How Do I Change The Colour Of Ubuntu?

[jingaling]

Hi Guys,

I have a bit of a noob questions for you guys, if you could help that would be a great!

I have only been using Ubuntu for around 3 months, I am an IT Manager and being a Techie I like to learn new OS and technologies. Ubuntu was my next learning curve but I have fell in love and migrated all my computers over to it!

Anyway, I digress...I am learning how to play around with desktop effects, I have the opacity and everything enabled and it looks brilliant compared to the out of the box graphics (in my opinion anyway).

The question I have is this, I want to change the colour of 'everything'. By everything I mean the panels the window borders, the menu's...everything . At the moment I am still stuck with Black (or a grey colour now I have opacity enabled) but I like my desktop to be light as I spend a lot of time working on computers. I have googled around but I cannot seem to find a how to guide on how to do this. Can of you guys help?

To summaries (as I have a terrible habbit of rambling on). I would like to change the colours of the whole desktop environment on Ubuntu to something other than Grey/Black, I have Emerald, Compiz and Ubuntu tweak running but I can't work out how to do it.

Thanks in advance for any help guys!

Jing

[TenPlus1]

It all depends on the actual theme you are using in Ubuntu... The Appearance preferences sometimes gives you the option under customize and allows you to select certain colours to change, but unfortunately not all unless you edit the theme itself...

[jingaling]

Thanks for the quick reply TenPlus. So if I have to edit the theme to make it a lighter colour how would I go about doing that?

The theme am using only comes in black , or if you can recommend a nice light theme (I would like something in blue or green) then that would be great also.

Thanks again!

[freeball1]

You could use gnome-color-chooser (should be in universe repos), gives u lots of options for your appearance (see screenshot)

[jingaling]

Thats perfect! Thanks Freeball. If I get stuck I will post a reply.

Thanks again gents!

[DrMelon]

You can change the colour of title bars + scroll bars (etc) by changing the "selected item" colour. Odd, I know, but it works for me.

[Spice Weasel]

Another thing to mention, a lot more customization can be found by directly editing the theme's source. Might not be for you, but the source is located at /usr/share/themes/themename/.