After initially being a little disappointed with Kubuntu’s default theme, The Irish Penguin new he’d have to roll his own.

Well, finally it’s been tweaked to penguin perfection and, amidst much wing flapping, uploaded as a KDE theme for everyone to enjoy. However, before it’s unleashed upon you, please be aware of a little gotcha. The KDE Theme Manager is the tool you’ll need to install/create your own themes. However it’s not to be found in ‘System Settings’ on the K-menu. Rather you must go to the command line (unless I am missing the menu icon with my dodgy eyes!) and type ‘kcontrol’. From here you navigate to ‘Appearances & Themes’ and then ‘Theme Manager’. Ok, now armed with this knowledge here’s what to do.

Save the Castle at Night (link no longer available) zipped theme file to your ‘/home/yourusername/.kde/share/apps/kthememanager/themes/’ directory. Then unzip it and, via the KDE Theme Manager, install this file and, hey presto(!), you’re looking good.

Note: If you are having trouble with installing this theme you can download, unzip and install some additional files (link no longer available) into your  /home/yourusername/.kde/share/apps/kthememanager/themes/’ folder.

To fully enjoy the theme you should right-click on the quicklauncher at left of the taskbar and configure it to have a fine big icon size - 28 looked good on the Inspiron (I think big icons always look nice in KDE’s taskbar).

Note: It’s been created on a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop (running Kubuntu 7.10 ‘Gutsy’) so perhaps the colours might look at little different depending on your machine. Now hopefully one day we’ll all have gamma correction that works. Until then, enjoy!