In Gnome, you can set the top and bottom tool bars to be transparent, which is great if you wallpaper is a light color. The ‘Applications’ ‘Places’ ‘System’ buttons along with the date and time are all in the standard black font. I, however, like using a dark background as my desktop wallpaper. I didn’t like having white tool bars just so that I could read the text. Here’s how to change the text into whatever color you would like:

First, open the terminal and type:

gedit .gtkrc-2.0

Insert the following into the file that was opened:

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”

The top line that says:

fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”

changes the text color to ‘white’ or ffffff.

This is what it looks like:

If you want to change your text color to a specific color, you will need to get that color code and insert it here. Colourlovers.com has an excellent list of the HTML color hex codes.

Now click save and you should be finished. All you need to do now is type this command into the terminal to reload your gnome task bars:

killall gnome-panel