If you read this blog you should know I’m a Gentoo Linux user. Unfortunately for me a large majority of modern Linux users use Ubuntu. There’s nothing wrong with Ubuntu at all and in fact I use it on various machines but my main Desktop machine runs Gentoo. My problem is that the interweb is littered with Ubuntu How-Tos and it’s getting to the stage where people are using the word Ubuntu synonymously with Linux. So, I often have to reverse engineer an Ubuntu how-to to get things working at my place. I think I’ll write about the Ubuntu/Linux thing in another post but that’s not what I’m writing about today.
DestroyTwitter
I use DestroyTwitter (DT) as my Desktop Twitter client. It’s an Adobe AIR application but it’s mean, lean and doesn’t eat your cpu. Since Adobe haven’t released a version of AIR that will install on my Gentoo Box I have to do everything manually. It’s actually not that hard but it means I have to run AIR applications through the Adobe Debug Launcher (ADL). I actually run ADL via a bash script after reading this blog entry.
DT comes with a default grey and blue theme that’s actually pretty cool anyway but there are now a lot of 3rd party themes. No matter what I tried though, I couldn’t get them to load into my installed DT. The answer to questions I’d pose on forums would basically be:
put the themes into
Documents/DestroyToday/DestroyTwitter/themes/
Well that path didn’t exist for me and creating the exact directory structure didn’t work either. I’d more or less resigned myself to the fact that since I was running DT via ADL, therein lay the problem. I’d have to stick with the default DT theme (which of course, ironically I like).
So, and again this will be the subject of a future blog post, I’ve been playing around with an Ubuntu derived distribution. I decided to install AIR and then let DT get installed automatically by the AIR installer. All went well, the DT directory structure was created as above and I could use themes. I then realised that the DT directory contained login.xml and people.xml. So, if I found those files on my Gentoo Box and loaded the theme files into the adjacent theme directory, you never know.
A quick locate login.xml found it in /home/dave/DestroyToday/DestroyTwitter. Hang on a minute, I knew that directory had been there all along, I thought I’d created it when manually installing DT. So I moved the DT directory, re-launched the application and knock me down with a feather DT re-created the DT directory structure, but not in Documents, just in my home dir ~/
I installed some themes into /home/dave/DestroyToday/DestroyTwitter/themes/, reloaded DT and boom! Me has themez. All right!!!
The top and bottom of this post is that DT seemingly creates its directory structure in a users home directory. How simple is that! I’d personally prefer it to be a hidden directory but hey, I has themez!
