Compiling GTK+ Theme Engines

The GTK+ widget library supports diverse customization of look and feel for GTK+ applications. This is achieved by installing a shared library (*.so or *.dll) that provides a particular GTK+ theme style. The default GTK+ theme engine (Raleigh) is too generic and old-fashioned to suit my style. The pixmap engine is too much of a resource hog, and the Wimp engine doesn't seem to work for GTK+ 2.18 and later releases.

My favorite GTK+ theme engines are thus:

• Aurora engine
  
• Candido engine
  
• CleanIce engine
  
• Clearlooks engine
  
• Lighthouseblue engine
  
• MagicChicken engine
  
• Murrine engine
  
• Nodoka engine
  
• Rezlooks engine
  
• Smooth engine
  
• Wonderland engine
  

Compiling GTK+ Theme Engines 2.20.1

After building GTK+ 2 library, I can compile GTK+ theme engines, including Clearlooks and Lighthouseblue. I couldn't find the upstream release of gtk2-engines, so I downloaded the source from Debian Sid's page.

gtk2-engines requires intltool, so I compiled intltool first.

tar xzvf intltool-0.41.1.tar.gz
cd intltool-0.41.1
./configure --prefix=/mingw
make
make install

configure script will complain if xgettext, msgmerge and msgfmt are not found. I got these programs from my static gettext package I compiled previously.

• msgfmt.exe
  
• msgmerge.exe
  
• xgettext.exe
  

Then, I compiled gtk-engines as follows:

tar xzvf gtk2-engines_2.20.1.orig.tar.gz
cd gtk-engines-2.20.1/
./configure --prefix=/mingw --disable-deprecated --enable-animation
make

I only wanted clearlooks, so I copied libclearlooks.dll.

find -iname \*dll
cp ./engines/clearlooks/.libs/libclearlooks.dll /mingw/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/engines

Compiling Aurora Theme Engine

I downloaded the Aurora source from here and unpack it. I compiled Aurora like this:

./configure --prefix=/mingw --enable-animation
make
make install

Cygwin: Compiling Smooth Theme Engine

The source code of smooth theme engine can be downloaded from here. Compiling is easy:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install