Install The Proposed Community Themes For Ubuntu Karmic Koala, In Ubuntu Jaunty Or Karmic (May Work On Older Ubuntu Versions Too)

There have been proposed quite a few themes for Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 and if you want to install them all in Ubuntu Jaunty for instance, you can just do:

sudo apt-get install community-themes

But not all the themes will be installed because the community-themes package in Ubuntu Jaunty repositories is currently version 0.14 I believe, while the Karmic version from Launchpad is already 0.17. But you can install the Ubuntu Karmic community-themes package (currently version 0.17) in Jaunty without any issues (in fact, it might work on Gutsy, Intrepid, etc, but I cannot test it). Obviously, if you use Ubuntu Karmic Koala, this will also work for you. Read on!


First, a look at the themes in the community-themes version 0.17 which you will be able to download in a .deb file at the end of the post:

The Kin theme

The Night Impression theme

The Impression theme

The Hanso theme

The Turrican theme

The Breathe icon theme

Now we can proceed to installing all these themes in Ubuntu. Basically, all you have to do is download the following two .deb packages:

1. For any Ubuntu version: community-themes_0.17_all.deb (99.0 KiB) (via)

2. The .deb file above has the breathe icon theme as a dependency, so you need to install this too (via Breathe dev Launchpad PPA). Choose the file appropriate for your Ubuntu Linux version, from these:

-Karmic: breathe-icon-theme_0.50~ppa1_all.deb (6.9 MiB)
-Jaunty: breathe-icon-theme_0.50~ppa1~jaunty_all.deb (6.9 MiB)
-Intrepid: breathe-icon-theme_0.50~ppa1~intrepid_all.deb (6.9 MiB)
-Hardy: breathe-icon-theme_0.50~ppa1~hardy_all.deb (6.9 MiB)

Install the breathe-icon-theme first, then the community-themes pack.

You can then select from any of these new themes ( Kin - Night Impression - Impression - Hanso - Turrican ) by right clicking on your desktop and selecting "Change Desktop Background", on the "Themes" tab:

And speaking of themes, you MUST try these 9 Great Gnome Themes with Ubuntu Repositories + Showtime which are really amazing.

Update 20 December, 2009:

There are new versions to these themes. To install them in Ubuntu Karmic, simply:

sudo apt-get install community-themes

For older Ubuntu versions, see updated packages HERE. Don't forget to also install the Breathe icon theme (or else you will get a dependency error). Get it from HERE.

Themes images credits: softpedia.com