LXAppearance Issues

A couple days ago, I had a bit more time on my hands, so I decided to redo UberBang and start from a minimal Ubuntu installation again; this is also because it seems like my respins created with Remastersys don't seem to be installable, so I want to redo it using the Ubuntu Customization Kit. I installed the OS in a virtual machine, installed packages like X, Openbox, Nitrogen, et cetera, and started configuring stuff.
Except that now I can't properly set an icon theme of my choosing. Previously, I used LXAppearance to do this, but now, LXAppearance sees all GTK+ themes as the default Clearlooks theme and all icon themes as the default GNOME Hi-Color theme. I installed GTK-ChTheme to be able to change the GTK+ theme, but there's no other similar program for changing just the icon theme (aside from the whole package of GNOME configuration tools, but I don't want to add all that extra bloat). Plus, editing the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file doesn't work at all; the icon theme remains at the default (and creating a ~/.gtkrc-2.0.mine file and including that in the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file doesn't work either).
Why is LXAppearance giving me so much trouble all of a sudden? Is there a more reliable way that I can change the icon theme? I would certainly love to know!

Announcing UberBang 10.04.2

I have posted an update to UberBang on the same SourceForge project page. It now includes the FBXKB keyboard layout switcher system tray icon, and Volumeicon and NM-Applet are now fully functional. Also present are the Openbox, GTK, and icon themes from the latest build of #! 10 "Statler"; however, the default GNOME-Colors-Statler icon theme used seems to not have been copied over correctly, as some icons (e.g. back, forward) appear a little weird. It seems like Elementary-Statler works fine though. Maybe for the next update I'll use that instead.
I read on the #! forums of people trying UberBang and being able to successfully use the live session but not being able to properly install it. With the previous releases I didn't have the time to look into these further; now I have the time, and I can confirm that UberBang doesn't install properly. It seems to be a known problem with Remastersys, but looking on the Remastersys forum didn't yield a whole lot of useful information (I tried one thing, but it led to a segmentation fault (another error type)). If anyone reading this has used and is familiar with Remastersys, please let me know what I should be doing so that UberBang can actually be installed.

In unrelated news, before coming to the Blogger Dashboard page, I often read news on various other tech sites including (but not limited to) TechDirt, Linux Today, Raiden's Realm, and Tech Drive-in. Having done that a couple minutes ago, I would like to let readers know that Raiden's Realm has been hacked; all that's present is scrolling mixed Arabic/English text on a black background.

A Quick Update on the Respins

This is going to be a quick post. I've made a couple changes to UberBang, such as installing the Murrine theme engine to make the #! theme look right and making VolumeIcon and NM-applet start on startup. I've combined all these and released version 10.04.1 of UberBang, and it can be downloaded here in the same SourceForge project page.
Also, I am working on a new release of Fresh OS ("Elementary"). I will likely be dropping the "Traditional" version for this release because the newest build of Linux Mint "Debian" seems to fill that void adequately now (as it now has all the new features of version 10 "Julia"). I'm not entirely sure about "Light" though.
Finally, I may rerelease Oxidized Trinity 6 "Squeeze" with the Debian Live Installer packages included as well because the Remastersys Debian Installer can be unreliable.
That's all folks. I'm looking forward to a bright, fun, and productive 2011!

An Update on this Blog and the Respins

Last week, I released an Openbox respin of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" called UberBang 10.04. Shortly afterwards, I emailed CrunchBang creator Philip Newborough with questions about the theming issues and related things. He very kindly answered my questions, so I've incorporated those changes (and a few others) and reuploaded the ISO file (which is slightly bigger now but is still under 600 MB). The download link is unchanged. Also, when I get the time, I'll make a wiki for UberBang like I did for the other respins.
Before that, I also released Oxidized Trinity 6 "Squeeze", a respin of Debian 6 "Squeeze" with Trinity 3.5.12 themed to look like KDE 4.1(ish). The download link is still here. Also, when I get the time, I'll update the wiki with information about this Debian-based Oxidized Trinity. (As an aside, interestingly enough, the top downloaders of Oxidized Trinity, as opposed to my other respins, use Microsoft Windows. Maybe that says something about KDE's ability to attract Microsoft Windows users. Then again, it's entirely possible that these are Linux users who just so happen to be downloading the ISO in Microsoft Windows. There's no way to know for sure.)
I haven't released a new version of Fresh OS in a while, and that's because of upgrade issues I've been having with those virtual machines. This stems from a couple of issues with upstream Linux Mint packages. Anyway, I'm waiting for the next snapshot to be released; that snapshot is supposed to have all the new features and themes of Linux Mint 10 "Julia", which may render Fresh OS "Traditional" unnecessary.
Finally, you may notice that the look of this blog has changed again. I really liked the old look, but the gadgets were starting to look weird in an old theme, so I decided to upgrade to a newer template and theme that. It didn't look quite the same, so I decided to try again. I think I've finally found something that imitates the parent theme (which, I found out after a lot of searching, is called "Subtle Beauty") well enough that I can stick with this. I hope you all like it too!

Introducing UberBang 10.04

Main Screen + Openbox menu

If you've been keeping up with this blog, you'll know that CrunchBang ("#!"), an Openbox distribution that was previously based on Ubuntu, has switched to a Debian base (and has added Xfce to the mix as well). While I agree with many of the developers' reasons for switching bases, I feel like now there's a void in the realm of Ubuntu derivatives using Openbox. No, Lubuntu doesn't count, because it uses LXDE, which is a little more fully featured and a bit different anyway (though it does use Openbox as its WM). No, I needed something a bit more like the lovely #! 9.04.01.

SLiM Login Screen

Enter UberBang. It's a spin that I created of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" Minimal. This means that creating this distribution was much like creating Oxidized Trinity 6 "Squeeze" from a minimal Debian 6 "Squeeze" installation; post-installation, I needed to fetch all the requisite packages myself (though I will say that here, thankfully, sudo was properly configured out-of-the-box post-installation). For example, in #! 9.04.01, the scrot command line tool is used to take screenshots. As it is a pretty basic command line tool, I expected it to be installed out-of-the-box; I was wrong.
There were a couple things that I tried to do in UberBang 10.04 to make it feel more like the #! 9.04.01 I knew and loved (as opposed to the #! 10 "Statler" that I didn't like quite as much). For one, I installed Pidgin, Skype, PCManFM, and Cheese Webcam Booth, none of which are present in #! 10 "Statler". I also installed programs like VLC, PiTiVi Video Editor, Claws Mail, Liferea Feed Reader, and File Roller. Next, I installed all of the wallpapers and codecs used in 9.04.01. Finally, I tried to port the #! 9.04.01 Openbox themes and icons (as well as the tint2 configuration) over to UberBang 10.04. While this works overall, this also leads me into the (unfortunately rather long) list of issues to watch out for. Follow the jump to read more about this.