Litestep Theme

Yes, I have been a-theming.

Basically, I went in search of a prettier windows desktop about a fortnight ago, and I found litestep. This is a funky replacement for the Explorer desktop which allows you to load some pretty themes. The problem was, none of them matched what I wanted to do, so I thought I’d go and see how difficult it was to make my own theme. The answer is, surprisingly, not very difficult at all.

Before you start, I would suggest downloading the Dist.Ru installer from here: http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php?id=lsdev:downloads

I found the simple Litestep Tutorial, and got cracking, with the help of wading through the documentation that comes with the modules, I produces a simple “theme”.

It currently works best on a 1024X768 screen, until I can work out how to make it resolution independant. I doubt that anyone will ever use the theme, it’s not pretty, and it’s far too basic to be useful, however it does contain the one thing that I found missing from pretty much all the themes I’ve come across, and that’s the ability to FLASH the taskbar when MSN fires off. It was the first thing that I had to fix, and in doing so, I just added all the things that I would want in a theme. So, that’s what this is, the point where everything is there. It’s not qutie how I’d want it, and no-where near “pretty”, but it’s a good place for themers to start looking.

I will document my theme.rc as a sort of tutorial as I learn things. I’ve found that the documentation on Litestep is severly lacking, so I will try to add to this as I go along (as I said I would about drawing Manga…… )

So, without futher ado, the theme can be found here:http://blog.valhalla.jara23.co.uk/?page_id=116

To install, simply go to you themes directory, create a directory, and drop copy the “theme.rc” into it. Then using LSCP2 (which comes with the dist.ru installer, which is the one I would recomend.), chose “switch theme”, and try it out. Don’t close LSCP2 until you’ve prooved that the menues work. This is good practive if your going to be playing with Litestep themes.

Other themse I’d recommend is the Obsidian theme, though I can’t remember where I got it, if I find it again, I’ll post the link.

Enjoy,

Black Xanthus