GTK, MDK, and XFCE

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Andrew wrote:

> > have you ever run gnome2 on the box, and did that work ok with theme 
> > switching?  if so, then i'm even more confused...
> 
> Good idea.  I just tried running gnome and actually, the same thing
> happens: button icons change, menus/borders change, but nothing else. 
> Does this help diagnose?

quite a bit, actually.  scratch my "long shot" modifier - it's almost 
certainly a gtk engine install issue, or a theme install issue.  is this 
a fresh install of mandrake with a user with a fresh homedir?  if not, 
maybe try creating a new user and staring up X (try both xfce4 and 
gnome2, i guess).  if the problem persists, at least that way we can 
eliminate the possibility that there's a weird config file in your 
homedir that's causing the problem.

if you're unable to fix the problem via normal means, you might try 
downloading garnome (from http://gnome.org/)  it contains an installer 
for an entire gnome2 distribution.  instead of following the install 
directions provided, cd into gnome/gtk+ and run "make install 
main_prefix=/opt/gtk2"  that should install the minimum for what you 
need to get gtk2 working properly.  then you need to put /opt/gtk2/bin 
in your PATH and /opt/gtk2/lib in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or list it first 
in /etc/ld.so.conf and run 'ldconfig') before you start X.  you can 
install gtk themes and theme engines to /opt/gtk2 and you'll have a nice 
confined environment to see if that fixes the problem.  this is a bit of 
a pain to do, so i'd only suggest this as a last resort.  if it gets to 
that and you need help, feel free to email me off-list.

	-brian