Plasma Themes

UPDATE: In kde4, you can right click your desktop, select desktop settings and select New Themes…

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So I found a great article on how to install my first non-default Plasma Theme. I’ve copied most of the steps, but found that some didn’t apply to me. I’m currently running kde4.1 under Fedora 9. If you have any questions, leave a comment and we’ll help where we can.

Steps to take:

1. Create a new folder where you are going to store the downloaded plasma themes
   • Go to the folder “~/.kde4/share/apps/” (My kde folder was ~/.kde/ rather than ~/.kde4/)
   • Create a new folder and name it desktoptheme if it does not exist
2. Get a Plasma Theme
   • Go to the site KDE-Look.org and choose a theme to download.
   • Download the tar.gz file to any folder of your choice (I downloaded the Glassified Theme)
3. Install the downloaded plasma theme
   • Extract the tar.gz file to a folder in the directory “~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/” – Again, the kde folder may be “~/.kde/”. Make sure you extract it into a folder that is the title for your theme as you will need this later.  If you don’t already have the “desktoptheme” directory, you will need to create it.
   • Press “Alt+F2″ and type in “kquitapp plasma”. This will exit the plasma theme. We will get it back later after configuring the new theme.
   • Press “Alt+F2″ again and type “kate” to open the text editor. (You can use any editor for this.)
   • Open the file “plasmarc” found in the folder “~/.kde4/share/config/”
   • Locate the line where it says [Theme] and change “name=default” to “name=[Name of folder u just created]” (In my case “glassified”). In case you do not find the line, just add it to the file ‘plasmarc’ I did not have the [Theme] category, so I had to create it. Just add it to the bottom of the file. like this: (this is where you put the directory name/theme title)

   [Theme]
   name=themetitle

   • Save the changes you made to the file and Exit
   • Press “Alt+F2″ and type in “plasma”. This will bring the new plasma theme

Worked like a charm for me. Great article from http://pramodrt.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/changing-the-kde4-plasma-theme/

Tags: download, fedora, how to, kde4, Linux, plasma, themes

This entry was posted on November 16, 2008 at November 16, 2008 and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.