desktop doesn't have different icons for different file types and dbus requirement and taskbar and toolbar at same place?

Jeremy C. Reed reed at reedmedia.net
Tue Aug 12 23:05:41 CEST 2008


On Tue, 12 Aug 2008, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:

> > At least my icons look nice now (using Rodent theme). It would be nice to 
> > get hicolor to work fine. If anyone has ideas on how to troubleshoot this 
> > please let me know so I can get the pkgsrc packages fixed.
> 
> No, there's nothing actually wrong here, aside from a poor choice of 
> defaults.  Despite what it may look like, hicolor is NOT an icon theme. 
>   It's a dumping ground for default icons and fallbacks.  It's not meant 
> to be complete.
> 
> What we should be doing is either a) somehow requiring that a particular 
> icon theme be installed (which I don't like), b) putting up a warning 
> dialog if hicolor is set as the icon theme, c) hard-coding a short 
> (incomplete) list of icon themes we know work ok, and trying them as 
> defaults before falling back to hicolor -- which should really never be 
> set as the system icon theme anyway.
> 
> (b) is probably the best solution.  Someone should implement that... I 
> don't really have time.

Okay, I see I was confused. I thought that the 46 icons included with my 
installed Xfce were for the desktop but now that I looked at each of them, 
I see that only a couple would even make sense (such as 
xfce-filemanager.png) for the desktop file type icons.

So even though I have near 60 file types representing images, PDFs, 
folders, archive files, documents, etc. on my desktop including my Trash 
and Home -- they all are represented by a single generic icon: 
/usr/pkg/share/pixmaps/xfdesktop/xfdesktop-fallback-icon.png

The warning seems useful if running xfdesktop with icons or Thunar with 
icons. It would have saved my time.

Also a FAQ entry would be great too. If it is there, I clearly missed it.

For what it is worth, when I went back into the User Interface 
Preferences, the icon theme menu no longer had "hicolor" as an option. The 
only available choices are now just Rodent and GNOME. So maybe "hicolor" 
was some historical junk leftover from old config. I don't know since I 
can't use that GUI to reset to that hicolor theme now. Strange, but good.

Thanks again



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