The first Linux desktop I ever saw was KDE and I loved it immediately. This is back when I was still a Windows fan and found the similarity of the taskbar and start button/menu type of setup in both OS’s comfortable.

I’m still a huge fan of KDE and have used it almost exclusively for quite some time. I keep dabbling with XFCE which I really like, but still prefer KDE for day to day use.

Now, Gnome is the desktop environment (de) I could never get my head around until recently. In the past few weeks PCLinuxOS final was released. I’ve been a fanboy of this particular distro for quite a while and have been using it daily on my laptop and desktop PC’s. Unfortunately, the final version doesn’t like the laptop any more and nobody in the PCLinuxOS community has so far been able to offer a solution. I’m very disappointed, as it took me a couple of years of distro hopping to actually settle on one distro. I’m now back to square one.

So, I began again. As I’ve tried almost all the top distros over the years, I concentrated on the ones I liked the most, plus Ubuntu. Nope, I’ve never liked Ubuntu, but that’s for another post another time. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 and immediately got rid of the bloody awful colour scheme. My aim being to stick with Gnome for a week or two to see if I could finally begin to understand why so many people love it.

There’s a lot to like about Gnome, I’ll admit. It’s much quicker on the laptop than KDE and has plenty of software specifically written for it. However, configuring Gnome is a royal pain in the backside compared to KDE and dare I say, Windows! Yep, it drives me mad. Considering the pedigree of Gnome, its reputation in the Linux world and the maturity, you’d think they would have sorted out the nuts and bolts configuration by now, wouldn’t you?

Let me give you a prime example of why newcomers to Linux are going to walk away for something really quite pathetic…the default panel. Have a look at gnome-look or kde-look and you’ll see lots and lots of nice wallpapers posted. Many of them are quite dark or dull looking, as dark colours are very popular within themes and skins. Try using a black wallpaper with Gnome and a transparent panel. What happens? Yes, you’re panel text disappears as if by magic. Why? Because the default text colour is black. Easy, just change the text colour I hear you say. Erm, not so fast…

This is not a problem in KDE; you load up the control centre and change the text colour or fanny around with the panel settings. Easy. What do you have to do in Gnome? Same as me probably…search on Google for a solution after spending a fruitless and rather frustrating 45 minutes trying to find a GUI based config editor for the panel. Stop looking now as there isn’t one! No, it’s true and a bit amateurish. Ok, the purists and Linux experts will mock and rant about how they hate gui’s and how everything config-wise is supposed to be done by hand in Linux etc. Whatever. You carry on using Slack or Gentoo then and us beginners will carry on walking away from Linux because it’s too hard and cryptic. Linux wants to get onto the “mainstream” desktops? Well, try making it bloody well easier for the noob to use the OS then! It’s not rocket science, is it? Nor is changing the text colour in Gnome. In fact, it’s dead easy to do, but will still put off a lot of beginners who can’t be bothered or maybe wouldn’t think of searching online for a solution. By the time they’ve reached the stage I did when looking for the setting in question, some of them will have started reinstalling Windows!

To change the text colour in the Gnome panel, do the following:

Type “gedit .gtkrc-2.0″ without the quotes in a terminal window.

In the gedit window, insert the following text:

style “panel”
{
fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
# fg[PRELIGHT] = “#000000?
# fg[ACTIVE] = “#ffffff”
# fg[SELECTED] = “#000000?
# fg[INSENSITIVE] = “#8A857C”
# bg[NORMAL] = “#000000?
# bg[PRELIGHT] = “#dfdfdf”
# bg[ACTIVE] = “#D0D0D0?
# bg[SELECTED] = “#D8BB75?
# bg[INSENSITIVE] = “#EFEFEF”
# base[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
# base[PRELIGHT] = “#EFEFEF”
# base[ACTIVE] = “#D0D0D0?
# base[SELECTED] = “#DAB566?
# base[INSENSITIVE] = “#E8E8E8?
# text[NORMAL] = “#161616?
# text[PRELIGHT] = “#000000?
# text[ACTIVE] = “#000000?
# text[SELECTED] = “#ffffff”
# text[INSENSITIVE] = “#8A857C”
}
widget “*PanelWidget*” style “panel”
widget “*PanelApplet*” style “panel”
class “*Panel*” style “panel”
widget_class “*Mail*” style “panel”
class “*notif*” style “panel”
class “*Notif*” style “panel”
class “*Tray*” style “panel”
class “*tray*” style “panel”class “*tray*” style “panel”

Notice the third line has no hash (#) symbol in front of the text. This is because this line has been uncommented. This is the command Gnome uses to determine what colour the panel text should be. In this case, “#ffffff” makes it white.

Save the document and close gedit.

Now type “killall gnome-panel” in the terminal window, again without quotes. the Gnome panel should restart and the text will be white. Now, if the text colour didn’t change when you did all the above, it’s possibly because cutting and pasting from this blog may have caused the quotation marks in the text above to be the wrong type for Gnome to interpret. Reopen the gtkrc-2.0 file and use the find/replace menu item to replace every quote mark.

The point of this post? Hopefully, to help others who find themselves in the same position as I was. It would be great if the Gnome devs tried to be a little more understanding of the Linux audiences these days. Linux is trying very hard to appeal to the masses and the days where only lab boffins and true geeks could figure it out as an OS are thankfully long gone. However, hiding simple settings like the one above is just not the way to do it!

Jim