Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid – Windows 7 Theme

My daily visit to Slashdot brought me a rather nice Windows 7 theme for Ubuntu 10.4 today.

I certainly wouldn’t say that I disliked the new Ubuntu Gnome theme for 10.4 but I happen to like the Windows 7 theme quite a lot. For some people I am sure that putting the Windows 7 theme on Ubuntu is blasphemy – so let’s put this in perspective – it’s just a desktop theme!

As you can see it looks pretty similar to the Windows 7 desktop. The ‘Show Desktop’ button at the bottom right is a little more prominent and the font for the date and time is bolder and wider. The ‘Action Center’ icon reveals a messaging menu for Pidgin and Mail.

The Start Menu looks quite nice and is well organized with the Ubuntu menus collapsed into one, so to speak.

Installing the theme is straightforward. First open the Terminal as follows, click Applications, then Accessories and then Terminal.

Download the theme with the following command:

wget http://lite.fr.nf./r-f

This will download a file called Win2-7Pack_v5.8_Multilang_Aero.

When I download it, it just called r-f than I just rename it to Win7_Theme.tar.lzma

To make the file easier to extract we are going to rename it (so that it does not have a colon in it):

mv Win2-7Pack_v5.8_Multilang_Aero Win7_Theme.tar.lzma

Next extract the file:

tar -xvf Win7_Theme.tar.lzma

You should now see a folder called Win2-7Pack_v5.8_Multilang_Aero.

To install the theme simply change directory and run the GUIInstall.sh script:

cd Win2-7Pack_v5.8_Multilang_Aero
./GUIInstall.sh

You will be able to choose between a basic or advanced installer. I chose the advanced one to see all of the options available. I chose not to install Compiz or Wine but otherwise selected all of the installation components. After that I accepted the defaults except for the Wallpaper (where I selected the ‘un-branded’ option) and the Browser (where I selected Firefox).

Overall I think that this theme looks really nice – the transparent borders and blue theme are just what the Doctor ordered.

Source: PricklyTech – Linuxtrends