After taking a peek at OpenSolaris (great tech, nicely laid out, meager package repository), I wanted to bring its Nimbus theme to my Ubuntu install. Here are the fruits of this work.

I took the basic information found here and updated it for the current version of Nimbus and Ubuntu.

A copy of the install script is available here. The script automatically creates a working directory, gathers the Nimbus source and patches, and builds it all into clean debian packages, ready for standard installation. It also optionally allows you to use the OpenSolaris logo to avoid the overly-large JDS logo on the main menu - although this defaults to off, I personally highly recommend turning it on before you run the script.

One known issue is when using the Nimbus GTK controls, the background color for the default main menu (Applications/Places/System) doesn’t adopt the panel color for some reason. I’m still investigating this.

NOTE: This script must be run as root to install packages and such, so you must use sudo when running the script.

# wget http://diamondsw.dyndns.org/Misc/Ubuntu/Nimbus/build-nimbus-0.0.12.sh

# chmod a+x build-nimbus-0.0.12.sh

# sudo ./build-nimbus-0.0.12.sh

Once this is complete, you’ll have two *.deb packages - just double-click them and install. The Nimbus theme will now be in your Appearance settings - enjoy!