MATE Why aren't gtk2-engines themes listed in Appearance

[kkruecke]

I have installed linuxmint-MATE. I want to switch to Clearlooks theme. Appearance->Theme. I see that gtk2-engines is installed, which contains Clearlooks. But when I go to Appearance->Theme, only Mint-X and Mint-Z are available. Why aren't the themes in /usr/share/themes listed?

[proxima_centauri]

I looked for the package 'clearlooks' in Ubuntu repository. Do you have "gtk-clearlooks-gperfection2-theme" installed?

[kkruecke]

That is a different theme. Clearlooks is part of gtk2-engines as are all the gtk2-engine-xxxx themes.
dpkg -L gtk2-egines
shows that these themes are in /usr/share/themes, along with the other gt2-engine-xxx themes. They aren't being listed though in Appearance. If I do
~: mkdir ~/.themes
sudo cp -rp /usr/share/themes ~/.themes
they will show up.

[proxima_centauri]

Hmm, it would appear the the "Appearance Preferences" version in MATE does not support reading the system folder for themes then.

[kkruecke]

Actually, I was wrong; they don't show up as Themes even when copied to ~/.themes, but they do show up under Customize->Controls. It is like they are not recognized as separate themes. The only way I got them to show up was to do

Code: Select all

tar -cvzf ~/themes.tar.gz /usr/share/themes

on my Ubuntu partition. Then extract them to ~/.themes. So it's weird.

[kkruecke]

The solution was to install the mate-themes package:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install mate-themes

Now Appearance->Themes shows several new themes. But the mate-themes equivalent to Clearlooks is called TraditionalOk, and the equivalent to ClearlooksClassic Controls theme is called TraditionalOkClassic. I guess MATE required some changes to the gtk2-theme-xxx's found in gtk2-engines, so they were given different names in mate-themes?