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Troubleshooting

If you have problems with the La Capitaine icon theme, please read the following sections before submitting an issue on GitHub. This document attempts to outline most of the common problems one might encounter with icon themes.

Necessary Background

What is a desktop file?

.desktop files are text files that can usually be found in either /usr/share/applications/ (accessible for all users) or in ~/.local/share/applications/ (accessible for the current user). These files tell your desktop environment how to display and create launchers for your desktop applications.

How do desktop environments know which images to use as icons?

A .desktop file also contains the name of an icon image, or a path to an icon which should be used in the desktop launcher. Sometimes the information in these files might cause some problems with theming.

Some common problems

An application on my desktop isn't themed!

To start your diagnosis, first look through this repository. You will likely find an appropriate icon somewhere. To see if some application icon is available in La Capitaine, just browse apps/scalable/ in this repository; try searching for the name of a particular application, or a keyword that is related to the application (e.g. search for "gedit" or "editor" if the launcher for your GNOME text editor looks funny).

If your application launcher looks funny after applying La Capitaine as your desktop icon theme, 1) there might be a problem with the .desktop files on your system, or 2) the application might not yet be themed.

  1. The icon path in the relevant .desktop file is malformed

Sadly, this is somewhat common. Some maintainers and packagers hardcode the application's icon in the .desktop file, so the application will always use the default icon. You can at least edit the file manually, and even better, report it to the developers/maintainers.

If the icon for the problematic application exists in La Capitaine, just edit the given path to a more general icon name.

Example: if foo-application is not themed properly, look for "foo" in the apps/scalable/ directory. If you find foo-icon-name.svg, you can add Icon=foo-icon-name to the application's .desktop file, assuming apps/scalable/foo-icon-name.svg exists.

The following list contains applications which may ship with hardcoded icons:

Name Find in the .desktop file Replace by
Nemo Icon=folder Icon=nemo
Gcolor2 Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/gcolor2/gcolor2.xpm Icon=gcolor2
PyCharm Icon=/opt/pycharm-xxx/bin/pyCharm.png Icon=pycharm
Most intelliJ IDEs in general Icon=/opt/intellij-ide-name/bin/ide-name.png Icon=ide-name
Python 2.x Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/python2.x.xpm Icon=python2 or Icon=python2.x, as you wish
Python 3.x Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/python3.x.xpm Icon=python3 or Icon=python3.x, as you wish

This list is just what we have noticed, it might or might not be true on your machine. If you found another candidate for the list, tell us!

  1. The icon may simply not have been themed yet.

If you can't find anything in this repository, and you're certain there are no absolute paths in your .desktop file, open an issue and I'll try to fix the problem. It's possible the icon has not yet been included. Feel free to submit an icon request or a pull request. If you want to submit a request, please be sure to read the wiki carefully, so as not to waste my time.

None of the icons are themed!

If some or all icons are not themed on your system, and you have correctly applied La Capitaine as your icon theme, then you may have one or more of the following problems.

  1. Your environment is not supported

Your desktop environment or system might not be supported. Some older environments do not support SVG icons. The solution to this would be to rasterize the vector graphics, however this is not officially planned. See supported environments on the wiki for more information.

  1. The icon theme installation is faulty or not accessible

First of all make sure that you have copied the la-capitaine-icon-theme (name doesn't matter) folder into either /usr/share/icons or ~/.icons, as described in the README.

If you have installed the theme correctly, then it should be visible in your desktop environment's Appearance or Theme settings. This varies by DE.

If that doesn't work either, double-check if the icon theme folder was copied properly to the correct location for a given user, or /usr/share/icons for a system-wide installation.

You may also need to correct file permissions. Files (images, text documents, etc.) should be rw-r--r-- or 644 in octal, directories or inodes should be drwxr-xr-x or 755 in octal.

Questions?

Feel free to contact me.