Gadget Pro

How to Install Elementary Luna Theme in Gnome 3 Shell

Gnome 3 or also known as Gnome Shell brought a lot of GUI changes when comparing with the existing 2x version. The changes are also massive and was something very similar that happened with the Gnome 1x to 2x "switch".

Those days (1x versions) Gnome used to give users a lot of features and options to customized the desktop (even better than KDE in features) but with the introduction of the 2x "jump" a huge list of those GUI configuration options were removed. So in a way, the Gnome 2x desktop was totally different one to its predecessor. 

Just like that the recently introduced Gnome 3 also brought a total re-design of the desktop GUI and computing in general thus just like with the 1->2 migration, it received a lot of criticism (both negative and positive ones, yikes!).

Anyhow, sorry about the "short rambling, introduction", if youre one of the fans of the new Gnome 3 apart from all those issues, and I gotta admit Gnome developers always had an excellent (highly relative) ability to provide good looking themes (although very little customization available) but after using it for months, if youre already bored with the themes that comes with it and looking for something that looks beautiful, then perhaps the Elementary Luna theme for the Gnome Shell might get you interested :).

Main features...

*. This is a complete theme suit but youll have to get an icon pack a wallpaper separately to the original shell theme (links below). But of course you can skip the icons and the wallpaper if you like as well.


*. Comes with a bit darker colors and my personal favorite, the awesome Blue color! :D. 

*. Theres a separate lighter version of the theme is also available if you dont like the darker color choices which resembles a lot of Mac OSX.

*. This is only compatible with the Gnome Shell 3.0. So if youre using the 11.10 Oneiric Alpha 3 and the Gnome 3.1.4 latest builds then this may not work.


How to install it?

1. The installation is quite simple actually. Just download the shell theme from here first.

Im gonna quote the author Danrabbit here...

Backup your theme directory first. Extract the zip file and rename "gnome-shell" directory to "theme" and copy to /usr/share/gnome-shell/. This path is usually where GNOME Shell is installed.
Restart GNOME Shell by Alt, F2, then type r and press enter.

2. If you want the icons, then get them from here. 

3. Get the beautiful Elementary Luna wallpaper from here.

Yep, that should do it!. Enjoy.

Available link for download

How to Install elementary Dark GTK Theme in Ubuntu 11 04 Natty Narwhal

Although a bit inspired (a bit! :D) by Apple, I gotta say that the Elementary team do have a talent for creating amazing applications + especially when it comes to art work... they just rock!.

Although they started off as a project that used to give (it still does) a beautiful looking complete theme suite for Ubuntu, but soon they saw their opportunity and seize it :) which is now called the Elementary OS (finally something of their own). As said when looking at what theyve done and the small group of geeks in the team, its bloody amazing what a bunch of people can achieve.

Anyhow, among many of their inventions, the previously introduced Elementary theme was a massive hit within the GNU/Linux community. As said, its clear that theyve taken few ideas from Apple but that theme looks awesome nonetheless!.

Although this may not interest many but have you been looking for a bit darker version of that elementary theme??, well if you were, then youre in for a little treat pal :) because few days ago another a deviantart user called Satya released a darker version of the elementary theme called "elementary Dark!".

Main features...

*. Two buttons instead of the usual "three". Maximize button to the right edge and the close button to the left-edge.

*. Re-customized breadcrumbs for the Nautilus.

*. Panel colors included.

*. This does not work in Unity. I mean it does, partially. For instance, in Unity, after installing, the theme will only change the look-n-feel of Nautilus and other individual apps and wont "touch" the application launcher nor the top panel, etc.

So at the moment it only supports Gnome classic desktop (metacity, GTK2).

My desktop after installing, Im using the Gnome High-Contrast icons...

One thing that I noticed after installing it was the lightness of the mouse pointer which means that thanks to the murrine engine, unlike with the default Ubuntu theme (Ambiance, which is also based on murrine) which is a bit slowish, but the elementary dark theme "feels light"!.

Anyhow you can install the elementary dark theme in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, although I havent checked this may also work in Ubuntu 10.10 and 10.04 too.

Although recent version of Ubuntu comes with murrine pre-installed as mentioned before (Ambiance is based on it) but the developers advices to have the latest, most up to date version installed.

1. So to install the latest murrine theme engine in Ubuntu 11.04/10.10 and 10.04 (using the PPA), open your Terminal window and enter the below commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:murrine-daily/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-murrine

2. Now youre ready to go to the next step.

The theme does not have any other dependencies but if you want the best possible integration, then you should have the elementary-mono-dark icon theme installed. To do that simply use the below command.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementaryart/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install elementary-theme elementary-icon-theme

If you also want the wallpapers... then use the below command as well.

sudo apt-get install elementary-wallpapers

3. Now get the actual theme from here and extract it , say to your desktop. Now open your Terminal and change the directory to your desktop (or where you have it extracted) and enter the below command.

sudo sh ./INSTALL 

Now you should have successfully install the elementary dark theme in Ubuntu Linux!. Use your usual procedure to apply it to system-wide.

If you use Fedora, to make a long story short, enter the below command and then jump to the step "3" right away. That should do it for you. 

yum install gtk-murrine-engine

However...

The bit "lighter version"... also looking good :)...

... if youd prefer a bit more "lighter" version then there is another theme based on this one from the same dude called "elementary dark mod" that you can get from this page. Again, thank you Satya for this pretty cool theme. Enjoy!.

Available link for download