[K12OSN] Apply Gnome Theme to all users

[Eric Harrison]

Edwardson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> How do i apply a Gnome theme ( i downloaded an XP theme) to all users 
> (thin clients).
> 
> Edward
> Thailand
> 

The "correct" way to do this is to use sabayon 
(http://www.gnome.org/projects/sabayon/). If you have sabayon installed, 
it will be on your menu as System -> Administration -> User Profile Editor

If you don't have sabayon installed, you can install it with

	yum install sabayon sabayon-admin




But that is simply too easy! Let's do this the hard way! (I'm looking at 
how to script this for K12LTSP 6.0 and am using this email as my 
personal documentation, no need to read any further unless you want to 
know the nuts-and-bolts ;-)



The first thing I did was run gnome-theme-manager (System -> Preferences 
-> Theme) and play around with different theme settings until I found 
one that I liked and jotted down its name (say I liked Clearlooks). I 
then set the theme to something with an unusual name that would be easy 
to search for, "Amaranth" for this example.

I then fired up gconf-editor, selected Edit -> Find -> Search for: Amaranth
and clicked on the "Search also in key values" button.

This returned the following entries:

/desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme
/apps/metacity/general/theme
/desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme

By clicking on them, it will bring them up in the editor window where I 
can manually change the values (say to Clearlooks).

But that is still too easy, and it only works on my account - it doesn't 
change the global settings. So let's play around with some command line 
magic.

First, let's test that we can successfully change the settings on own 
accounts:


gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme   Clearlooks
gconftool-2 -t string -s /apps/metacity/general/theme         Clearlooks
gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme  Clearlooks




Once we are happy with that, we can then log in as root ("su -l" from 
your shell will do the trick), and make these settings the default for 
all users:


gconftool-2 --direct --config-source \
     xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
     --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme Clearlooks

gconftool-2 --direct --config-source \
     xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
     --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/theme Clearlooks

gconftool-2 --direct --config-source \
     xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
     --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme Clearlooks