Ubuntu – How to add a theme to the Appearance settings tab in 11.10

11.10appearancethemes

Eventually, I'd like to create a proper 11.10 theme and perhaps distribute a package via ppa. To start, I thought I'd copy one of the "official" themes on my local system and start modifying it.

After a google search, this question suggested a simple approach: How do I make a Theme from scratch for Unity?

So I copied /usr/share/themes/Ambiance to /usr/share/themes/MikesExperiment, and edited several text files to change the name appropriately. However, the new theme does not show up automatically in the new 11.10 appearance tab under System Settings, alongside Ambiance and Radiance, and I have to use gnome-tweak-tool to select it.

How do I get my theme to show up on that list?

Thanks,
Mike.

Best Answer

I took a look at the source code for gnome-control-center (specifically the cc-background-panel.c file) and found the answer. The list appears to be hard-coded in the source:

static gchar *themes[] = { "Adwaita", "Ambiance", "Radiance", "HighContrast",
    "HighContrastInverse" };

This was added by Ubuntu (in 04_add_theme_selection.patch) to the original gnome 3 gnome-control-center source. It appears that they did not plan to allow anyone to add 11.10 themes at this time. Presumably the list will be editable or generated dynamically in future versions of Ubuntu's theme selection patch.