Matt Van Stone

I know… shut up about Linux already.

If you have changed any of the system colors, icons, or fonts in Ubuntu you probably will have noticed sooner or later that when you open a program like Synaptic Package Manager or pretty much anything under the System > Administration menu, the theme is still the default one.

Well this is because all these applications are launched by root and the root profile doesnt have these customizations. It is an easy fix that I found on this Gnome customization thread on ubuntuforums.org.

Just run these three simple commands to create links to your theme, icon, and font folders in the root profile.

NOTE: This trick really only works if you are the only user on your system, or if every user has the same theme, icon, and font settings. Because it links to your theme, if someone else logs into the computer who has a different theme and opens any root application they will see your theme for that app, not their own. There really is no workaround for this.

Anyway, run these three link commands:

sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root/.themes
sudo ln -s ~/.icons /root/.icons
sudo ln -s ~/.fonts /root/.fonts

Here is a before and after screenshot of what it looked like on my workstation.
View the before image
View the after image