Alright, you're all going to say I'm an idiot. Oh well... here goes... I've been trying my hardest to download and install a new theme. Sounds easy enough. I went to google.com/linux and ran a search for themes. It pointed me in the direction of freshmeat.net. So I searched around and found a Matrix theme that I liked. I downloaded the tar.gz file to my home directory. I went into my theme manager, and tried to add it. It gave me this error: Theme does not contain a .themerc nor a .theme file. Hmm... it said the same thing for a few other themes that I've downloaded. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a place that I can download a good matrix theme, and explain how to install it. I've spent weeks on this stupid thing... I'm lost. All help is much appreciated.

Hmm, you have Mdk9.0, which has KDE 3.0.3 iirc. Sure the themes you got weren't for KDE 3.1? Mdk9.1 has that.
I remember I've often had problems with installing themes, I tried a few times, but then settled with the excellent default ones with Mdk9.1/KDE3.1

Can you name the specific themes and urls you were trying, and do they have any feedback posted there?

Can anyone please help me?

Again, exactly which themes were you trying? Has anyone else posted on freshmeat about problems with them?

A last resort might be to customise your KDE by seperately selecting items from the .tar.gz. Extract it somewhere and then set eg the provided background as your background, icon sets etc.

have you tried the additional ones from your mandrake disc's? - I think its in kdeartwork or something like that but you can have a look for either kde or gnome in the install software thing at the MCC software manager and check out install software>graphical environment>kde/gnome and see what's there - that's what i used in the end, I wasn't too keen on the ones that I found at kdelook but I installed some buttons and so on.

Might help? but if not then ???

regards

John

Try getting them from kde-look.org, lots of cool eyecandy there

I untar, configure and make themes with NO ERRORS

But where do I need to put them?? When I load up the KDE theme manager the new theme I have installed is NOT THERE.

I usually compile stuff in usr/local/src but make install obviously isnt putting anything anywhere

Ideas please?

Try searching for them with "find file" in konqueror.

Sometimes they have ".ktheme" (notice the dot!) and sometimes they are just jpeg images.

I have ended up having to look for both.

regards

John