A Win9x inspired theme for GTK3 and GTK2 developed for XFCE4
The Redmond97 project aims to recreate the nostalgic look of the Win9x desktop for the XFCE4 desktop environment.
Included with the main theme package are the GTK themes, the Xfce4WM theme, Metacity-1 themes and various Firefox IE themes. Many color schemes from the Windows 98 Plus! pack are also included. A theme generator script is also available to compile the Redmond97 theme using custom colors.
The following packages are recommended for full functionality:
firefox, xfce4, xfce4-goodies, xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin (included with xfce4-goodies), gtk-nocsd, marco
The theme has been designed for XFCE4 but it is not not required for the use of the GTK and Firefox themes. Support for MATE desktop has also been added. To get the gradient titlebars use a window manager that supports metacity-1 themes such as marco (included with MATE desktop).
For the theme generator the following packages are also required:
imagemagick, bc, sed, grep, tar
There are two ways to get the theme source files. For convenience I always make a tar package of the repository after any updates so you can download the archive instead of cloning the whole repository for every update. You can find the archives here. For those who prefer to clone the repository you can download a copy of the repository by the following command:
git clone https://github.com/matthewmx86/Redmond97.git
Make a .themes directory in your home directory if one doesn't exist and extract the Redmond97.tar.gz archive into the ~/.themes directory.
mkdir ~/.themes
tar -xvzf Redmond97.tar.gz -C ~/.themes/
The GTK2/3, Xfce4WM and Metacity-1 themes will now be installed. It is also recommended to disable GTK overlay scrollbars (autohiding scrollbars in GTK3). The following command will disable the overlay scrollbars for the current user:
export GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0
You may have to log out and back in for the setting to take effect.
To get the gradient titlebars shown in the screenshots you will need to use a window manager that supports metacity-1 themes such as marco. If you are using XFCE4 and want to use the metacity-1 themes you can run the following command to replace XFWM4 with marco. (You may need to install marco)
marco --replace
To set the marco window manager theme in XFCE4 you can use the gsettings command. For example to use the Redmond97 Millennium theme you would type the following:
gsettings set org.mate.Marco.general theme "Redmond97 Millennium"
The main theme includes a GTK2 hack for the system tray and orage clock applet to make them appear to be inside the same inset frame (only applies to GTK2 version of the Xfce4 panel). In order for the frames to display correctly, you must add the two applets in order: "Notification Area" and then "Orage Clock". Your panel layout should look like the image below:
Once you have added the applets you will notice that the frames between the two applets don't line up correctly. To fix this you will need to deselect the option "Show Frame" for the notification area applet. Right click on the notification tray applet and select "Properties":
Uncheck the option "Show Frame" on the dialog window:
The frame borders should now look aligned between the notification area and the Orage Clock applets. (Note that there will be a small gap between the two applets this is currently a bug in the theme.)
The theme includeds a hack to make the clock applet and system tray applet appear inside the same frame. To acheive this the right border from the tray applet has been removed and the left border on the clock applet has been removed. To display correctly the systemtray applet should be followed by either the xfce4 clock applet or the orage clock applet. You will need to uncheck the "show frame" option for the system tray using the exmaple above for the GTK2 panel.
Both the XFCE4 application menu button and Whisker Menu buttons are styled and either one can be used. The theme styles the Whisker Menu window and supports most user configurations, no particular settings are required. In MATE desktop the custom menu bar applet has been styled and includes a styled application menu.
You will first need to find your firefox user profile directory. It is usually the one that ends with ".default". To find the correct directory, open a terminal and go to the hidden Firefox directory. Using grep you can view the directories ending with ".default".
cd ~/.mozilla/firefox
ls | grep default
In this exmaple I have two directories: one .default and the other .default-release.
If you only have one directory ending with .default that one is the correct profile directory and you can skip
this next step. Otherwise, you can run the following to see which profile is the default.
firefox -P
You will then see the following window:
The selected profile is your default profile, in my case it is the default-release profile.
Once you have found the correct profile directory, you will then need to make a directory inside of it called "chrome". Following my example above you would run the command:
mkdir ~/.mozilla/firefox/vugvl4ul.default-release/chrome
Now that the chrome directory has been created, you can install the classic IE3 theme by extracting the ie3_classic_firefox.tar.gz archive into your chrome folder. Again, using my example above the command would be:
tar -xvzf ie3_classic_firefox.tar.gz -C ~/.mozilla/firefox/vugvl4ul.default-release/chrome/
The Firefox theme should now be installed and will be activated once you close all Firefox sessions and restart Firefox.
As of right now GTK3 Libre-Office does not display 100% correctly. Some widgets are off in the preferences window and the scrollbar buttons don't use the default theme arrows. There has however, been many additions to the theme for LibreOffice compatibility and I no longer recommend using the GTK2 workaround for this theme.
- Write documentation for the theme builder script
- Add more features to the theme generator
- Troubleshoot Libre-Office issues
