Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

On Friday I put together an Openbox arrangement in Crux that looks something like an Intrepid Ibex alpha desktop. I will admit my cretinous nature when I also admit I did it partly to spite the fake desktop “mockups” people throw around. I am petty, weak and shallow, I confess.

After I got it all in place, I rather liked it. It has a very dark tone, and that’s kind of what I was after. Primarily I wanted something to complement that wallpaper — the Heron Simple image from the available wallpaper package.

To be honest, it’s not that great an arrangement. I probably could have been a little more aggressive with the Openbox theme itself, instead of just jumping on one that was black. And the Droid font was just something somebody mentioned on the Ubuntu wiki as a possibility, so I ripped it out to complete the image. The Crashbit icons … were just the first I saw.

I guess the real effort was the conversion of the NewHuman GTK2 theme to rezlooks — which wasn’t much of an effort, since I just since I just commented out any setting that caused errors for the engine. It’s a rather sloppy job. I guess it’s still noteworthy since it retains the effect of the original, even if it’s a good deal simpler. Maybe I’ll put it on gnome-look.org; I’ve never done that before.

Since dark themes don’t entertain me for long, this was gone almost as fast as it was built. After that I recast a variation on LookClear, from Sebastian Sareyko, which I made flat because I prefer it over gradients or 3D illusions. LookClear isn’t very glossy to start with, but it

Being amazingly inventive, I call this “LookClear-Flat” and I like it better than the “Clearlooks-Flat” I spun out a year ago.

This basically removes the destination color variables from the old-style theme config and replaces all the gradient and bezel commands with flat and solid. It also makes the padding a little different, and sets the handles to my own liking. Like I said, I can be amazingly inventive at times. 🙄

This one I’ll put on box-look.org, which allows me to avoid the rotten filename requirements on WordPress.com. Match this with the Rezlooks-Clear GTK2 theme and your Openbox desktop is … well, it will be remarkably similar to mine. 😐