On Wednesday 25 January 2006 7:46 pm, Martin Schulz wrote:

This is non-technical - where did all the design effort go SuSe used to spend in 9.*?

I loved SuSe 9.* for the green theme - from Grub over the frame buffer to KDM and desktop themes, all backgrounds with beautiful and soothing colors.

I couldn't believe my eyes and wanted to cry when I installed the SuSe 10 Eval DVD. Plain Redmond WinXP couldn't be more ugly than that.

So download one of the 900 themes available for free over the net

So is this just a penny saving exercise at Novell, or what?

Why is it every time someone doesn't like the way something looks they always say Novell is trying to save money?.... Do you honestly think that out of all the costs at Novell, the GUI colors are at the top of the expensive list? Come on man. 300 web sites that give you pre-made themes and you're complaining because "Novell saved 3 bucks..." This happens to often, every time someone doesn't like something about SUSE it's "Novell trying to save a few pennys"... Here is a secret, they don't make that much of home sales.

And is there a howto anywhere to recover this setup from 9.3?

Thanks for your patience! Martin

Just a recap that what I wanted to achieve was to use the same boot loader, bootsplash and KDM theme as in SuSE9.3. [ Yes, I know it's matter of taste, but I love that greenary; and I don't get why it's not brought forward by SuSE or left alone when upgrading ] Anyhow, since I asked before and got minimal feedback only, and since there are several different twists and gotchas, here's the HOWTO. Btw. the new themes under SuSE 10 are also professionally done, it's just that I don't like them as much and they smell a lot of Redmond. 1) Trivial: Use Control-Center -> Background to pick your favorite wallpaper/background. [ The Suse10 JPEGs (the Chameleon) fit nicely with the green theme from SuSE93, so I picked that ] 2) Easy: KDM theme Despite the intent and name, this is not configurable through the Control Center KDM config, so don't get stuck there. Instead, this is under the control of a SuSE theme configurable through YaST2. This should be trivial, as the theme for KDM is editable in Control Center -> YaST2 Modules -> System -> /etc/sysconfig Editor -> Desktop -> Display Manager -> DISPLAYMANAGER_KDM_THEME, by setting it to SUSE93, however the subsequent SuSEconfig does not really replace the kdmrc file, so there's no visible change for that one either (but maybe I'm getting bitten by dfferent bugs than you). I didn't bother with the new kdmrc file, and instead edited /etc/opt/kde3/share/config/kdm/kdmrc directly, setting the Theme to: Theme=/opt/kde3/share/apps/kdm/themes/SUSE93 Caveat: While this is a very beautiful login screen, it does not provide the Redmond style user icons to click on. I might say, good riddance. 3) Intermediate: Bootloader and Bootsplash theme You need to get hold of the content of the SuSE93 bootsplash-theme-SuSE (but don't clobber your SuSE10 installation by installng that package though), then copy the SuSE 9.3 theme under /etc/bootsplash/themes/SuSE93. Nearly there, the *.cfg files under the config directory contain hard-coded references to JPEG images in /etc/bootsplash/themes/SuSE/images, so the references must be modified to point to the SuSE93 directory instead. Then edit /etc/sysconfig/bootsplash and change the THEME entry to SuSE93. Finally, save a copy of your current /boot/initrd* and run initrd -R. Carefully and at your own risk. Alternatively, just get hold of the SuSE93 image and message files and integrate those into the SuSE theme, by updating the .cfg files. Anyway, I'm pretty satisfied with the end result, even if I didn't do much but restore what I was used to. Maybe this will be of use to someone else. Cheers. Martin