I'm new to Linux Mint 18.1 and am duel booting with Win 10. I have 3 USB hard drives mounted. Is there any way to change the fonts and background colors on the USB drives while in Linux?

In Windows I have a light blue background color and a bold type font. When I get to Linux, I have a white background color and a "thin type" font.

In Linux I have changed the fonts to what I want. It's only the USB drives I have a problem with.

Thanks for any help.

fonts and colors in a terminal? icons on the desktop? WHERE are you seeing these colors? You can use scrot to make a screen cap. And other methods with gimp and other tools.

Thanks for your reply.

The fonts and colors are on the USB hard drives that I had installed when I had Win 10 (before Linux). Now that I duel boot, I have the USB drives on BOTH Win 10 and Linux.

The fonts and colors show when I am in Win 10. I would like to have any light colored background (other than white) and a bold font, when in Linux.

The question is: How to change the USB hard drive while in Linux?

Are you looking at these drives on your desktop or in the file manager? If so, then you need to concentrate on the settings of the file manager, which by default on Mint 18.1 Cinnamon is, IIRC, Nemo.

If not, could you post a screenshot please?

I am assuming at this point that you're just saying USB because you're running your distro from it. It technically has little to do with default fonts and colors. You can launch another xterm from your xterm with different colors.

$ xterm -fg rgb:aa/aa/aa -bg rgb:00/00/00 &

You can also add the -fn and -fb options to choose a normal and bold font.

$ xlsfonts

To list available fonts and their long name. You can also hold down CNTRL and right mouse to change the size of the font with xterm. But not all terminals are xterm so consult the man page for your particular terminal.

$ sudo apt-get install xfonts-jmk
$ xterm -fg rgb:aa/aa/aa -bg rgb:00/00/00 -fn -*-neep-medium-r-normal-*-20-* -fb -*-neep-bold-r-normal-*-20-* &

The neep font is a common choice for looking at code and things. And this particular one is 10x20 pixels which fits well on modern displays. There are ways to make these settings defaults, but I'm not even sure I'm interpreting your random strings of words in a meaningful way.

Check out Appearance in your Menu.
The File Manager (caja or thunar or nemo or ...) window I believe is the canvas in question.

in your terminal,can we have this output Please?
It should be a link.

Thanks.

Thanks for the reply.

hydrurga - On my desktop I have 12 USB icons that are partitions from the 3 USB hard drives. I click on the icon to access the drives I want to use. File manager? I find files but see no way to do any settings to USB drives. I'm using Mint 18.1 Cinnamon.

Shadow 7 - I have an internal hard drive that is duel booting Win 10 and Linux only. The 3 USB drives are files only. I am so new to Linux that I have no idea what to do with the info you have given me.

Habitual - I can't find Appearance in the Menu. Also can not find File Manager, only files.
output from terminal: https://gist.github.com/3d70a8e79dcd...628ba38e3fa838

Thanks again!

i think op wants to color-code automounted partitions from their usb drives.
most probably directly on the desktop (because it is so cluttered with other stuff that they cannot find the drives otherwise).

i might be wrong, but i don't think it is possible to customise that. so either the desktop manager (nemo on cinnamon?) has a feature to do this, or not.

I probably still don't understand correctly, but have you tried right clicking on one of the partitions on your desktop, choosing Properties, then clicking on the icon (top left-hand side) in the window that opens? This will allow you to browse to any image on your system (see "icons" on the left menu for example) and use that instead of the icon that you currently have displayed for the USB drive.

Let me try again. My PC has 1 SSD drive that has Win 10 & Linux Mint 18.1 (duel boot). I also have 3 USB hard drives that contain 12 partitions.

When I am in Win 10, ALL partitions (and every subfolder) have a light blue background with a bold black font.

When I boot into Linux, all 12 partitions show on the desktop, which is what I want. However when I click any partition and it opens it has a white background with what I call a "skinny" black font.

I would like to have the same choice of partition background color and font in Linux, as I do in Win 10.


Thanks for any help.

Fonts are controlled in Appearance, off the Menu.
Try another theme? It's pretty customizable, but can get jenky.

Habitual - Thanks for the reply.

I can't find anything in Appearance that would do anything for USB drives. I'll just learn to live with it.

Thanks again.

crgibson:
You are welcome.
Cinnamon, I gather is a "special" case in customization.

Cinnamon is darn popular, there should be something quick and dirty to make it more to your liking.
Choices. Didn't have too many of those in Windows, at any price, hey?

Have a Great Day!

crgibson, since you're having no luck with the other approaches suggested, I suggest a very different one. Try opening the application called "mc" or "Midnight Commander", first installing it if you cannot find it where it should be in file managers in the main menu, then navigating with it using the keyboard to the mounted location of the USB drives. If you get the hang of using mc you'll likely not want to use any other any more. Several apps similar to mc are available for Windows, as are other variations of it on Linux.