Linux Mint Forums

After a number of years using WinXP on my laptop for various reasons, I'm now getting ready to switch (back) to using Linux as my primary desktop OS. I've been pleasantly surprised at Linux Mint -- though I've used everything from RedHat (back in the old days) to Gentoo to Ubuntu (so I'm no newbie), I've appreciated the kind of thoughtful work that's obviously been put into the spit-and-polish of Linux Mint, not just functionally but also aesthetically. Great job so far, guys! There's a slogan for you: Linux Mint: It's not just for newbies.

Of course, I also have a question/feature suggestion to go with my accolades. With my widescreen laptop, I prefer to use a vertical taskbar these days. But the Shiki Mint theme doesn't get along so well with this; it looks like it's only really set up for a hortizontal taskbar, because with a vertical taskbar, the gradient only runs about 1/4" of the length of the taskbar, and then repeats itself, which looks really odd. Can this be fixed somehow (or worked around) so that the Shiki Mint theme (which I otherwise quite like) gets along better with this configuration?

Thanks!!

I'm not sure how you'd handle a color gradient, but if you have an image set as your panel background, you can find the source image (or another one you feel suits your aesthetics) and open it in gimp or another paint program, rotate it 90 degrees, and save it that way. It stands to reason that the rotated image would be evenly applied across the vertical panel.

Thanks for the reply. Initially, I tried just going to the panel preferences and changing the background to the color or image of my choice, but found that it doesn't work right -- several of the applets still only reflect the background of the Shiki Mint style, which feels like a bug to me.

So I found the Shiki Mint panel-bg-dark.png file and modified it directly. I don't like doing it this way, but I'd welcome someone to tell me a more "correct" way to do it... thanks!

ezekiel_quacks wrote: So I found the Shiki Mint panel-bg-dark.png file and modified it directly. I don't like doing it this way, but I'd welcome someone to tell me a more "correct" way to do it... thanks!

There is actually nothing wrong with doing it this way, and it does work. Your other option would be to edit the "panel.rc" file directly and changing the panel-bg-dark.png to some other file name. Basically you are still changing it, but in a different way.

Hope that helps a little.

Well, the main problem with doing it this way is that such changes would be overwritten by any upgrade. Is there a way to modify the theme (or create a modified theme) which would avoid that problem?

Yes absolutely. You could copy the original theme to your /home/[username]/.themes/ folder and edit the index.theme file and rename the theme there. Then you could edit to your hearts content without messing up the original.