Well, I'm completely new to litestep. I've been looking all over for tutorials tailored to newbies and they're all either down or not tutorials at all. I love to customize things, from my car, to my comp case, to every aspect of my house, and I've been looking for something like litestep for some time. Specifically, I want to eventually incorperate Trillian into my bar. I'm not asking for code handouts as I despise people who aren't willing to put effort into their customizations. However, with the lack of (or perhaps just my inability to find) tutorials out there, I'm stumped. I certainly don't want to download someone else's theme and start deconstructing it just yet, I'd like to at least know the basics first. So I beg of anyone with the URLs to any litestep tutorials for total newbies, please would you be so kind as to link them or if preferred E-mail or IM them to me (dimlu@earthlink.net [e-mail/msn] DimluTine [AIM] We_Desire_Wisdom [yahoo] 279680460 [ICQ]) I would be most grateful. I understand that I'm going to get a lot of flames for this post, but believe me I /have/ looked for tutorials, I fear that I'm just not the greatest at locating things online. As I said, I do want to do this myself, I'm not looking for handouts or anything. Thank you in advance.

Unfortunately a lot of LS sites have gone down or haven't been updated in a while. With that said, the best way at the moment to learn how to make themes is to disect existing themes and see how they work.

As for including trillian into your theme, the module kidnap (http://www.alphafish.com) will probably come in handy.

yeah i've found a distinct lack of tutorials too.
what i've been doing to learn is basically just reading the manuals.

like whitman said, examining others code can be helpful but i've found the manuals the most help (well i suppose that is what they are there for)

this forum is also very useful too, you may not have noticed (i didn't at first) that although the search function seems to be disabled you can stilll search.
in each forum there is a text box to enter search terms in.

the only things even vaguely resembling tutorials i managed to find are:
http://www.bedtrick.com/lstutorial.htm
http://www.residualvisuals.com/
http://www.scriptorium.se/westep/beginners.html

and there were little to no help at all really (though the last ones page about xp env variables was useful)

the manuals are your best bet really in my opinion

there's also http://shell-shocked.org/tutorials.php, the official ots2 docs at http://o-t-s.sf.net, and http://www.monkiboi.net/litestep/lsindex.asp

Of course you should start with:
http://lsdocs.shellfront.org
http://o-t-s.sourceforge.net

And now, the basics to start your own theme:
Then, read the docs and check for desktop2, too; to see if it better suit your needs than jdesk.

After that, you'll want to add stuff like time, taskbar, icons and so on.
xLabel will bring you time, system info, powerfull text displaying, icons, colors, ghosted images (you can click through)
xTaskbar is very interesting as a taskbar module and RabidVWM will add virtual desktops and an uncredible ^@variable^ support :)

But you could enjoy a Rainmeter centered theme. Check out the last 0.10, it's too much!

Quickly, you'll surely need to think about scripting (mzscript-0.9-beta_12)

And then, let's have some fun...

Is it possible to run LS in Virtual PC so I can test things without worrying about messing up my comp too badly? :P

on the one hand it should, on the other hand, why don't you just try? as a virtual pc is virtual, you cannot mess up anything (? or am i wrong? don't know too much about virtual pcs though).

Honestly if you read the docs a lil and get a basic understanding of how litestep works, you will be fine.

You have to realize that no matter how bad error messages sound in litestep, in the worst case all you have to do is follow a couple of simple steps to get back to windows so you can try again.

Just don't panic and use your brain when things go haywire, I've been using litestep for over 5 years, and I still break things all the time. You just have to remember that litestep is separate from windows, almost all the normal windows stuff is still there.

If you are running win2k or winxp, the worst possible thing that can happen when you HORRIBLY mess up litestep is you hit ctrl-alt-del, wander into your documents and settings\litestep folder and set the shell to default, then reboot.

Good luck :)