So tonight I've been sitting around, eating Mom's fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies (most awesome cookies ever), and I decided that my desktop needed tweaking. It was just too blah. I've been using the Everaldo SphereCrystal theme for Gnome, but, my curiousity piqued by Garrett LeSage's Industrial Theme for Firefox, I decided to test out the Ximian Industrial theme.

I could have sworn that I'd tried it before and hadn't liked it, but it's nice. Very smooth, uniform look, good colours. Somewhat sexy, not gaudy. I like the scrollbars a lot better than the Crystal ones. Definitely going to be using this for a while now, probably until Gnome 2.12 is released come September, or something new and cool shows up.

Speaking of which, I'm still waiting on Gnome 2.10 to be released into Debian Sid. According to one developer, it may still be a couple days yet - looks like they're a bit caught up with getting ready for the Sarge freeze that should be happening soon. I went ahead and threw the pkg-gnome repository into my sources.list, though, so I can get my hands on it ASAP. I've been having this severe itch over it, not really for any reason in particular. Just the smell of new stuff to break.

It's kind of weird when you get excited about new releases of open source software. Even bugfix development releases (2.10's not that). Geeky. On that note, I also added a couple Gnome-related RSS-feeds to my packed newsreader, just for kicks.

Among other tweaks I made were subbing in the official Firefox and Thunderbird icons into the Debian builds of the apps, seeing as how theirs are a little on the lame side. My apps menu keeps resetting the icons on just those programs, though. Weird. I also just grabbed a new GAIM smilie theme, so I can stop remarking to myself every time I use AIM (read: every day, multiple times) about how ugly the default AIM icons are.

I also tracked down the Gnome-Tb theme to make Thunderbird fit the look. And spent some time lurking around GNOME-Look and GnomeFiles, grabbing a few new login screens and GXMMS, so I can manage XMMS from the taskbar. Works fairly well, except that you need to have XMMS open in order for it to work; if you start the playlist without opening up XMMS first, it'll sort of half-open XMMS where it'll show up as being open, but you won't be able to maximize it. I did grab a couple new skins for XMMS too, though I still can't find one that I particularly love. Jimmac's Ximian - South and the WinAmp 5 clone are fairly nice.

Other than that, I tried fiddling with putting up a bootsplash screen up, using the DebBlue theme. After almost breaking things once with that, I think I'm going to let it sit for a day or two (Mike usual does anything involving the kernel, though I'd better get used to it eventually). At least I kept a backup of my wlan modules. Whoops.

Overall, I'm liking the integration. It's slick. Hot. It's amazed me how many talented open source graphic artists there are out there.

Current favourite login screen/wallpaper? Tux versus MS Butterfly. Squashed.

Edit: GNOME Journal's fine-toothed review of Gnome 2.10 has me continuing to be itching for those Debian packages. (And staying up till 2 AM.) I also threw up a screenshot of my desktop, for kicks.