Dave's Window Maker Theme Stuff

You guys have probably heard all you want to know about Window Maker, but one thing I've seen a slight gap in is Sound themes1. They exist, but haven't seen very many made public. So, I've put together the ones I've made in the hopes that you can use them.

How to install them

First, you need to take the tarball and put it in ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker. Then issue the tar xvfz tarballname.tar.gz command.2 If it unpacked properly, you should find the new theme in your ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/SoundSets directory. You'll also find new sounds in ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Sounds.

Second, you'll need to insure that you have a Sound Sets entry in your Appearance menu off your main menu. Or you can simply use WMSoundConfig, if you wish. Me, I just put the Sound Sets off the Appearance directory. It looks like this. To make this happen, use WMConfig to edit your menus. Select the Appearance submenu do the following:

  1. Add external menu
  2. On the "label" enter "Sound Sets"
  3. On the "Menu Path/Directory List" enter ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/SoundSets
  4. On the "Program to Open Files" enter "setsounds" (you can do a type -path setsounds just for good measure)
  5. Save these settings to your setup
  6. Note: the filenames mentioned in ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/SoundSets/themename must be identical to the sounds in ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Sounds. If something doesn't work, check this first.
  7. If all has gone well, you should be able to select the desired sound set from your appearances menu. This will activate the new sound theme!

Some Pointers

There are multiple formats for WAV files.3 So, make sure that you have the latest version of Sox installed on your system. The link I quoted just now (at spies.com) is three years old at the time of this writing. You really want the updated Sox work done by Chris Bagwell. He has added a great deal of functionality and flexibility to the program. His latest version, as of this writing, is 12.15.

When you decide to make your own sound themes for Window Maker, or whatever window manager blows your skirt up, beware Microsoft's file naming conventions when you copy files over from Windows. For example, a file under Windows comes across as "Critters Windows Start.wav" and that won't work under Unix. So, just issue a mv "Critters Windows Start.wav" CrittersWindowsStart.wav command to rename each of the offending files. Or you could write a little script to do it for you. Anyway, I've already done it for these themes:

My Sound Themes For Window Maker

If these files don't work for you or if you have problems with them, remember, they come with no guarantee! :-) Use them at your own risk. But if you want to tell me how nice I am to make them available to you, you can drop me a line.

Some "Original" Themes?

I don't know how much of this stuff actually is original, but here goes anyway. The backgrounds you'll recognize from digitalblasphemy.com, and I think that's a great place to get wallpaper. The sounds I swiped mostly from Microsoft Windows. And the icons and tiles aren't anything very special--I swiped those from Themes.org. But at least I put them together...

One of the things you'll need to pay attention to is that my graphics are all XPMs. I just happen to like them for backgrounds and tiles. If you've configured Window Maker to use a different graphic format, please be advised that you'll need to change these formats in my themes.

Thanks for visiting!

Footnotes:

1. Themes.org has quite a bit of info about themes that include pixmaps, icons, tiles and wallpaper, but sounds are something you have to hunt around for.

2. If you're like me, you prefer pictures to words.

3. Basically, Microsoft, in its infinite arrogance, throws existing standards to the winds and adds their own variant of ADPCM to their WAV files. See Chris Bagwell's Audio File Formats FAQ.