Icon changes to the Messaging Menu in Ubuntu 12.10 were met with a lukewarm reception from many users.
The good news is that like all things open source if we don’t like it we can, with a little effort, tweak things to suit our personal preferences.
And in this guest post from Sam Hewitt, we take a look at how to do just that….
Alternative Icons
Instead of using a coloured shape overlay to denote status, this reworked icon theme uses the colour of the messaging menu envelope itself to denote status.
The icon changes to a relevant colour to reflect the user’s status, whilst reserving the default light blue icon for a “new message”. The status “shapes” are also replaced with coloured circles.
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Install Alternate Messaging Menu Icons (in Ubuntu)
Download the archive of alternate icons here and extract it (Right click > Extract here).
- To change the indicator icons, as root: copy, merge & replace the “ubuntu-mono-*” folders from the archive to /usr/share/icons.
- To change the status “shapes” in the menu, as as root: copy, merge & replace the “Humanity” folder from the archive to /usr/share/icons.
Users of the lighter Radiance theme don’t need to feel left out – this hack caters for them too:
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If in time you grow to love the default icons and/or just want to undo the changes, the hack can be reversed by reinstalling the default Humanity and Ubuntu Monochrome icons.
- sudo apt-get install –reinstall humanity-icon-theme ubuntu-mono
Thanks to Sam Hewitt