Ubuntu – How to modify the icon size of the side main unity launcher

For Ubuntu 11.10

The first thing you would need to do is take a .png icon file that you would like to use and copy it to the respective ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/ directory. This will contain the following directories (which are the dimensions of the icons) : 16x16/apps/ 32x32/apps/ 48x48/apps/

I downloaded a free 16x16 free icon sampler and picked a 16x16 icon called Alien.png

I took the Alien.png file and copied it to ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps, When you copy yours, you can do that through either the GUI or terminal.

From there you would need do the following in a terminal (you may need sudo to copy this over):

cp /usr/share/applications/pidgin.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

Next edit the pidgin.desktop file:

vi ~/.local/share/applications/pidgin.desktop

Look for the line that says:

Icon=pidgin

This will need to change to the new icon name without the .png prefix...

Icon=Alien

Save your changes... Then logout and log back in.

Please let me know if this helps or if you need more assistance.

I just installed Unsettings and it's excellent, handles the launcher and panel colour, opacity etc. It does a lot of other stuff too. There's a short piece about it here:

http://www.noobslab.com/2012/04/install-unsettings-tweak-tool-on-ubuntu.html