Tips and tricks: How to get the Mac OS X look and feel on the GNOME desktop

In his article “Painless dual-booting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and a MacBookPro,” Noah Gift shows how to install RHEL 5 on a Mac. This article shows you some customizations that will make your newly installed Red Hat system look like Mac OS X.

The items required do not ship by default but are available at www.gnome-look.org.

Changing default login screen

Download the Aqua GDM theme. This is a theme for the GNOME display manager (GDM) which presents the login screen. To install it, follow the instructions below.

tar -xzvf aqua.tar.gz
su
Password: [your root password]
mv aqua/ /usr/share/gdm/themes/

Navigate to System > Administration > Login Screen and choose the new theme.

Changing default desktop theme

Download the MacOS-X Aqua theme. Make sure you download all three files: the theme itself, the icon theme and the wallpapers, then follow these steps for installation.

mkdir ~/.themes
tar -xzvf 13548-Gnome_MacOS-X_Aqua_Theme_20040730.tar.gz
mv MacOS-X ~/.themes/

mkdir ~/.icons
tar -xzvf Gnome_MacOS-X_Icon_Theme_20040730.tar.gz
mv MacOS-X ~/.icons/

Open System > Preferences > Theme, and select the new theme.

To reorder the buttons for the window border start gconf-editor, navigate to /apps/metacity/general/, and edit the button_layout key to:

close,minimize,maximize:men

If you don’t have gconf-editor installed, which was the case with my system, edit or create the file ~/.gconf/apps/metacity/general/%gconf.xml and make it look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
    <gconf>
	<entry name="button_layout" mtime="1183235731" type="string">
	    <stringvalue>close,minimize,maximize:menu</stringvalue>
	</entry>
    </gconf>

If you edit the file manually, log out and log in again for changes to take effect.

Changing desktop wallpaper

Extract the wallpapers that you downloaded in the previous step:

tar -xzvf MacOS-X_Aqua_Wallpapers.tar.gz
mv MacOS-X_Wallpapers/ ~/.mac_os_x_wallpapers

1. Right click on the desktop “Change Desktop Background”
2. Click “Add Wallpaper”
From the file open dialog choose your home directory
3. Right click in the right pane “Show Hidden Files”
4. Navigate to `.mac_os_x_wallpapers’ directory
5. >Select all files and click “Open”
6. Choose your desired background and click “Close”

The result

Now you have a GNOME desktop which looks pretty much like your Mac OS X one.

A few things are missing to recreate a 100% Mac OS X experience. I hope they will be shipped in the next release so Mac fans won’t have an excuse for not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux anymore.

• For the Mac OS dock (toolbar), you will need gdesklets and the StarterBar desklet. Replace the standard bottom panel with it.
• A Mac style menubar merges the main menu with the menu of the current application.
• Finally, you’ll want a nice bootsplash theme. Two themes are available at gnome-look.org: MacAqua Bootsplash and Aqua for Splashy.

This entry was posted by Alexander Todorov on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 4:11 pm and is filed under tips and tricks, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.