of themes. Themes allows you to customize the color and shape of widget by assigning colors and/or pixmap to GTK application. This can give you a completely new look and feel to you application.

1. Using themes:

Themes are stored in: /usr/local/share/themes
To use a theme, copy the /usr/local/share/themes/THEME_NAME/gtk/gtkrc file to your ~/.gtkrc.

For example, to used the Redmond95 theme,
cp /usr/local/share/themes/Redmond95/gtk/gtkrc ~/.gtkrc

To stop using theme,
delete the .gtkrc file or
cp /usr/local/share/themes/Default/gtk/gtkrc ~/.gtkrc

2. Downloading Themes.

You can also download you own theme from: Gtk.Themes.org

1. Download the file from http://Gtk.Themes.Org .
2. Unpack the theme to your home directory or wherever you store your gtk themes. You can do this by typing "tar xzvf theme.tar.gz", replace theme to the theme name of course.
3. Open the gtkrc file with a text editor (vim,emacs,pico,etc..) and insert the following line somewhere near the top of the file.... pixmap_path "/path/to/themename/gtk/"
5. Save the changes to the gtkrc file and then copy the file to your existing .gtkrc file in your home directory. To perform this step, type "cp gtkrc ~/.gtkrc".
6. If you have a theme that doesnt work with the instructions above try adding the following line to your gtkrc as well.... module_path ".:/usr/share/themes/Xenophilia/engine"

3. First install GLib and GTK.

Quick note on how I installed them:

glib:
    make distclean
   setenv CFLAG -02; ./configure
   make
   make install

gtk:
    make distclean
   setenv CFLAG -02; ./configure
   make
   make install

4. Configuring your computer to support Themes

To support themes you will need to have (or install) the following libraries.

gtk-engines: get this fromm the GNOME archives. Requires imlib.
imlib - image library: get this from the GNOME archives: Require jpglib, libpng.
jgplib - Independent JPEG Group's free library for JPEG compression.: www.ijg.org.
libpng - portable network graphics library: http://www.cdrom/pub/png. Requires zlib.
zlib - general purpose data compression library: http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/zlib.

I installed these on duke, bigdogm, and guidedogm. There a summary on what I did for each library:

zlib:
   configure
   make test
   make install
libpng:
   cp scripts/makefile.solaris makefile
   make test
   make install
libjpeg:
   ./configure --enable-shared --enable-static
   make
   make test
   make install
imlib:
   ./configure
   make
   make check
   make install
gtk-engines:
    make distclean
   ./configure
   make
   make check
   make install