Snott

Category: Linux

Linux Related stuff, system administration, installation tutorials and more

  • Change Icons in Docky

    Change Icons in Docky

    Docky LogoFor me, docky its a must have application, it makes your desktop look so cool and it is also very functional and stable (if you are experiencing problems with docky, check out my article for compiling it from source here.

    Sometimes I am sure you have wondered where does docky get the icons? can I change any of those? well, you can!

    There is a very simple way to change any application icon to whatever you want, for this example I’m going to change the virtualbox logo for a high-resolution one:

    1) Go into applications -> system tools and find the Oracle VM virtualbox launcher, right-click on it and choose “add this launcher to panel” that will create an icon on your panel (drag it to docky also if you don’t have a launcher there, this is optional, you can drag it at the end), you can delete this later, we are just going to check the path of the icon, now right-click the Virtualbox launcher in your panel and click properties, a screen will pop up:

    launcher properties

    2) Now click on the icon and a menu to select a file will pop up, DON’T change the icon here, it will only take effect for this launcher, and we want to change the docky icon not this launcher. Take note of the path the icon is, for this example it is /usr/share/pixmaps, the icon can be someplace else but this path its pretty standard and many apps store the icon info here.

    3) Next, go into a terminal and type:

    sudo nautilus

    this will open up a file browser will root privileges. Navigate to /usr/share/pixmaps and RENAME the logo you don’t want, in this case it’s called VBox.png, rename it to something like VBoxOLD.png

    4) Paste the logo of your choice on this folder and rename it to VBox.png (keep the same format for files, don’t replace a png file with jpg file, it may not work)

    As soon as you do this, if you already have the launcher on docky you will see the icon automagically changing to the one you have chosen.

    This works great with all that apps that have ugly and small icons that when enlarged look terrible.

    One last thing, I am using Gnome, if you have docky in KDE or any other desktop environment, the procedure is the same you only have to change the apps you use (ie. dolphin instead of nautilus).

    Also, if you have Arch Linux, you can compile docky from source

    Try it!

  • Securely Copy Folders and Files from one machine to another

    Securely Copy Folders and Files from one machine to another

    Scp

    I personally don’t like using USB keys to store critical information, they are very vulnerable to viruses and anyone can just steal it from you, so I started searching for a way to copy files and folders across computers in a secure way, and thats when I found scp.

    This tool will copy files remotely via ssh, you just need to give the correct credentials for the remote machine and everything works like a charm, the commands are a little long because a lot of authentication takes place but you get used to it very fast.

    Lets say you just configured a proxy server and firewall and that you want to backup that configuration to a file server on your network (scp works on any machine with ssh configured), the command would be:

    sudo scp -r /etc/squid/ user@172.1.1.1:/home/common/squid

    Where:

    -r means recursive (copy all files and folder structure beginning with the one you specified, in our example, the whole squid folder get copied)

    /etc/squid is the folder to be copied

    user is your username on the REMOTE machine

    /home/common/squid is the destination folder

    If you want to copy a single file, just remove the -r option and replace the folder path with a file path (ie. /etc/squid/squid.conf)

    I decided to do this short post because I have found the information on scp a little confusing for the newbies, because people tend to explain all functions and parameters and sometimes people just want to get things fast instead of learning every command and syntax scp has to offer.