Change Icons in Docky

For 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:

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!