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Tag: docky

  • 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!

  • Docky in ArchLinux does not launch anymore after a system upgrade

    Docky in ArchLinux does not launch anymore after a system upgrade

    Docky LogoIf you, like me, use docky for managing your windows and launching your applications, you should have noted that recently an ArchLinux update broke docky because it installed a newer version of mono that docky doesn’t like. Anyways, here is how to fix it.

    This is the error when trying to launch docky:

    [1111@MNAME ~]$ docky
Could not load file or assembly 'Mono.GetOptions, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756' or one of its dependencies.

Unhandled Exception: System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type 'Docky.Docky' from assembly 'Docky, Version=0.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'.

    You can just recompile the package the usual way, but the best and easiest way to do it is to use the ABS (Arch Build System). If you already have ABS installed you can safely skip to the “Compiling docky using ABS” part. Here is a step by step guide:

    To install ABS:

    sudo pacman -S abs

    Also you will need some compiling tools, install with:

    sudo pacman -S base-devel

    Next edit /etc/abs.conf to have the desired repos fetched

    sudo nano /etc/abs.conf

    Make sure that the last line is uncommented, if you don’t want to fetch some repo, just add a ! in front of its name and you should be good to go, I would recommend fetching all of them, it doesn’t take much space (entire tree is like 56mb uncompressed, about 18mb download) and it is really handy.

    Next, download the abs tree:

    sudo abs

    Your ABS tree is now created under /var/abs. Note the appropriate branches of the ABS tree now exist and correspond to the ones you specified in /etc/abs.conf.

    The abs command should be run periodically to keep in sync with the official repositories.

    Next thing you have to do is create a build directory, a folder on your home

    mkdir -p $HOME/abs

    There you will compile the files you need for getting docky to work.

    Now that ABS is installed and correctly configured, we can get on to:

    Compiling Docky using ABS:

    docky package its in community so we need to copy those files to our pc:

    cp -r /var/abs/community/docky $HOME/abs

    and change directory to $HOME/abs:

    cd ~/abs/docky

    now run:

    makepkg -s

    NOTE: DON’T ever do “sudo makepkg -s” be sure to run it as a normal user or else you could end up breaking your system.

    This will compile the package, wait for it to finish and then install it using pacman:

    sudo pacman -U slim-1.3.0-2-i686.pkg.tar.xz

    now test docky, everything should be working now :D

    Any questions leave it in the comments.

    Thanks for reading!

    NOTE: I’m leaving this here just for reference purposes or If you encounter a similar issue in the future, as of now, this isn’t needed anymore because the appropriate changed have been made on the Arch Linux packages