Theme conflict on dual-boot of Ubuntu 10.10 & Fedora 14

Question

I've recently been required to migrate to Fedora 14 for work, but am not willing to give up the awesomeness of Ubuntu. As a result, I'm now dual-booting Fedora 14 and Ubuntu Maverick with a shared home directory.

Everything seems to work, but one glaring problem is the fact that the gtk theme configured for each OS seems to conflict. If I set the default system theme in Fedora, then it looks broken in Ubuntu. If I do the same in Ubuntu, it is broken in Fedora. I'm under the impression that it should be possible to have each OS use a separate theme, and the following tutorial confirms this, but doesn't mention how it is achieved:

http://www.hackourlives.com/dual-boot-ubuntu-10-04-and-fedora-13-goddard-with-shared-home/

As shown, I want to use Fedora's theme in Fedora, and Ubuntu's theme in Ubuntu. How can I have Fedora's and Ubuntu's respective themes co-exist peacefully?

Answer 1

You can fix this by changing where gconf stores its configuration data for each distro.

The config file is in /etc/gconf/2/path in each distro. So you're going to want to edit this file once in your fedora partition, and once in your ubuntu partition. The config option you want is in this line:

# The default storage location, ~/.gconf
# This should be the only readwrite source
xml:readwrite:$(HOME)/.gconf

You can change it to something like xml:readwrite:$(HOME)/.gconf_ubuntu for ubuntu, or add _fc for fedora, or whatever you'd like. This way, ubuntu stores its settings in a separate place from where fedora does, so they won't clobber each other. Apps that don't use gconf (firefox, etc.) will still share configuration.

You can also change some of the other "include"s in the User Preferences section and rename them depending on the distro you're using.

We use this for shared NFS homes at work and it seems to work great.