Liberate Knoppix from Geramik

[unamiccia]

Several days ago I updated my Knoppix 3.2 hard drive install (circa July 2003) with Knoppix 3.3, February 16, 2004 build. All went well, but when I was done a lot of my applications looked worse: The Gimp, Mozilla, and newly installed instances of Firefox and Thunderbird were all burdened by big, puffy, pillowy, hard-to-read buttons and other "widgets."

I prowled around KDE's Control Center for a long time trying to fix this to no avail. Then I posed an incoherent question to this forum and got nothing. So I did more sleuthing and finally got an answer, which I document here.

Basically, Knoppix 3.3 has an unholy alliance with a GTK theme called "Geramik" that looks awful and is hard to eliminate. If you want to get rid of it and are having trouble figuring out how, check the above link -- the fix is nonintuitive, but once you've killed Geramik the results are delightful.

Forge ahead!

[c123]

w3as wondering how to improve the look of my GUI, thought it was just a case of finding a better theme.

thanks, I will be going back to 'normal unsquished' buttons tonight hopefully :)

[c123]

followed your procedure the other night, works fine. the GUI is a lot better now :)

[zz9pluralzalpha]

Wow, thanks!

I've had Knoppix installed for about six months and those gtk-theme-switchers have never worked.

Note to others: the procedure can be summarised as

sudo mv /etc/gtk/gtkrc /etc/gtk/gtkrc-knoppix
sudo mv /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc-knoppix