In the Previous lesson Preparing Drupal for Additional Themes and Modules we prepared the directories that will hold optional Drupal components. Now let's go ahead and install the Zen theme. You can either download it to your local PC with your web browser, then FTP it to /home/public_html/sites/all/themes or we can just download and extract it from the console.

user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all$ cd themes
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all/themes$ sudo wget 
                                  http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/zen-6.x-1.1.tar.gz
user@getondrupal.com:/home/public_html/sites/all/themes$ sudo tar zxvf zen-6.x-1.1.tar.gz

The contents of the archive will be extracting to /home/public_html/sites/all/themes/zen. The next portion of the theme setup requires us to use our web browser. Navigate to Administer, Sitebuilding... Themes.

Drupal will scan the directories /home/public_html/themes and /home/public_html/sites/all/themes, any new themes found will be listed along with the six preinstalled themes. Note: If you do not see the new theme listed it may be that you extracted the archive into the wrong folder or do not have the appropriate permissions on the directory. Set the Zen theme to Default, Enabled and click the Save configuration button.

You should see an immediate difference in the look of your Drupal website. We used the Zen theme for this demonstration because it is a very good starting theme to sub-theme to your liking with a little CSS training. Theme Garden is great place to download free, ready made themes you can install with this tutorial.