challenging linux

I was doing some day the usual dist-upgrade to kep  recent my Debian squeeze. Everything went well, but there was a surprise next reboot and login. All the icons were ugly. The whole new style does not fit me, but the logout and shutdown button was disturbing ugly.

Here is how did it look before the upgrade:

The pretty icons

And this is how did it look after:

The ugly icons

After the changes, I have tried all the other icon themes (by customizing the current theme) but most of them did not have an own version of these icons, nor were pretty. After that, I did a search for gnome icon themes, but I could not find this older theme or some other pretty (which has own versions of these icons). So I have realized that I have to hack something.

So, I have downloaded some previous gnome-icon-theme from the Gnome ftp site:

wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-icon-theme/2.26/gnome-icon-theme-2.26.0.tar.gz

After this, I have unpacked it, and did a make. For doing that, some devel packages are needed. I had to install icon-naming-utils, intltool and automake, autoconf.

apt-get install icon-naming-utils intltool automake autoconf

After that, I have compiled it :

cd gnome-icon-theme-2.26.0

./configure –prefix=/home/user/temp/somedir

make

make install

All I had to do was to tarzip the icon directory from the install directory

cd /home/user/temp/somedir/share/icons/gnome/

tar cf – . | gzip -f9 > ../gnome-icon-theme-2.26.tar.gz

Then I could install it within the Appearance preferences easily, and my pretty icons were back