"Go Home" button's icon can't be changed easily

[Colin Norris]

On my Eee PC, I use the unofficial eeebuntu distribution, and so I have two icons on the top panel. The Go Home applet, and an icon that provides access to the Applications, Places and System menus - like the Start button on Windows. I don't think the "start" style applet was developed for eeebuntu. Due to the way icon themes are applied, both the go home applet and the "start" button use the same icon, which would be confusing to new users - not to mention unprofessional looking.

If the Go Home applet was improved, to allow the user to select a specific icon to be applied to it, from an options screen, not only would my problem be solved, but it would allow OEMs to select a more recognizable icon that features in their marketing materials, that would always reflect the button's purpose, whilst still letting users choose their own icon theme.

I'm thinking, just add an options panel that allows the user to select "use system theme" or choose a custom icon or image.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

how about reading the icon name from a gconf setting?

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

In go-home-applet 0.1ubuntu14, the icon used is controlled by a per-applet gconf key "icon_name". There's no UI for setting it (beyond gconf-editor, where you'll find the key under /apps/panel/applets/applet_X/prefs).

[antistress (antistress)]

It's not easy to set : how can we change the icon ? i have to manually enter a name and i don't know which one !

with my dell mini 9, that applet looks like a house (Home)
with my desktop PC with manually installed UNR configured, that applet looks like Ubuntu logo (like my menu : very confusing)

Maybe that could be set from contextual menu with the possibilty to browse folders (see other applets that are used to launch an application from the panel) ?

thanks

[Kilbasar (kilbasar)]

Hi antistress,

Please see my answer here:

https://answers.launchpad.net/netbook-remix/+question/70335

The short version is that you can change it to any icon in "/usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/places/" (I did not verify this, so it might be one of the other places with a "distributor-logo.svg" in it). If you don't like those icons, try adding one to there. But my solution to your problem was to change "icon_name" to "user-desktop", which changes the icon to the "show desktop" icon, which I find appropriate.