Epidermis Change the entire look of your desktop in one click!

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:

• Epidermis ported to Debian unstable (uses Python 2.5)
• PolicyKit support.
• Translations built correctly, including .desktop and .policy files. (fixes bug #469511)

Downloads for Epidermis 0.5

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:

• Added support for Xsplash themes.
• Removed support for Usplash themes.
• Skin previews are displayed.
• Added autogenerate button for Epidermis Creator so that previews of pigments can be automatically created.
• Help message is displayed if no skins are installed.
• License updated to GPLv3.

Downloads for Epidermis 0.4

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:

• Not all distributions support it. In fact, only Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives support it, as far as I know. Dropping Usplash pigments would make Epidermis easier to port to other distros, such as Fedora.
• Usplash themes have to be rebuilt for every release of Ubuntu and for every architecture. This makes creating and distributing Usplash themes incredibly complicated. Pigments are supposed to be indepedendent of the type of machine used. Usplash themes are more like programs in C, so they should be distributed like programs.
• The next version of Ubuntu, 9.10 Karmic Koala, will not include Usplash (brainstorming here). So sooner or later, I'm going to have to drop support for it anyway.

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.

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)