Epidermis theme manager is an open source GTK application for managing, automatically downloading and installing themes of various types, in order to transform the look of your Ubuntu desktop, from the moment you turn it on until the moment you turn it off. Take a look at the screenshots.
Initial screen
Applying a skin
Mac4Lin skin activated
Ubuntu Studio skin activated
Repo browsing
I've just submitted a proposal to Freedesktop's XDG mailing list called Universal Themes. The proposal is attached as a PDF.
The idea is a new file format called "universal theme" (or utheme, for short), to accommodate all types of themes for your computer. Currently, the situation on Linux is far from ideal: find a theme on gnome-look.org or kde-look.org or wherever, and you get a .tar.gz. If you're lucky, it's been packaged correctly and the Appearance dialog knows how to install it. If you're new to theming, you'll just double-click a compressed tarball and be greeted with a collection of confusing files.
This new file format aims to have the following features:
Epidermis 0.5 has been released. It is the first version that is cross-distro: both Ubuntu 9.10 and Debian unstable (sid) are supported.
This release's back-end now relies on PolicyKit, giving users a more friendly experience.
Translations include Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and British English, thank you to all the contributors who translated.
Changelog:
After releasing Epidermis 0.4, reports of Epidermis failing to launch flooded in. Bug #469655 received a record number of eight duplicates. This release fixes this critical bug, along with another less critical one.
Epidermis 0.4 has been released, with a brand new feature: Xsplash themes. Epidermis is the first GUI program to offer this capability, as far as we know. Changing the look of your boot-up screen is now as simple as changing your wallpaper.
Pigment creators also have a new feature to play with: automatic preview generation. Now you don't need to the hard work of taking screenshots yourself any more, Epidermis Creator does it for you.
Changelog:
As I develop Epidermis, I keep thinking of more and more reasons to drop support for Usplash pigments (and grub as well). Here's a list of why:
So don't be surprised if the next version of Epidermis loses a feature!
This release includes one new feature and several bug fixes. You can now choose whether you want the undo feature introduced in 0.3 to be activated. It's everything Epidermis 0.3 was, minus some annoyances.
This release includes several new features. .pigment files can be previewed directly from Nautilus thanks to their thumbnails. You can double-click on them to open, install and activate them. Skins can also be incomplete, you don't have to link grub and usplash pigments to your skin any more.
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I've been working on exciting things for Epidermis 0.3: much better integration with .pigment files. Look at this screenshot: all the .pigment files have been thumbnailed, whatever their type (metacity, gtk, etc).
Good things coming soon...
(for the impatient there's always the bazaar branch)