Tk is so much easier concerning colors, isn't it? Here is one trick that took me awhile to figure out, concerning bg colors and overriding themes. My theme Improve the look of your Perl/Gtk2 apps has many pixmap based elements. If I want to modify bg colors, you first need to remove the pixmaps, or else any bg color change will not work. Comment out the parse_string block and see the bg color changes won't take affect.

I mention this in case you need to worry about portability. Many installations are using pixmap based themes now, so people running your code, will not be seeing what you think. In discussions on the maillists, all the experts say "do not try to override someone's theme". I guess that's the way it's going, even though I personally like to customize colors.

I would say to be sure that your end user is seeing what you want, use the pango markup, as shown in the second example.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Glib qw/TRUE FALSE/;
use Gtk2 '-init';

Gtk2::Rc->parse_string(<<__);
style "default"
{

bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "<none>"
bg_pixmap[INSENSITIVE] = "<none>"
bg_pixmap[ACTIVE] = "<none>"
bg_pixmap[PRELIGHT] = "<none>"

bg[NORMAL] = { 1.0, 1.0, 1.0 }

}class "GtkWidget" style "default"
__

my $greyl = Gtk2::Gdk::Color->new (0x9999,0x9999,0x9999);
my $bluel = Gtk2::Gdk::Color->new (0,0xCCCC,0xFFFF);
my $red = Gtk2::Gdk::Color->new (0xFFFF,0,0);
my $white = Gtk2::Gdk::Color->new (0xFFFF,0xFFFF,0xFFFF);

my $window = Gtk2::Window->new('toplevel');
$window->signal_connect( destroy => sub { Gtk2->main_quit; } );

$window->set_title("Label");
my $vbox = Gtk2::VBox->new( FALSE, 5 );
$window->add($vbox);
$window->set_border_width(5);
$window->set_size_request(300,200);
#$window->modify_bg('normal',$greyl);

my $frame = Gtk2::Frame->new("Colored Label");
my $label = Gtk2::Label->new("This is a  Colored Label");
$label->modify_fg('normal', $white);

$frame->modify_bg('normal', $red);

$vbox->pack_start( $frame, FALSE, FALSE, 0 );

#used for coloring background
my $coleventb0 = Gtk2::EventBox->new();
$coleventb0->modify_bg ('normal', $bluel);
$coleventb0->set_border_width(2);

$frame->add($coleventb0);
$coleventb0->add($label);

$window->show_all;

Gtk2->main;
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#! /usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Glib qw/TRUE FALSE/;
use Gtk2 '-init'; 

my $window = Gtk2::Window->new('toplevel');
$window->signal_connect('delete_event' => sub { Gtk2->main_quit; });
$window->set_border_width(5);
$window->set_position('center_always');
my $vbox = &ret_vbox();
#add and show the vbox
$window->add($vbox);
$window->show();
Gtk2->main();

sub ret_vbox {
#create a vbox to pack the following widgets
   my $vbox = Gtk2::VBox->new(FALSE,5);
   #create a label that will demo pango markup
   my $label_w_markup = Gtk2::Label->new();

   $label_w_markup->set_markup("<span background = 'black' foreground=
+ 'green' 
   size=\"40000\">Label with <i>markup</i></span>");

 $vbox->pack_end($label_w_markup,FALSE,FALSE,4);    
 $vbox->pack_end(Gtk2::HSeparator->new(),FALSE,FALSE,4);
 $vbox->show_all();
 return $vbox;
}
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