Help with hosed LC UI on Ubuntu

[Richard Gaskin]

I've been using LC on Ubuntu for years, and while there are a few 
details where it's not quite HIG-savvy it's generally been pretty good.

But I recently did a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04, and now LC 6.6.2 
looks horrible.


The Problem
-----------
This screen shot shows both LC and GEdit side by side, so we can see 
that the Ubuntu theme is reflected well in GEDit, but at the moment LC 
looks like merde, with:

- Menus and menu items with white text and no hilite (used to have
   orange hilite per the OS theme)

- Controls look bland, not using theme settings

<http://fourthworld.net/channels/lc/fubuntu.png>

Even the Save As dialog (not shown there) looks like the rest of LC's 
own controls, suggesting that somehow LC just isn't initializing support 
for the current theme, in a way that affects everything it touches.

I've checked the lookAndFeel property and it's not "Motif" but 
"Appearance Manager" as we would normally expect.

And on another machine here running Lubuntu 14.04, the same build of LC 
reflects the current theme just fine.

So I'm at a loss to explain how to fix this.   It seems to be specific 
to my Ubuntu install, but only affects LC.


What's Different
----------------
Historically, the only way I could get LC to run in any 64-bit Linux is 
to install ialibs-32, but as many of you know that's no longer supported 
by Ubuntu.

This post from Neil in the forums suggested a simpler alternative:
<http://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=20091&p=104639#p104639>

Namely:

     sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0:i386

So the difference with my current Ubuntu over previous installs is that 
I don't have ialibs-32 installed, but I have installed libgtk2.0.

FWIW, I've run LC with ldd and it appears that all library dependencies 
are being met.

LC runs (quite well actually in terms of functionality) but it's so 
darned ugly right now it's just not much fun.

And I'm guessing I'm not the only person seeing LC this way, which if 
true would be dismaying since I'd like LC to be something I'm proud to 
share with my Ubuntu friends.


Next Steps
----------

1. Anyone here seen this with LC before?

2. Anyone here have suggestions on how to fix it?


Thanks in advance for any guidance you can offer -

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com