Login to your server

To login to the command line of your VPS:

• If you use Windows, we recommend the Putty SSH software
• Use the IP address as your host, 22 as your port number, and your SSH username as the account (usually 'admin').
• for the Mac, you should already have an application called "Terminal" or you can download the open source alternative iTerm. The SSH host is the IP of your VPS, and your login is 'admin' plus the password provided to you when you received your server.

1. ssh [your_IP] -l admin
2. sudo su
• This will grant you full access to your server. You'll probably have to type your password

Initial Setup

You will only have to do this once if it's not already done. 

1. cd /var/www/
• This will put you in your website's directory (technically the directory just above it).
2. mkdir themes
3. cd /var/www/html/sites/yourdomain.com
4. mkdir themes

Installing Themes

Go to the Drupal theme's project page. For example, the Zen theme is available at http://drupal.org/project/zen Each theme will have official and/or developmental releases. Click on the version number, and you will get a tag listed there. For example, the 1.1 release of the Zen theme compatible with Drupal 5 is DRUPAL-5--1-1. Use the tag you find on the release page for when you check out the theme using CVS (see below).

1. cd /var/www/themes
2. cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib co -r DRUPAL-5--1-1 -d theme_name contributions/themes/theme_name
• Use the method above to determine which tag to use. If the theme release has the tag DRUPAL-5--1-1, that's what you would use instead of just DRUPAL-5.
• Also, replace theme_name with the name of the theme you are downloading. This is the name, lowercase and without theme template, take a look at http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/themes/ and determine the name of the theme.
3. ln -s /var/www/themes/theme_name /var/www/html/sites/yourdomain.com/themes/
• this is an important step which makes it so that the theme will show up in your site's theme list
4. visit your site, login with your administrator credentials, and enable the theme by clicking Administer » Site building » Themes.