I always liked the CDE for its clear appearance and easy to navigate colors. I also liked the look and feel of the terminal at the time.

So once we all manage to pull up the theme editors again and whatnot – what were these colors again? What were the wallpapers and sounds that were authentic?

Table of Contents

Colors

Front window border #b24d7a (178 77 122)
Window pane background #aeb2c3 (174 178 195)
Desktop background #574c8f (87 76 143)
Dark blue #4f5e86
Purple #63639c
Green #7acac5
Blue #768ca1
Turquoise #4992a7
Blue #7595a9
Blue #8998aa
Green #84948f
Dark blue #687580
Mauve #847982
Brown #856565
Pink #b7878d
Beige #c6b2a8
Beige pink #cfa5a4
Yellow #e6bc8e
Orange #e29c83
Bright orange #fe8282

These are these colors as images:

That would be a CDE Solaris type theme.

A different, more HP-UX Motif color style, would be this choice:

Front window border: #eda870 237 168 112
Window pane background #4992a7 73 146 167

Wallpapers

A few frequently encountered tiled background patterns:

SGI or Solaris workstation backgrounds:

Standard X-server background:

Grayscale expanded variation:

Huawei cell phone wallpapers:

More wallpaper tiles:

CRT wallpaper:

CDE Themes for GTK 3 to use under Ubuntu

You need this I guess:

apt install gnome-tweak-tool

And the cdetheme1.3.tar, or if you get too many errors, the crash-wise less obnoxious OneStepBack.zip too. Put the themes themselves into a ~/.themes folder to make the tool find it.

cd ~
mkdir .themes

The themes are the two folders contained in the package. A theme would generally be a folder whose sub folder also contains at least one folder with all the GTK 3 stuff in it.

If you get obscure SIGSEGV (0xb) errors with C [libgobject-2.0.so.0+0x35e9f] as objection, consider to roll your theme park back a bit.

Approximating CDE under Windows 10

You may need the Aero_Lite_Theme, double click it to install, and then you can do your own color editing there. Codes above : )

Sounds

There is one that I had recorded myself back in the days, the Miktek C108+ (1992) terminal.

- c108+.zip (contains wav and mp3)