Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Compiling GTK+ Theme Engines

The GTK+ widget library supports diverse customization of look and feel for GTK+ applications. This is achieved by installing a shared library (*.so or *.dll) that provides a particular GTK+ theme style. The default GTK+ theme engine (Raleigh) is too generic and old-fashioned to suit my style. The pixmap engine is too much of a resource hog, and the Wimp engine doesn't seem to work for GTK+ 2.18 and later releases.


My favorite GTK+ theme engines are thus:



  • Aurora engine
  • Candido engine
  • CleanIce engine
  • Clearlooks engine
  • Lighthouseblue engine
  • MagicChicken engine
  • Murrine engine
  • Nodoka engine
  • Rezlooks engine
  • Smooth engine
  • Wonderland engine


Compiling GTK+ Theme Engines 2.20.1


After building GTK+ 2 library, I can compile GTK+ theme engines, including Clearlooks and Lighthouseblue. I couldn't find the upstream release of gtk2-engines, so I downloaded the source from Debian Sid's page.


gtk2-engines requires intltool, so I compiled intltool first.


tar xzvf intltool-0.41.1.tar.gz
cd intltool-0.41.1
./configure --prefix=/mingw
make
make install

configure script will complain if xgettext, msgmerge and msgfmt are not found. I got these programs from my static gettext package I compiled previously.



Then, I compiled gtk-engines as follows:


tar xzvf gtk2-engines_2.20.1.orig.tar.gz
cd gtk-engines-2.20.1/
./configure --prefix=/mingw --disable-deprecated --enable-animation
make

I only wanted clearlooks, so I copied libclearlooks.dll.


find -iname \*dll
cp ./engines/clearlooks/.libs/libclearlooks.dll /mingw/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/engines


Compiling Aurora Theme Engine


I downloaded the Aurora source from here and unpack it. I compiled Aurora like this:


./configure --prefix=/mingw --enable-animation
make
make install


Cygwin: Compiling Smooth Theme Engine


The source code of smooth theme engine can be downloaded from here. Compiling is easy:


./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

2 comments:

  1. Hey, i can't understand how you compiled that stuff... the commands are typed in Windows our Linux... it seems linux... but where install msgfmt.exe and others? do i need mingw? In Ubuntu, there is mingw package, ready to install in synaptic...

    I want, compile Equinox engine to GTK Windows, can you help me?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you very much!! I could compile it! If you want test and use it, get here:
    http://www.2shared.com/file/6MGDNaLj/libequinox.html

    Equinox is the most wonderful gtk engine ever! Now I can put this engine in my windows apps!!!

    ReplyDelete

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