How to reinstall?

[hhliou2]

Hello, I am running Ubuntu 24.04.

I was interested in messing with the color scheme in the GTK css, mainly because I was seeing if I could self configure a dark mode. I ended up giving up on some kind of conversion, and realized I forgot to make a backup css, so I figured I could try reinstalling based on your provided instructions.

The first re-installation attempt seemed to make zero changes, so I figured I would delete the entire theme and have it reinstall from there. Unfortunately for me, it seems to do nothing, on top of now being short a theme. So far I have tried redownloading and rebuilding from source, with no luck.

I apologize for asking about what is probably an easy fix, but could you provide instructions on how I can go about fully uninstalling and reinstalling the conversion? Thanks for your help!

[rozniak]

Well if you built the packages and reinstalled them, and apt or dpkg definitely said it installed stuff (not skipped or had errors) then that would replace the files.

Did you edit / delete the theme CSS under /usr/share/themes ? If you could let me know exactly what you did in detail, I can try and help figure out what's gone wrong. 👍

[hhliou2]

Yes, I edited and ended up deleting the entire theme from /usr/share/themes. My last reinstall method was deleting and recloning the repository, running packaging/buildall.sh, changing directory to xptc, and running your provided commands adjusted for Ubuntu:

for lib in 'comgtk' 'shcommon' 'syscfg' 'registry' 'shelldpa' 'shlang' 'winbrand' 'sndapi' 'comctl' 'exec' 'msgina' 'shellext' 'shell'
do
    find . -type f -iname "*${lib}.*" -exec sudo apt install '{}' \;
done

find . -type f -exec sudo apt install '{}' \;

If it matters, I didn't bother redownloading the build-time dependencies. I don't think that's the culprit but it helps to be thorough.

Nothing seems to be able to bring the theme back, and I'm beginning to wonder if there's something in the installation that makes it as though the theme is there and already installed.

[rozniak]

The package manager tracks what stuff is installed - you can't just get rid of things by deleting the files. 😛

You might need to try and remove the package for the theme first and then reinstall it... I'm not sure whether it will like the fact you've edited/deleted files but it's worth trying anyway.

If you edited the Luna (Blue) theme for example, do sudo apt remove wintc-theme-luna-blue

See if it's happy to do that, and then reinstall that package.

[hhliou2]

Ah, I wish I knew earlier that themes could be uninstalled using package manager commands. Surprisingly, deleting the files didn't end up killing the uninstall process, so that ended up fixing the reinstall. Thank you!

On a side note, would it be possible to support a dark mode in the future? Much as I love the old Windows XP look, I've gotten so used to the dark look. Nevertheless, the CSS file looked like it'd take a while to edit everything nicely.

Thanks again :)

[rozniak]

Ah, I wish I knew earlier that themes could be uninstalled using package manager commands

Yea, that's why the build lives under /packaging, and you use apt/dpkg to install the output instead of the usual make install elsewhere. You should be able to clean remove the whole thing, reinstall, upgrade etc. 😛

To see everything you have installed you can do apt list --installed | grep 'wintc'

On a side note, would it be possible to support a dark mode in the future? Much as I love the old Windows XP look, I've gotten so used to the dark look. Nevertheless, the CSS file looked like it'd take a while to edit everything nicely.

Sort of, with like #89 ... though it is more of a wishlist item since it's 'additional' to what Windows XP originally had. If you want to just toy with the CSS, it would be easier to edit the sources in the repo (SASS) rather than the package's CSS.

Say you wanted to muck around with Luna (Blue), the SASS source lives in /themes/luna/blue in this repo:

• Edit the source files under /themes/luna/blue (you're probably interested in the scheme file for colours, though maybe some bits under gtk-3.0/)
• Once done, under /packaging, do ./build.sh themes/luna/blue to produce the CSS etc.
• Then ./package.sh themes/luna/blue to package it up to a .deb
• And finally sudo dpkg -i ./local-out/wintc-theme-luna-blue.deb to install the new package
• Deselect and reselect the theme in Appearance settings to see the changes

Hope this helps if you want to toy around with it. Let me know if you need any information about anything. 😁