Desktop Branding

From NetBSD Wiki

Contents 1 Theme outline 2 Notes 3 Wallpaper 4 Download 5 TODO 6 Problems 7 Suggestions

Theme outline

• OS splash screen: [1]

Notes

• This page will be updated soon.
• The wallpaper color is too loud, and so is to be changed.
• The boot time icons are from the 'nuoveXT' icon theme. They are provided as 'food for thought'.
• The gdm and GNOME themes are based on the Ubuntu Human themes.
• The icon theme was missing (i.e. not installed) for the screenshot.
• Nautilus was not running with --browser because the version tested dumps core.
• The terminal is using the 'Inconsolata' font.

Wallpaper

Wallpapers from here: [2]

For NetBSD, open each original wallpaper in GIMP and apply Filters -> Noise -> HSV Noise, then export as PNG. This is to reduce obvious banding due to the limited range of 8-bit-per-channel images and in particular, LCDs.

The orange wallpaper is too loud, proposing to replace it with graphite [3]. This has had noise applied to hide the banding.

Download

Not yet; expect to find themes up for download in the next few days.

TODO

• NetBSD logo looks dull in the login screen, even though it has embossing effect applied.
• This is more pronounced with the splash screen image. Apply a mild effect?
• Confirm copyright status of wallpapers. Ok to distribute as package?
• Confirm copyright status of Human theme. Ok to modify and distribute as package?
• Create a package for these.
• What needs changing?

Problems

• gdm clears screen during login. Better to leave the wallpaper intact so default login is seamless. How to change this? Modify gdm source or config parameter?

Suggestions

• Do not use black for the bootsplash background. It may give the bootsplash sort of cool industrial minimalistic look but some screens need a picture to lock on for auto-configuration which the black background does not provide.

• The Human theme might not be the best theme to start off. It has relatively dark (brownish) and relatively bright (gray) parts. In the default theme the colour parts are something like (very light) sky blue which is a better choice. They are still different from the non-colour parts but pretty much the same brightness.

• Make terminal to default to "Linux console" colors.