In a previous MTE article, you learned how to create a unified desktop using the KDE 4 Oxygen themes for KDE, GTK, and Firefox. Oxygen is clean, simple, and visually pleasing, but some people want a little more flexibility. QtCurve is a theming system that gives you the configuring power to have varieties of themes, from downright plain to shiny eye candy.
Best of all, QtCurve has native support for KDE 4, KDE 3, GTK, Qt4, and Qt3. For those who are frighteningly obsessive about having uniform boxes, buttons, and sliders, QtCurve is perfect.
If QtCurve is in your Linux (or other Unix-like OS) distribution’s repository, installing qtcurve is as simple as a single command, such as the Ubuntu command:
sudo apt-get install qtcurve
Many distributions, however, do not have the latest version. For that you will need to compile it from source. First, visit KDE-Look.org, and download all three source archives: KDE 4, KDE 3, and Gtk 2. Then, open a terminal, such as Konsole, and follow these steps:
(Note: To compile from source, you will need the qt, gtk, and kde development libraries installed)
1. Extract the archives:
tar -xvjf QtCurve-Gtk2-1.2.0.tar.bz2 tar -xvjf QtCurve-KDE3-1.2.0.tar.bz2 tar -xvjf QtCurve-KDE4-1.2.0.tar.bz2
2. Repeat these steps for each directory:
cd QtCurve-KDE4-1.2.0 mkdir build cd build cmake .. make make install exit
3. Start KDE “System Settings”
4. Click “Appearance”
5. In the “Style” tab, click the widget style dropdown menu and select “QtCurve”
6. Click “Configure…”
7. Choose a preset theme, import one you have downloaded from KDE-look.org, or fiddle with the settings until you have the theme you want
8. Click the “Legacy” option (third from the bottom)
9. Click “Export colors and fonts” for both KDE3 and pure Qt3, and then click OK
10. With the appearance settings still open, click “GTK Styles and Fonts”
11. Choose “User another style”, select “QtCurve”, and then click “Apply”
12. Close System Settings
At this point, you have configured the KDE4 and GTK2 settings, but your pure Qt3 and Qt4 apps, such as SMplayer and Arora browser, will be unaffected. Follow these steps to configure each.
1. Press Alt-F2 and type “qtconfig” in the Run Command dialog
2. When the Qt-Configuration window appears, select “QtCurve” as the GUI style
3. Click “File” and “Save”
4. Close the window
5. Press Alt-F2 again and this time type “qtconfig-qt4”
6. Select QtCurve, click “File” and “Save”, and close the window.
You should now have a completely unified desktop with all of your apps looking like they were cut from the same mold. You can control colors for all widget sets in your normal KDE color dialog in System Settings. You also have the option of using the QtCurve window decorator, which now supports KDE 4’s window grouping (a.k.a. tabbed windows). Configuration options for the window decoration are in the QtCurve style settings dialog.
To download more QtCurve themes, visit KDE-Look.org and click “Themes/Styles”. Look for themes that have “QtCurve” next to the titles or just use the search function.
Enjoy!
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