[needs-packaging] Nimbus GTK theme

Any update? :)

Yes, the Nimbus support would be opportune, since no new theme in the Hardy.

No new theme, eh? True. Packaging this will satisfy a lot of people's wants and needs. I'm using Nimbus primarily because of its lightness. For some time, I settled with Human and Fedora's Nodoka because they work well with 'tangified' icons but no decent theme is more resource-efficient Nimbus.

Don't know if there is any update, but I would also like to see the Nimbus theme included in ubuntu.

Nimbus is extremely professionally designed, wr to usability and beauty. Together with some other colour scheme than the ugly brownish style (my personal opinion and opinion of all people I moved over to Ubuntu so far, no offense intended) this could be a real competitor against Mac OSX appearance.

I already did some Nimbus packages ad offered them, but simply packaging is not enough as some versions had some little rough corners that came from the OpenSolaris desktop layout.

Please, can we have this for Hardy?

Link to a screenshot that show the potential issues with the sources but also the beauty of the Nimbus theme:

http://vale.homelinux.net/wordpress/2007/09/29/nimbus-beauty-for-your-ubuntu-desktop/

A nice person called wiz has started to provide packages via his/her PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~wiz/+archive

However, his/her packages also suffer from the problem of not really being customized for Ubuntu - the Application menu icon in the upper tool bar shows the Opensolaris Community Icon with the arrow pointing up cause the icon is used in Opensolaris for the lower tool bar etc.

But nevertheless a first step - Nimbus is by far the most beautiful and professional theme right after Aqua and fits nicely to the Ubuntu colour scheme except of the brownish colors (which are dead ugly, IMHO). Thanks whiz.

Further information about Nimbus from the developer blog:

http://www.jasperpotts.com/blog/category/nimbus/

I'm not sure how to do this - I've only been using Linux/Ubuntu for six months, but I do have the latest Nimbus themes and gtk-engine (version 0.1.1 from Sun) customised for ubuntu in both i386 and x86_64 debs.

If there is someone who wants to help me learn how to package these for inclusion in ubuntu, then I will take it on. It would also be helpful if there was someone who was a GTK theme expert - I'd like to learn more about GTK themes in general, particularly in the use of the make and install files. It has been a very long time since I have programmed in C.

I am attaching a screenshot of my desktop with Nimbus applied. I am running 8.10 AMD64 on this machine and installed Nimbus from my .deb file.

The latest Nimbus upstream update changed the icons a little bit, so that especially the start menu icon now does not need to be changed for upper screen taskbar. IMHO, no further customization required.

Latest PPA packages can be obtained here:
https://launchpad.net/~pcastellazzi/+archive

--> I am using these packages on all our machines (i386 and amd64) on Intrepid and I did not encounter any difficulites so far. So maybe you want to take those as a starting point - maybe you can pcastellazzi how he did packaging?

I am also lacking experience, but in theory, you just create a subfolder that mirrors the root filesystem and you then copy the files to the right places in this folder. Add some packages information, and you are done :-)

In reality, it might be not THAT easy :-)

BTW, I started a vote on Brainstorm for Nimbus - not very successful, unfortunately....

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/14144/

The latest Nimbus upstream is version 0.1.1, which is quite a bit up from 0.0.17. I was able to make two packages that fully installs the themes - one for i386 and the second for 86_64. The package installs the icons and the appropriate gtk-engine. I will check with pcastellazzi to find out how to package.

This is the 64-bit package

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/NewPackages explains how to get a new package included in Ubuntu.

This is what I get when I try to upgrade from 0.0.17 as provided in PPA:

root@xxxxxx:/home/xxxxxx/Dropbox/Linux# dpkg -i nimbus*.deb
(Lese Datenbank ... 119023 Dateien und Verzeichnisse sind derzeit installiert.)
Entpacke nimbus-0.1.1 (aus nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_i386.deb (--install):
 Versuche, »/usr/share/themes/nimbus/metacity-1/button-close-icon-prelight.png« zu überschreiben, welches auch in Paket gtk2-engines-nimbus ist
dpkg-deb: Unterprozess paste mit Signal (Broken pipe) getötet
Fehler traten auf beim Bearbeiten von:
 nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_i386.deb
root@xxxxx:/home/xxxxxx/Dropbox/Linux#

Maybe you want to keep the package name "gtk2-engines-nimbus"? That seems to be the reason for the collission.

The gtk2-engines-nimbus is included in the package. I'm sorry, but I
don't read German, so is it possible that you could provide some
specifics on the error message that you are getting.

On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 20:40 +0000, Christian Wolf wrote:

> This is what I get when I try to upgrade from 0.0.17 as provided in PPA:
>
> root@xxxxxx:/home/xxxxxx/Dropbox/Linux# dpkg -i nimbus*.deb
> (Lese Datenbank ... 119023 Dateien und Verzeichnisse sind derzeit installiert.)
> Entpacke nimbus-0.1.1 (aus nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_i386.deb) ...
> dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_i386.deb (--install):
> Versuche, »/usr/share/themes/nimbus/metacity-1/button-close-icon-prelight.png« zu überschreiben, welches auch in Paket gtk2-engines-nimbus ist
> dpkg-deb: Unterprozess paste mit Signal (Broken pipe) getötet
> Fehler traten auf beim Bearbeiten von:
> nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_i386.deb
> root@xxxxx:/home/xxxxxx/Dropbox/Linux#
>
> Maybe you want to keep the package name "gtk2-engines-nimbus"? That
> seems to be the reason for the collission.
>

The error message says that an error occured while trying to overwrite »/usr/share/themes/nimbus/metacity-1/button-close-icon-prelight.png«, which is part of package gtk2-engines-nimbus, and therefore the dpkg-deb process paste was killed with signal broken pipe.

If you add

Conflicts: gtk2-engines-nimbus

to the control file, gtk2-engines-nimbus will be removed from aptitude before installation of your package is possible, so the error would not occur (at least I think that will happen, have not tried :-) )

The other question is wether your package name (nimbus) or gtk2-engines-nimbus follows the standards for package names of desktop themes - a question I have no answer for. However, looking into the repository, other Gnome themes are also following this package name scheme: gtk(2)-engines-xxxx

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=engines&searchon=names&suite=intrepid&section=all

When I build the debs, I'm not given an option to specify 'Conflicts:'
Do you have any idea where that goes?

These are the instructions that I have to build the debs. Please note
that the last step is where I set up the name and version number
information.

./configure --prefix=/usr Prepare the files necessary to compile the
theme
make Compile the theme
sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no --install=no Check and make sure that
all is okay. This will also create a .deb file

Thanks,

On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 09:11 +0000, Christian Wolf wrote:

> The error message says that an error occured while trying to overwrite
> »/usr/share/themes/nimbus/metacity-1/button-close-icon-prelight.png«,
> which is part of package gtk2-engines-nimbus, and therefore the dpkg-deb
> process paste was killed with signal broken pipe.
>
> If you add
>
> Conflicts: gtk2-engines-nimbus
>
> to the control file, gtk2-engines-nimbus will be removed from aptitude
> before installation of your package is possible, so the error would not
> occur (at least I think that will happen, have not tried :-) )
>
> The other question is wether your package name (nimbus) or gtk2-engines-
> nimbus follows the standards for package names of desktop themes - a
> question I have no answer for. However, looking into the repository,
> other Gnome themes are also following this package name scheme: gtk(2
> )-engines-xxxx
>
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=engines&searchon=names&suite=intrepid&section=all
>

I've started the 'learning curve' for how to properly package the nimbus package and how to maintain it going forward. The learning curve is steep, since I'm coming from ground zero.

I have placed the source and my current debs on http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=046374f71330ec4dab1eab3e9fa335ca1691171a9aedb7a6

I would appreciate it if someone could start looking at these and give me some advice on how to properly package these. I will update the contents at this site as I go through the learning curve, as well as add thoughts and progress on this bug report.

Thanks,

I am still waiting for the old problem to be fixed, having all the icons work on Linux. Many beautiful icons are wasted because the naming convention is for Solaris.

I have a couple of questions:

1. I have setup a project in Launchpad, nimbus-ubuntu. I haven't figured out how to do a code import yet. If someone knows how to import the code from my machine into launchpad, then could they tell me how. The code is currently stored on a directory in my machine.

2. How do we find out what the icon naming convention should be for ubuntu?

3. How do we find out what the icon naming convention is in nimbus?

Once we know these things, then we can figure out how to get from point A (nimbus on OpenSolaris) to point B (nimbus on Ubuntu). Along the way, we may learn a few things.

I would like to suggest that we start with the nimbus 0.1.1 from the Sun site. Also, I will be happy to set people up as contributors, if they wish.

Thanks,

I will assist you as far as I can, you can add me as tester. However, for time reason, I can currently do not more than test.

By the way, I mixed Nimbus with the Mac4Lin cursors (beautiful animated), a Mac4Lin wallpaper and the Mist icons - looks IMHO also very nice, see attached screenshot.

My first suggestion would be to add a screenshot to your project page on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/nimbus-ubuntu and to extend the scope to customizing AND providing Debian/Ubuntu packages for Nimbus.

Also, we could contact upstream maintainers if they maybe will provide additional icons for Ubuntu, as Sun and Canonical seem to have a good relationsship.

Some more indepth testing also needs to be done - there are possibly icons missing or at the wrong place in the Ubuntu builds that we have not yet discovered. I will try to to this as soon as I have installed the latest Nimbus.

Christian:

I agree with the notion of the Screenshot, and as soon as I figure it
out, I will add one.

I also agree with the notion of supplying an Ubuntu package, but not
necessarily a Debian package. The reason for excluding Debian is the
logo in the top title bar - we would have to have a separate release for
Debian. It's something that we can look at for the future, but I'd like
to stay with an ubuntu release for the moment. Hopefully, you will
concur.

I am attaching a screenshot with a plain background. Have a look at the
trashcan in the lower-right corner. This is the trashcan from nimbus. If
you compare that to the trashcan in your screenshot, you will see that
they are quite different.

I agree that we need to identify those cases where the icons differ
between ubuntu and nimbus and determine how to best correct the
deficiencies that we find.

I am also grateful for your offer of being a tester, and I will set you
up as a tester once I've figured out how to do that.

Many thanks,
Flavelle

On Sat, 2008-11-22 at 14:05 +0000, Christian Wolf wrote:

> I will assist you as far as I can, you can add me as tester. However,
> for time reason, I can currently do not more than test.
>
> By the way, I mixed Nimbus with the Mac4Lin cursors (beautiful
> animated), a Mac4Lin wallpaper and the Mist icons - looks IMHO also very
> nice, see attached screenshot.
>
> My first suggestion would be to add a screenshot to your project page on
> Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/nimbus-ubuntu and to extend the scope
> to customizing AND providing Debian/Ubuntu packages for Nimbus.
>
> Also, we could contact upstream maintainers if they maybe will provide
> additional icons for Ubuntu, as Sun and Canonical seem to have a good
> relationsship.
>
> Some more indepth testing also needs to be done - there are possibly
> icons missing or at the wrong place in the Ubuntu builds that we have
> not yet discovered. I will try to to this as soon as I have installed
> the latest Nimbus.
>
> ** Attachment added: "Screenshot Nimbus theme with Mist icons and Mac4Lin cursors"
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/19859541/Bildschirmfoto.png
>

I created a PPA for the latest version 0.1.2.
https://launchpad.net/~merlwiz79/+archive/nimbus

Hi merlwiz79,
I also have a problem with thie installation of the gtk2-engines-nimbus. The problem is: if I have the icontheme installed, and then install the engine, then I get this error-message in the Terminal:

(Lese Datenbank ... 119023 Dateien und Verzeichnisse sind derzeit installiert.)
Entpacke nimbus-0.1.1 (aus nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_amd64.deb) ...
dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_amd64.deb (--install):
 Versuche, »/usr/share/themes/nimbus/metacity-1/button-close-icon-prelight.png« zu überschreiben, welches auch in Paket gtk2-engines-nimbus ist
dpkg-deb: Unterprozess paste mit Signal (Broken pipe) getötet
Fehler traten auf beim Bearbeiten von: nimbus-0.1.1_0.1.1-ubuntu-1_amd64.deb. Das Packet konnte nicht installiert werden.

So I removed the icontheme in the hidden folder ~.themes. Then i went to Synaptic and completely removed the theme.

But now, if I want to reinstall this package, then there is the message: Error dependencies can not be fulfilled: nimbus-icontheme.

Can it be possible, that the theme and the engine have problems with each other?? Please give me help.

Greetings,
Linuxexperte

hi merlwiz79,

problem solved. Found the solution here: http://www.ramoonus.nl/2009/08/02/howto-install-the-nimbus-theme-in-ubuntu/comment-page-1/

Since I followed this instruction, everything is running. But i would be happy, if - somewhen, there could be a pakage for Karmic Koala (this is the new stable Release of Ubuntu).

Thank you and Greetings
Linuxexperte

hi merlwiz79,

I just switched over to Lucid Lnx 4 days ago and nowI wwould just like to add this nice nimbus-theme into my Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04). Will there be a package for Lucid Lynx too??

I love this Icontheme. Please make a package for Lucid Lynx too. I would be happy seeing this theme up here for Lucid too soon.

Greetings
Linuxexperte

I agree that this theme needs to be put in the Ubuntu repository. For the half-year that I used and developed for OpenSolaris, I used this theme the entire time. It is a very professional theme. To my knowledge, there used to be a version for Ubuntu on GNOME Look, but the download is no longer available.

Hello,

I certainly applaud your effort to improve the user experience of Linux in general and Ubuntu specifically. Knowing very little about Nimbus it sounds like a couple of things needs to happen.

1) The Nimbus engine needs and may already have a development group. If the desire is to expose this to Ubuntu/Debian I would suggest a Launchpad presence.

2) If your desire is to see GTK themes created using the Nimbus engine, documentation is a good start and an existing theme to serve as an example.

3) Get involved with the Ubuntu Artwork team. There is a Ubuntu package titled "community-themes" which can serve as a vehicle into the distribution.

Maverick is all but done but the window for Natty is wide open.

Good luck,

John
Artwork Team

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@jorg: The current upstream source tarball can be found here: http://dlc.sun.com/osol/jds/downloads/extras/nimbus/nimbus-0.1.7.tar.bz2

Latest packages of Nimbus theme for GTK3 are at gnome-look.org:
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=164641

Oracle updated Nimbus to 0.1.9 http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/info/0/gnome%2Ftheme%2Fnimbus%400.1.9%2C5.11-0.175.0.0.0.0.0%3A20110927T093201Z
Latest sources: http://sourceforge.net/projects/schwer-q.u/files/nimbus/