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Linux

Getting full theming of Ubuntu inside VirtualBox

Due to some issues with my laptop hardware, I can not use Ubuntu all time. After some time, the laptop just freezes. After repeated occurrence of the same crash, I have started using Windows full time and kept Ubuntu inside VirtualBox. In the default setup, the first thing I noticed is that the theme is broken – both in unity and the classic ubuntu session (which is a gnome2 based fallback option, I guess). I love working on Ubuntu, but I hate the grey old ubuntu theme that appears on my screen. I always wondered why this happened.

After some googling, I came to find that VirtualBox by default doesn’t enable 3D hardware acceleration. So, Unity can not find required hardware to enable the theme. I just increased the video memory for the virtual machine to 32MB and enabled 3D acceleration. Installed VirtualBox guest addition. Restarted the machine.

Everything was fine except the panels and nautilus icons. It is mainly because the “gnome-settings-daemon” crashes. I killed the process and then restarted it using:

(PS: Don’t use sudo, you need to kill the process running under your account)

Then I dealt with nautilus in the same manner: