Hoping someone here can help. I noticed yesterday that some of my application icons in the Gnome Shell overview have reverted back to the Gnome default “cogs” icon. They were fine one moment, then after a reboot seemed to have changed without any input from me. It’s only a few of them, but is there any way of getting them back to the way they were? I tried the Alacarte menu, but manually selecting an icon doesn’t seem to work. I select the icon I want from the menu but it doesn’t change it. It just stays as it was.
No, I only have icon sets installed from the repositories. I tried a couple of different themes based on the lovely Faenza set and also Gnome-Colours, but it’s made no difference. The missing icons remain so. It doesn’t matter which installed set I pick, the missing icons don’t change.
Just a variation on Malcolm’s answer. For those times when Icons get wonky, I have a script that I run (I didn’t write it, but I can’t remember where I got it). Just save the below code in a text file (I named it Fix_Icons) in your home directory’s “bin” directory and make executable (right click → properties → Permissions, check 'Allow executing file as program"). You’ll then be able to run the command “Fix_Icons” from a terminal without changing directory or typing the complete path:
#!/bin/sh
find /usr/share/icons -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read -r THEME; do
if -f "$THEME/index.theme" ]; then
gtk-update-icon-cache -f -q "$THEME"
fi
done
Well there you are. That fixed it! Though I ought to have asked this before running it (I know I know!), could you explain what this script does? I’ll try a reboot and see if the fix is persistent. Thanks for your reply.
Just rebooted, and all seems fine. The icons are fixed and as they should be. Many, many thanks for the solution. I’ve backed it up into my “Useful Linux Scripts” folder in case I need it in the future.
I’m so pleased. Gnome 3 looks so lovely with the complete Faenza set. Thanks again.
I’m please that I was able to help. Basically, the script forces a rebuild of the entire icon cache (.icon-theme.cache) from scratch for all themes installed in /usr/share/icons.
I suppose I SHOULD have mentioned that you need to run the script as root… but obviously you figured that out on your own.
