How To: Change Themes On Ubuntu 11.10

You can change the looks of Ubuntu 11.10 using the gnome tweak tool. If you don’t have the gnome tweak tool installed read this article and for those who already have it installed continue reading.

Press Alt+F2 and type: gnome-tweak-tool
 

Select Theme options

 Cursor theme: allows you to change your cursor

 

Keybinding theme: allows you to change the keyboard shortcuts layout

 Icon theme: Here you can change the icons

 GTK+ theme: Allows you to change the look of the top panel, menu and windows

 Window Theme: Changes the window borders

If you have any shells installed you can change them by clicking on the Shell theme button. I don’t have any shells installed yet so i can’t show you a screen shot with a list of shells.

 
On Ubuntu 11.04 (and older) it was very easy to change your theme from default to a custom theme. You just had download the theme and open your Appearance manager, select the Theme tab and drag and drop the new theme into the appearance manager. But on Ubuntu 11.10 you first need to download the new theme and extract it into the /usr/share/themes folder. And to change the theme you need the gnome tweak tool.
 
If you want to use a custom theme make sure it’s GTK+3 and that the theme file is compressed as a .tar.gz file. Download and save the theme you like in your Downloads folder and to extract and move the theme into you /usr/share/themes folder copy+paste the following line in a terminal window:

sudo tar xzvf Downloads/theme-name.tar.gz -C /usr/share/themes

Replace theme-name with the name of the theme you want to install. When installed you can use gnome tweak tool to enable the newly installed theme.
 
Good luck and have fun changing the looks of your Ubuntu desktop.