Labs / Custom styles / Theme for Acer Aspire One desktop

I love my Acer Aspire One net­book. It really is so much eas­ier to carry around with you if you’re just gong to a meet­ing, or trav­el­ling and only need email, web surf­ing and some other small tasks.

How­ever, the default desk­top is pretty ugly. And being the sort who doesn’t like ugly, I whipped up a ‘theme’ that can be eas­ily used to pretty up the default desk­top. It’s hardly per­fect, but it’s about the best that can be done with the cum­ber­some sys­tem the desk­top uses.

Below, on the left you can see the orig­i­nal desk­top, and on the left you can see my updated ver­sion. Click on a thumb­nail to enlarge.

This is ver­sion 0.1

Install:

  1. Down­load the files to your Aspire One
  2. Locate the zip file you just down­loaded and dou­ble click it.
  3. XArchiver will open. Click the Extract but­ton. Choose a loca­tion to save to.
  4. Locate the files you have just extracted. It will be a folder called ‘images’.
  5. Press Alt+F2 to bring up a Run win­dow. Type ‘ter­mi­nal’ (no quote marks) and press enter.
  6. A ter­mi­nal win­dow will open. Copy and paste this into the win­dow:
    sudo thunar /usr/share/backgrounds/
    and hit enter. This opens a file viewer win­dow where you will see, among oth­ers, a folder called ‘images’.
  7. Right click on the ‘images’ folder and choose Rename. rename this folder to ‘images_old’ or sim­i­lar. This backs up your old theme in case you want to go back to it.
  8. Copy the ‘images’ folder you unzipped into the folder you just opened.
  9. Go back to your ter­mi­nal win­dow and copy and paste:
    sudo mousepad /usr/share/search-bar/start-search_bar.sh
    A file will open. Place a # at the start of every line. Save the file and close it.
  10. Close all win­dows and restart the com­puter. You will see your new desk­top when the com­puter has fin­ished restarting.

Impor­tant Notes

  1. These files are sup­plied with no kind of war­ranty. If it breaks your com­puter, it’s not my fault, etc.
  2. This theme does not include the appli­ca­tion icons you can see in my screen­shot. They are by the very tal­ented David Lan­ham .
  3. As my screen­shot shows, this will dis­able your desk­top search bar. I found it point­less. If you want to keep it, miss out step 9. How­ever, the search bar will not fit the rest of the theme. If you want to use a wall­pa­per that fits with the search bar, try this wall­pa­per , by gliph_writer in the AspireOneUser.com forum .