A few weeks ago I migrated from Debian Testing to Ubuntu Breezy. It didn’t take long before I noticed some glitches… Don’t get me wrong, I like Ubuntu so far, but you find some glitches in every system. Earlier or later. The following story describes one of them:
Because I find the default Gnome icon set a bit, well, angular, I use the Nuvola icon theme by default. This might not have been a problem at all, if I didn’t feel the necessity to customise my panel in a special way. I bet, that it isn’t very Linux-like, but I don’t like the idea of two panels. Especially on my small notebook display. I tolerate the second panel on the large screen of my Sun workstation at university, though. However, on my notebook, I like to have everything on one panel at the bottom. This includes the sound control applet. And this brings us to the heart of the story.
After I had installed Ubuntu, the first thing I did, you guess it already, was to merge the contents of the panel at the top of the screen with the contents of the panel at the bottom of the screen and delete the former. And, you guess it already, the sound control applet worked fine. But then…. The next thing I did was, you guess it already, to change the icon theme to Nuvola. And voila… you guess it already… the sound control applet was gone! Yes, it was gone. It was not visible any longer. But wait: Clicking at the place in the panel, where the sound control applet should have been – and where I tried to add a new instance of the sound control applet, that would, maybe, last a bit longer – I got the context menue of the sound control applet. Weird, don’t ya think?
Well, it was weird, indeed! To cut a long story short: After some research I found the problem: The Ubuntu version of the Nuvola theme was a special scalable version (you could also say: SVG version) of the theme. That again was not the type of version, the sound control applet liked. The applet was more like a the static version of the theme, please type of applet. Anyway, the solution was, to copy the static sound control applet images of the Gnome default theme over to the Nuvola theme directory and change the index file of the Nuvola theme to include those images.
sudo mkdir /usr/share/icons/Nuvola/32x32sudo mkdir /usr/share/icons/Nuvola/32x32/stocksudo cp -R /usr/share/icons/Gnome/32x32/stock/media /usr/share/icons/Nuvola/32x32/stock/sudo vi /usr/share/icons/Nuvola/index.theme# add this at the end of the file[32x32/stock/media]Size=32Context=StockType=Fixed
Of course you could have made your own static images from the scalable Nuvola sound images to enjoy a consistent look, but that is, surely, beyond the scope of this post….
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