Thoughts from the abyss

Here’s how to change Gnome’s taskbar to be transparent, and then change the font colors of the text. This way you can have a dark background and be able to read the text on the taskbar windows.

Right click taskbar -> Properties -> Background

Choose solid color and then set the style to be transparent. You should see that occur directly.

Now, the next step is to create a text file to store the settings that you need. Perform this step as your normal user in his/her own /home directory.

# vim .gtkrc-2.0

style "panel"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
# fg[PRELIGHT] = "#000000"
# fg[ACTIVE] = "#ffffff"
# fg[SELECTED] = "#000000"
# fg[INSENSITIVE] = "#8A857C"
# bg[NORMAL] = "#000000"
# bg[PRELIGHT] = "#dfdfdf"
# bg[ACTIVE] = "#D0D0D0"
# bg[SELECTED] = "#D8BB75"
# bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#EFEFEF"
# base[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
# base[PRELIGHT] = "#EFEFEF"
# base[ACTIVE] = "#D0D0D0"
# base[SELECTED] = "#DAB566"
# base[INSENSITIVE] = "#E8E8E8"
# text[NORMAL] = "#161616"
# text[PRELIGHT] = "#000000"
# text[ACTIVE] = "#000000"
# text[SELECTED] = "#ffffff"
# text[INSENSITIVE] = "#8A857C"
}
widget "*PanelWidget*" style "panel"
widget "*PanelApplet*" style "panel"
class "*Panel*" style "panel"
widget_class "*Mail*" style "panel"
class "*notif*" style "panel"
class "*Notif*" style "panel"
class "*Tray*" style "panel"
class "*tray*" style "panel"

Now at the command line reset the Gnome panel.

# killall gnome-panel

This will restart the Gnome panel and you should see the white text in the taskbar when you open a window. There are a bunch of other options above, but I have no idea what they do. Play around with them. The important one is this one which is commented out above.

fg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"

Obviously #ffffff is white, so if you want another color change it.

You can see what it will look like with a dark background by clicking here. This is my taskbar. Who says you can’t make a server level OS look good with CentOS 5.1?