[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Unbreaking themes in Sardine

[From: Michael Dominic Kostrzewa]

Hey,

As some people have noticed in the past, theming/display used to be
pretty broken when using Sardine. This was caused by the fact that (due
to the way things were packaged/organized) we couldn't really provide
any gtkrc/theme updates without providing the whole graphical package (a
package that includes the themes we're working on that can't be made
public). 

This is, however, no longer the case. From now on, the theming
components (hildon-theme-*) become an integral part of Sardine and will
be kept up to date in future. No more theming breakage! 

To get on going, after installing Sardine, try:

$> apt-get install hildon-theme-plankton-3

This will install a new, updated theme called "Plankton". It's not
activated by default so you need to manually select it from the control
panel. For the time being the theme actually looks like the old "purple"
N770 theme. But this is temporary -- tigert from the Tango fame is
almost done with the real "plankton" tango-theme which is *very* sweet
and IMHO much more pleasing than other theme we bundled before. Plankton
is going to become our new "development" theme and will be always
public/updated.

To make it all possible we introduced a small "system" of separate
theme/layout/tool packages that can be used by the community to create
custom themes for different versions of the platform. We'll be writing
more about this in future, but for now you can check out the following
packages in the Stage repository:

hildon-theme-tools
hildon-theme-cacher
hildon-theme-layout-3
hildon-theme-plankton-3

"3" here stands for "maemo version 3" -- Bora. We'll be providing
"2"-versioned stuff to build themes for stock Mistral installations
too. 

Best regards,


-- 
MDK