Change Icon in KDE4
 

I recently installed Kubuntu 10.4 (running KDE 4.4.2) on a new laptop. All of the important stuff is working fine and I'm now on to the tweaks.

To that end: does anyone know how to change individual application icons? I installed a new icon theme from kde-look, but many of the icons either did not change (a.) or are just ugly and I'd like to be able to change them manually (b.)

When I right-click an icon, I have the option of clicking "icon settings," but there is no option to change the icon from there. In earlier versions of KDE, I could just click the icon itself and it would bring up all of the available icons. Is this a permissions issue? If so, what do I change to be able to edit the icons?

Thanks in advance!

P.S. I googled and searched the forums to no avail on this issue already.

The "desktop" in KDE 4 is totally made over. Icons anywhere else can be changed exactly as you described, the properties has a button with the current icon on it.

But "desktops" are really now part of a concept called "activities." (great idea... buggy as all get out) and can be set to one of two options: folder view or desktop. When set to desktop you can't change the icon. When it's a folder view, it shows the contents of a folder you select.

You can change icons in folder view just like KDE 3. You can also add a "folder view" plasmoid that does the same; shows contents of a folder you select.

So what I have done on systems that need icons on a "desktop" to launch things, AND I want to use custom icons I do one of the two options above, ie set a plasmoid or set it to folder view.

But in either case I make a folder in the user's /home called "apps," and anything they want on the desktop, I put the icons in that folder. Mind you anything in that folder will be displayed on the "desktop" folder view, so only put the icons for apps you want displayed in there.

In both cases right click and unlock widgets. To set the whole activity to a folder view, right click the desktop, select desktop activity settings, go to the "activities" page and change via the drop down. (never forget to lock widgets after you're done!)

If you want a plasmoid to be a folder view, click the "cashew" on the lower right by the system notifications, click "add widgets" and look for the folder view.

Once you added it, click the wrench on the 'handle' that pops out when you mouse over, and change the folder it is displaying to the one with your desktop icons in it. The square thing on that handle lets you resize the plasmoid, this is preferable to making the whole activity a folder view. It can be made to fit whatever number of icons you have perfectly, eg no scroll bars.

BTW ubuntu/kubuntu doesn't do KDE 4 justice. If you want the best KDE 4 environment and the most helpful forum second to this one =) I recommend Mandriva. The current release is 2010.1, depending on your hardware it'll either be the greatest Linux experience you've ever had or you'll have a couple of well known, easy to fix issues... and a forum that really helps.

Hope this helps. Don't hesitate to ask for clarification. Welcome to LQ and don't forget to vote... for your favorite Linux applications that is, during the annual LQ survey. ;)

In the name of fairness, Linux magazine says this about kubuntu 10.10:

Kubuntu, on the other hand, is worth the upgrade to get KDE 4.5. KDE 4.4 was a good release, but KDE 4.5 finally brings KDE back (in my opinion, at least) to the state it was at with KDE 3.5. It feels much more polished, its fairly speedy, and the Kubuntu take on KDE 4.5 seems very well done.

Again, moving to KDE 4.5 means only 18 months of support — but in this case the switch is worth it. KDE 4.5 is enough of an upgrade that it merits the update right now.

Thanks for the tips, and for the advice regarding 4.5. Since my wife will kill me if I spend any more time futzing about with reinstalls, I'm just going to wait until Kubuntu adds 4.5 as its default update. :]

That said, I don't think your reply quite addressed the issue I brought up - I have no option to change application icons on the panel (I don't normally use the desktop for anything - I just rely on panel icons to launch apps.) The issue is that "Icon Settings" for each icon does *not* include the ability to change the icon.

Does anyone have any ideas here?

Thanks again.

Ok - fixed it.

By default, only root has permissions to the *.desktop files used by KDE to denote icons. This prevents the user from changing the icons.

You have to go into /usr/share/applications and change the corresponding .desktop file to allow other users to change it (chmod a+rwx).

Hope this helps someone else!

right click then select properties
select the icons then select the icons you want

or download icons in http://gnome-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=102

after downloading log as super user then paste the icon folder in the
file system/usr/share/icons


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