Gnome and GDM Config

Changing the default menu icon on the Gnome panel

So you'd like to replace the standard Gnome foot or Ubuntu icon on your main panel menu? It seems easy at first, but you may have trouble getting it to actually change... Then follow these steps, and you should be a happy camper with a shiny new menu icon :)

• First you need an icon; try to find or convert the one you want to SVG format, since Gnome will try to use the scalable SVG icons before falling back to fixed-size icons.
• Once you have an icon you want, rename it to start-here.svg and put it under the

  Foo/scalable/places

  directory where your icon theme is. Note this could be under either the system location (e.g., /usr/share/icons) or your own ${HOME}/.icons/Foo.
• In the same directory, make a symlink named "distributor-logo.svg" that points to the start-here.svg icon.
• Using sudo (or su - to root first) if it's the system location, run the following command:

  gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/Foo

  where Foo is the name of your icon theme (as above).
• Finally, restart the panel with this command:

  killall -s HUP gnome-panel

  And don't forget to select your custom theme (or add your icons to an existing theme) in the Gnome Appearance config GUI.

If that doesn't make your custom icon appear, then something went wrong; either you don't have the right theme selected, or perhaps your icon isn't a valid SVG file. If you used a PNG icon at a specific size, then your panel size could be different than your icon size, or perhaps an existing SVG icon is taking precedence over yours. Remember, Google is your friend, along with your distribution's support forums, etc. You can also find many lovely desktop and icon themes, backgrounds, etc, on sites such as Gnome-Look.org, as well as other places...