Removed empathy, no gnome: how to install themes?
 

I want pidgin instead of empathy so I removed it. Aptitude get rid of gnome and themes too.
Whenever I go to 'System>Appearance>Theme' I am getting this warning: This theme will not look as intended because the required GTK+ theme 'Clearlooks' is not installed.
Is there any workaround for this?
How can I install themes?

You have to install the gtk-based theme clearlooks:

You run gnome, you didnt uninstall it.

I would check on that removal. If the OP has not rebooted since the removing empathy it could very well be removed. This will make rebooting to a desktop a little tough.

To the OP
Removing empathy did not remove Gnome, if it has been removed, you did. There is no package manager that will remove things unless you clicked on OK.

I would run, as root;
This will either install the bugger or tell you it is installed.

I would also remember that command. You may need it when you reboot and get nothing but a tty login.

EDIT
I got curious and checked the depends on the gnome-desktop-environment package. Empathy is a depend on that package. So you probably did remove it. I would make sure it is back before rebooting.

I may well be wrong but just judging from your question I would say you probably do not want to deal with an OS with no gui from the command line when you reboot.

This is one reason that all my installs include the packages mc (midnight commander) and elinks. Midnight Commander is a file browser that will work from the command line and elinks is a command line internet browser.

I like to improve my OS too. Sometimes improvements are not as good an idea as I think they may be.

If you have room on your HDD you may want to put on another copy of your OS on a very small partition. You can use that install to test these "great" ideas on before doing it to your main install. Always reboot that "trial OS" to see what the effects of your improvement are.

This is what I get when I do that:

I don't want to reinstall gnome desktop again.All I want is to clear out the gtk2 warning.

I take it that you want, therefore, to run an OS without a desktop environment.

Now I could be wrong, I am a geezer, grumpy at that, but if you have not rebooted I would be a little worried.

This is Linux not MS. It does not run from the HDD, it runs from your ram. What this means is that you can remove anything, including the kernel, and the box will continue to run. That is because you have only removed it from the HDD. The ram is what is running the box. When you reboot the ram is cleared and then reloaded during the boot cycle.

If the files are not there, such as your desktop environment (or kernel if you removed it, not saying you did, just an example), you are not going to boot.

With no kernel grub would error out (no kernel available). With no DE it will boot to a black screen with a command line prompt. You can log in and actually use your box from there. As long as you know the commands for everything you want to do.

You really better check to see if it is there. I doubt that it is. That is a meta package that installs a lot of packages, including empathy, and you cannot remove any of them without removing the bunch.

You could check all the depends and install just the ones you want. This will take a while for you to figure out and do. The meta package is easy.

If you run the command I gave you before or using aptitude as root;
you will know if it is there or not.

Your warning is there because you are trying to change your theme. The theme is not on your ram, it has to come from the HDD using tools that are not loaded on the ram. If those tools are not there, your theme will not be found. Those tools are Gnome tools.

This should be telling you something about the condition or Gnome on your HDD.

There are ways to remove empathy after you fix this and get things back to normal. This will take, probably, a reboot.

You will need aptitude. Be glade you are not running Ubuntu or you would have to install it too.

I should have put this in my post;
Note the "i". That indicates it is installed.

I suspect you will get something like this;
Note the "p". Yours should be a "d" I think.

If you run that and get an "i" then there is no problem. Anything else is.

Thank you for taking time to explain widget.
I don't have problem rebooting and I still have my gui.
This is what I got when I run aptitude search.

This is all great news. Now all you need to do is figure out the package that was removed that gives you the theme problem.

I have no idea why it would be removed but do you have "gtk2-engines-clearlooks" installed. This should be part of the "gtk2-engines" meta package. Clearlooks is not going to work without it.

You might want to reinstall it to jump start it.
This has got to be working, to some extent. or you would have more problems though.

I am not sure what is not allowing gnome to "see" that clearlooks installed. The above is what I would do to eliminate one possibility.

Hopefully there is someone that knows more.

I still think reinstalling the gnome-desktop-environment package would be the easiest way out. I am noted for not doing things the easy way so I can understand if you don't.

Or just install the removed metapackage again, gnome, you uninstalled it while removing Empathy.
You can of course remove Empathy without removing gnome if you want.
That is why it was removed, take a look at the dependencies.

Do you have the gnome-themes package installed? If not, try installing it, as well as the package gtk2-engines (the clearlook theme and engine are included in these two packages, according the the description on Synaptic).

I did this one... downloaded almost 200mb of archives but the problem did not go away.
We'll I think I just have to live with it until I upgrade to wheezy.

My earlier posts suggest that I have this one installed.

Are you sure you're not confusing gtk2-engines with gtk2-engines-clearlooks. These are two different packages (in fact, I think the latter doesn't exist; at least not in debian wheezy). Did you really check if gtk2-engines and gnome-themes are installed?

This is what 'aptitude search' reported (succeeding lines I omitted as they may not be relevant).