Themes wont install, and system->preferences->themes is gone.
 

I am very new to linux so please forgive the newb problems.

I am trying to install a new theme, I have tried to get several to work, but so far all of them have done nothing. First I tried kubuntu but all it did was ad more applications, and I think kde was thrown in the mix at some point, only thing that changed when I added kubuntu was the login screen, I THINK I removed kubuntu from the add/remove application. And now I cant find Themes button in preferences, and I even tried to open it in the console.

So my question is, can I install the themes through synaptic, and how can I get themes to come back?

Thanks for any help, snack

That sounds like exactly the correct behaviour and what you should have expected.

Just a quick review; Ubuntu is the Ubuntu OS with Gnome (confusingly) and Kubuntu is Ubuntu OS + KDE. So, if you add KDE to Ubuntu, you will end up with both KDE and Gnome. You will have both KDE and Gnome, both KDE and Gnome applets and will have the choice of KDE and Gnome from the login screen. (And, in general, you can use the kde applets under Gnome or vice versa).

I hope you removed kde rather than kubuntu; if you really managed to remove all of kubuntu, you'd have have ended up with Gnome and no os to run it; presumably dependancy checking would have stopped you doing this.

Is this in Gnome or kde? I'm guessing that you have managed to remove something that you really shouldn't have done;

• backup your own data:
• you'll then need to re-install something (and given the available information I'm not sure what; you might use synaptic to re-install whatever GUI this refers to; pragmatically, depending on 'net access, you might find it easiest to re-install completely from your installation CD)

Thanks for your reply, I ended up formating and reinstalling everything and trying compiz fusion.

(for people that had the same problem as me)

If you just wanted a new look then you should read this:

http://forlong.blogage.de/article/20...-as-Xfce-users

Thank you Salasi for explaining what all the differences are.

...not a problem; if anything, the difficulty is knowing how much to explain as people often get into difficulty because they called one thing something else and you can't often tell from what they post...

On a side note, another thing people often fail to get their head around is how configuarable linux GUIs are without making fundamental changes to the OS. For kde, have a look at kde-look.org for alternative themes that can be downloaded; and in most cases, something quite different from 'standard' can be achieved just by changing wallpapers, window decorations and colours.