Just a few days ago I downloaded some new gnome themes from freshmeat.net and i tried to install them under the Gnome Theme option but none will show up. I did it exactly the way the help files said. The files were tar.gz files and I clicked installed, waited for a bit but none showed up in the list. Am I missing anything? Do I need to untar them from the commandline? I've tried to untar some of them under the command line but when I went to ./configure it tells me/configure is not a directory. I didn't think it would be this difficult to install/change a theme.

i believe you don't have to untar them. go to desktop preferences, themes. then click install new theme. point it to the tar.gz file you want and click install. then restart gnome, and the new theme should be there in desktop preferences, themes. if it's not there, then click theme details and look at each of the three (i think?) tabs for the theme you just installed, cause sometimes it's only an icon theme, or only a window theme, etc. instead of a full theme.

thank you so much your advice worked. only thing that sucks is the other themes are not there but oh well. i think they maybe kde themes. i appreciate your advice. thank you again

sometimes
particularly with gnome icon themes,
you need to extract the file manually into /home/xxx/.icons
otherwise they don't show up in the gnome theme manager