For some reason, a few days ago my Programs menu suddenly reverted to what I think must have been the Red Hat 9 menus, complete with artwork from the Bluecurve theme. Which I love by the way. They’re by Garrett at linuxart.com and I think they are very good-looking. But I would have to say I’m an even bigger Tigert/Jimmac fan, the dynamic duo at Ximian that do the stock GNOME artwork. So this was upsetting to me. The documentation will tell you that to edit the Programs menu, go to the Personal Settings in the System menu. Along the top row is an icon marked ‘Menus’. This will open a Nautilus window that you can move the menu items around in, add new Launchers (by right-clicking and filling out info), etc. However, I was seeing that if I changed the icons, they would revert (I didn’t see any rhyme or reason to the cycle either). I couldn’t find any bug reports on the Ximian site, so I went deep into my system.
The Ximian Icons are in subfolders under /usr/share/icons/Industrial. The subfolders at that level have different versions of the icons at different sizes. 32×32, for example, means that icons under that are 32 pixels high and 32 pixels wide. Under those folders are further subdivisions. Menu icons are in the ‘apps’ folder. To change them (or at least how I did it so it wouldn’t change back), you will need to be root. In the folder /usr/share/desktop-menu-files, there are text files with info on each of the default folders. They’re not named exactly the same (Sound & Video is Multimedia.desktop), but you can figure it out. At the end of each of these .desktop files is a line that says ‘icon=something.png’. Simply change it to ‘icon=full path to new icon. So in Accessories.desktop, I set it to icon=/usr/share/icons/Industrial/32×32/apps/gnome-util.png.
Now they stay.
