KnowUbuntu

These are not professionally done. Fair warning. I just like to customize things to the way I like them and when I saw that most of the icons in the gnome panel in the notification area were gray scale icons, I had to make (or find) some for pidgin (my personal IM client of choice).

Example Icons | |

You can download my icons if you wish.

Changing the icons is easy enough to do.

1. Backup your existing icon directorysudo cp -r /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/22 /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/22.oldNOTE: The size that my gnome panel uses is 22. Yours may differ and there are other size folders in the tray folder to choose from.
2. Copy the new icon folder where the other one wassudo cp -r ~/22 /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/You can use mine (if your panel also uses size 22) or you can make your own. Just make sure your image files are named the same.
3. Restart Pidgin and you will have nice humanity themed icons.

I get annoyed sometimes with the mounted volume icons on my Ubuntu desktop. I don’t like them popping up when I insert my USB drive or attach other volumes. So…I got rid of them.

I have come across two ways to do this. The first is very simple, but requires you to install a third party tool called Ubuntu Tweak (sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak). Once installed, open the application (Applications –> System Tools –> Ubuntu Tweak) and click on Desktop on the sidebar.  From the Icons section you can select which icons show up and even what to call them.

This next solution isn’t as simple, but doesn’t require the installation of any additional software.

1. Open gconf-editor
   1. Open a terminal window
   2. Type: gconf-editor
2. Navigate to /apps/nautilus/desktop
3. Uncheck the volumes_visible box.

Either of these solutions will remove the volume icons from the desktop. The Ubuntu Tweak solution will also allow to customize the icons a little more and also provides other useful and fun customizations for Ubuntu.