gnome-panel’s Text to White

Google turned up this today, and it worked so impressively for me that it’s worthy of passing on.

I’ve had a problem where I have a dark background and black, mostly-transparent panels. This makes reading things (the menu titles, the clock, open window names, etc.) impossible. So to change gnome-panel text to white, do this:

Open a terminal, type in:

$ gedit .gtkrc-2.0

Paste this in:

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"

Save, return to your terminal, type this in:

$ killall gnome-panel

and you’re done. If it doesn’t work, return to your terminal and do this:

$ sudo apt-get install gcolor2
$ killall gnome-panel