I’ve been thinking about finding a windows theme for linux for a while, but I definitely found something better than i was imagining.
I guess i was scrolling through reddit and ran accross this post that looked beautiful to me. I was mostly caught by the neofetch, but then realized i can run a modern system with security updates and still have it look like i remember from years gone by. Anywho…i had to try it
Short summary would be i cloned a laptop arch linux install over into a new partition and installed this cool theme. And then, there’s a longer version with all the stuff that went wrong.
First off, instead of doing a rsync copy of the contents like i had just finished doing on the Fedora Media Server (see this post); I decided to try a dd clone of the whole partition. Ugh. I’m not sure what I was doing wrong, but I kept having issues where it would copy fine, but then I couldn’t mount the partition anymore. I struggled for an hour or so until i finally gave up and just rsync’d all the data over into a partition after I reformatted it. I ended up with a 30GB partition with a small 2GB arch install. I chrooted into it and set it up to boot as “Arch – Chicago 95”.
Once i could boot into the system I installed xfce desktop and downloaded the script from “grassmunk” – https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
I was worried I would have to do a manual install as his github only shows compatible with Debian & Ubuntu, but I was going to give the installer a shot before doing any hard work :)
“Chicago 95 comes with an automated installer. Run the installer.py python script to walk through a guided install of Chicago 95.”
I opened a terminal and fired away at the python script. Up popped a retro looking installer window and i plowed through the options.
I even dutifully tried to go through the final after install steps. But I seemed to be in a lurch. Nothing looked right (as far as file stuff) and it definitely didn’t have a theme applied to the desktop.
I again struggled for about an hour trying to figure out what I had done wrong. I rebooted and went through the installer again. I read the docs again. I had almost given up when it hit me. i logged out and sure enough…I had been logging in under the miminal gnome desktop that is installed along with xfce. dumb me.
So anywho, let’s log in correctly to the xfce desktop and WHAM-O! beautiful Chicago 95 theme. I went back through the post install and as far as i can tell the installer took care of everything. I haven’t been back in to play since (tooth surgery stuff – & new laptop *read post here).
I’ll come back with pictures if I make time for it. I want to say that That’s one of the best documented installs I’ve ever had and super glad I didn’t have anything to do post install (after realizing my mistake).
Well, thank you grassmunk for the theme!