Combining themes

Arcticflare · Joined: 06 Sep 2002 Posts: 24

Hey, I have been frustrated for a while with the lack of themes for aston, so I thought I might mention a nice little method to mix things that I have used to get by.

See, there are some nice themes, but often I don't want EVERYTHING from a specific theme, or I like certain elements from other themes and not the rest. So, I have discovered that with aston, themes can be easily combined, mixed, modified, and saved as a new theme. It's rather easy really, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if other people were doing the exact same thing.

Do do this, you open a theme, make the changes you want, add the new elements you want, and then go to the theme manager and select a different theme, uncheck all the boxes except for the elements that you want to add from that new theme and click okay. Keep doing this, combining, recombining until you are satisfied, and then save it as an new theme (once you have changed all the element attributes to be part of your custom theme). Name your theme, and a new directory will be created with your theme name and all the elements you chose to be part of it. Check the directory to make sure everything you wanted was saved there. Presto!

Right now my theme that I made and am running has elements from 3 different themes; the taskbar and start button are from one, the start menu itself from another, and the left and right toolbars from yet another. And of course, all my destop icons are custom Wink

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almark · Joined: 30 Aug 2002 Posts: 129

Good point, I didn't realise you could do this.

Arcticflare · Joined: 06 Sep 2002 Posts: 24

Weee.... Screenshots are fun....

http://www.geekshelf.com/gallery/Arcticflare/desktops/aston_chroma_desktop.jpg

ibob74 · Joined: 04 Jul 2002 Posts: 19

Mixing aspects from different themes is a great idea and got me thinking, wouldn't it be cool if... instead of downloading complete themes, there was a section in Aston Themes where one could download parts of themes. For example; a selection of buttons, task-bar bitmaps, left/right tool-bars etc.
I know you can download any theme and extract what you want from it, but I for one don't really want to upload my entire theme (first, because it's mine and I want it to be unique and second, some aspects are created by others and might be copyrighted).
I certainly would be eager to upload certain elements of themes that I created or not currently using.
Any thoughts?

TonySwartz · Joined: 09 Sep 2002 Posts: 8

That's actually a good idea Ibob. Interesting thought. ;D

Arcticflare · Joined: 06 Sep 2002 Posts: 24

You know, that's a great idea. And Aston would certainly get a lot of good reviews on that bit alone..

"featuring the ability to download skins for individual components of the GUI."

That has a nice ring to it, eh? ;D

If that were allowed, people could choose to do either a full theme or just a skin for one component. I can see a door opening to many possibilities... now somebody just needs to suggest the idea to the right person. Any volunteers? Wink

almark · Joined: 30 Aug 2002 Posts: 129

I assume, that the Aston Admin people scan the forum every so often to pick up on all these great ideas!

(Of course assumption is the mother of all cockups!)

ArnOct · Joined: 12 Jul 2002 Posts: 188

[quote author=Arcticflare link=board=aston1;num=1031355555;start=0#2 date=09/09/02 at 03:57:36]Weee.... Screenshots are fun....

http://www.geekshelf.com/gallery/Arcticflare/desktops/aston_chroma_desktop.jpg[/quote]

!

How did you get chroma to work with aston? I've been trying for weeks and I can't get it to work! Sad

thypentacle · Joined: 01 Jul 2002 Posts: 64

I can't get Chroma to work with Aston either. Crying or Very sad

Arcticflare · Joined: 06 Sep 2002 Posts: 24

Have no fear! I can help, but first, another screenshot to get you all worked up:

http://www.geekshelf.com/gallery/Arcticflare/desktops/aston_chroma2.jpg

When I converted the screenshot from bitmap to jpeg some of the colors got screwed up, but you get the idea. It's an example of altering the QNX (theme for chroma) a bit so it looks the way I like it.. I changed the fonts it uses as well as making the top bar gray instead of blue. It's also got a bit of my aston taskbar skin I am making.

Anyways, To answer your questions, I started a thread over at deskmod a week or so ago about running chroma with aston, and I ended up finding a solution, which I posted there. Here is the like to that thread:

http://www.deskmod.com/core.mod?show=forum&thread_id=1364&fstart=0

Read the WHOLE THREAD, and you should be able to use the information I put together to run chroma with aston. ;D

ArnOct · Joined: 12 Jul 2002 Posts: 188

Ah, sounds good... but I'm using windows 2000, so it's hard for me to change the shell= thing Sad

shufty · Joined: 19 Aug 2002 Posts: 11

by this i presume you cant access it through windows so through DOS:

if you want to change the "shell=" line then copy system.ini to floppy and edit it to what you want it to be then in DOS navigate to windows dir

"cd c:\windows"

then type

"copy a:\system.ini c:\windows\system.ini" \\copies from a:\ to C:\windows dir

this should alter it. i sugget you make a backup before hand.... ;D

if it does go all pearshaped and a backup is gone or corrupted, use this,

"copy c:\windows\system.ini a:\system.ini" \\copies from C:\windows to a:\

alter it on another pc and then

"copy a:\system.ini c:\windows\system.ini"

i had to do this whe i tried out another shell called @shell, featuring no shell swapper. i thought i was well buggered. Razz

Arcticflare · Joined: 06 Sep 2002 Posts: 24

Actually, with windows 2000 you can just edit the registry to change the shell instead of the system.ini Wink

ArnOct · Joined: 12 Jul 2002 Posts: 188

Where in the registry do I go to do that though?

smanic · Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2002 10:47 am Post subject: Re: Combining themes

In [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
or
if all user use Aston
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]