Three Random Simple Questions

[Dan Martin]

>         1. How do I access installed themes? I installed a 
> bunch of themes, like "thinkeramik" in Synaptic, but when I 
> tried to change themes in Preferences | Theme, they were not there.

A Gnome theme can have one or more of the following: Controls (a GTK theme),
Window Borders (a Metacity theme), and Icons.  If a theme only installs one
or two of those, it may not show in the main theme list.  But if you go to
Theme Details, you can choose the individual components, and you should see
the themes you installed in one of the three tabs.

>         2. How do I get the bittorrent GUI to be the default 
> interface for bittorrent downloading? Again, with Synaptic, I 
> downloaded the GUI, but if I open bittorrent from the menu, 
> or by clicking a torrent in FireFox, it comes up with these 
> strange, old school looking clunky download screens. One for 
> each download.

When Firefox asks, tell it you want to open the file with
"gnome-btdownload".

>         3. How do I get icons for video files, like mpegs and 
> AVIs to be small captures from the video? In CentOS, my 
> previous Linux distro, after I installed Gstreamer, it 
> defaulted to having little screen grabs as the icons for 
> video files. I thought that was neat. I believe I have 
> Gstreamer libraries installed, but this effect does not happen.

These are called thumbnailers.  You may not have the necessary thumbnailers
installed.  This is working for me, and I'm not sure what I installed that
made it work, but you might try searching Synaptic for "thumbnailer".

-Dan