Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

The Ubuntu light-themes: Ambiance and Radiance got an update today which finally fixes the border around the Metacity buttons, meaning you can now place them in any order without the need to edit the theme in GIMP to fix the border around the maximize button. Well, sort of, meaning the active window buttons were fixed for both Ambiance and Radiance, but the inactive window buttons still need a bit of fixing:

ubuntu radiance partially fixed theme


ubuntu ambiance partially fixed theme



Even though this still needs work, it's a great step forward, especially for those like me who simply can't get used to having the minimize and maximize buttons inverted.


To play around with the button order, don't forget you can use MWbuttons, a great GUI for Metacity (and very easy to use).


This update also means we will no longer maintain the light-themes-fixed package in the WebUpd8 PPA a new version should be released soon anyway and it will fix this once an for all.



To upgrade to the latest "light-themes" version in Ubuntu Lucid, all you have to do is:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade


For Karmic and Jaunty, you'll have to wait. The new light-themes package needs the latest Murrine Engine from SVN - not the one we had in our PPA (or in any other PPA for that matter) but the actual "latest". We've backported the Murrine Engine from Lucid to Karmic and Jaunty but it will take from 11 hours (for 32 bit) to 1-2 days (for 64bit) due to Launchpad being under heavy work lately. We will also update the latest light-themes package in the WebUpd8 PPA but we didn't hurry since the theme is broken if you don't use a Murrine Engine from 23 March, 2010 or newer! We've also updated the ubuntu-mono (monochrome) and humanity-icon-theme packages but the last one also needs quite a few hours before it will start building.

To install the light-themes (Ambiance and Radiance) from the WebUpd8 PPA in Ubuntu Karmic, see THIS post.

Update: it seems the latest Murrine now needs GTK 2.18 which is not available for Jaunty even in a PPA, therefore I cannot maintain the themes for Jaunty anymore.

Update 2: the new light-themes is now available in the WebUpd8 PPA as well as Murrine Engine as of 23 March, but only for Karmic.


Here are the complete changelogs:

light-themes (0.1.5.9)

* Adding new listviewheaderstyle and seperatorstyle
* Fixing Radiance menu seperator padding
* Adding buttons and metactiy config for unfocused windows
* Rearraning values to best match intended design
* Ambiance/Radiance: Reduce progressbar appearance (LP: #535175).
- Minor beautifications / reduced code to buttons, treeview-header, spinbutton, and comboboxentry closer to the original design. Thanks to l3on.
- Adjustment to scale / scrollbar to utilize bg_color for customization
- Mixed focus color (LP: #535177).
- Cleaned up code
- Fix panel visibility (LP: #536844).
- Fix inactive entry text and focus
- Restore missing style sections
- Fix separator-menu-item Mozilla GTK (LP: #538164).
- Fix metacity border not defined (LP: #537920).
- Rewritten metacity themes using trough bg's and icons; prelight, presses, etc. were added (LP: #538721).
- Fix GtkTreeView::indent-expanders (LP: #540973).
- Fix round maximized metacity bottom corners (LP: #541542).
* Ambiance: Fix brown scale in Banshee (LP: #538500).
- Fix comboboxentry (LP: #540511).
- Fix Evolution button/text (LP: #539188).
- Fix white border on show desktop icon (LP: #544962).



ubuntu-mono (0.0.10)

* Adding account-logged-in and new mail icon
* Adding indeterminate states for me menu
* Ambiance/Radiance: Global button settings
- Fix scale borders (LP: #545024).



humanity-icon-theme (0.5.1.7)

* Update Login Screen icon; LP: #542767.
* Correct spelling mistake in applications-engineering; LP: #546430.
* Banshee should have status icons in the panel; LP: #546464.
* MS mime icons in all sizes and more SC icons.
* System shutdown icons for humanity-dark.