When you install Linux programs on your Chromebook, you should hopefully have the correct icon for the program showing on your Chromebook.

However, if you just see the generic Linux icon for certain Linux programs you’ve installed, this can become frustrating.

In this video I will show you how to change the Linux Icon for the programs you’ve installed on your Chromebook. This makes it much easier to identify programs when searching for the one you want to use.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

00:00

hello in the video coming up i'll show you how you can change your linux icons from this to this so if you use linux on your chromebook or your chromebox one thing you might realize is some programs not all of them some programs do not use their own icons they use a generic icon a penguin

00:28

from linux and it's not that nice and it's not just about how it looks it can also make it pretty difficult to actually find different apps so i'm going to show you in this video how you can change that so you can change the icon so you can choose one that you prefer and it just different it

00:46

differentiates your linux program so you find them easy to find on your app launcher down here so i've installed linux i'll have a look at the moment i've only just installed it on this chrome box because i did a refresh i've tried this on my chromebook and it works

01:01

all okay so i'm going to do it from scratch on here to show you so first of all what you would need you would need to have linux installed if you don't have linux installed i've got a video will show you how to do that you'd also need to have a linux app store installed

01:16

put it in this way where i'm going to show you and again i've got a video to show you how to do that or if you know how to install apps using the terminal yourself that's fine you can do it that way so the reason why you need a linux app store is because i'm going to use

01:32

the linux app store to install a program so this is the linux app store here so if you don't have this have a look at my videos and there's a video how to install a linux app store and i'll try and remember to put a link in the description as well okay so first of all then what i would

01:47

suggest is don't skip through the video because you're gonna miss steps and there are steps that you need to follow so don't skip through the video and then not see what the steps are and then leave a comment saying how to do this when the video will explain everything you need to do so one

02:03

thing i will say before we get started is that it it's the strange thing and i couldn't really get my head around was that here for example when we create a new icon here for example say if we changed this was the penguin look icon here and we changed it and we changed the name

02:23

here just say to chrome 2 for example the chrome 2 the actual name changes straight away the icon is it's really intermittent on my chromebook when i did it on my asus chromebook once it changed straight away the next time it changed when i turned off the computer and turned it back on

02:41

but then when i did another one it didn't change until the next day so this is obviously cached and if you don't know what cache is what a cache is it it helps systems and websites perform much faster so instead of when you go to the app launcher for example instead of it

02:57

always looking up data it caches the icons were linked to certain programs and it's that cash update which i can't really get my head around so when you do this if it doesn't work straight away don't think oh it doesn't work it does work it may just take a restart of your chromebook for example

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or wait until the next day and you'll see it work or it could work straight away that's what i mean i couldn't really get my head around it so let's get on to how it all works then so first of all what i'll do and you do need this program but this program is good because this program

03:32

does just use that generic penguin icon so you'll see the difference so go on to discover and we do need um a file x manager for linux so that's our files manager for chrome os but we need a files manager for linux and the one i'm going to install is nemo which is really good just type in nemo

03:55

and you'll see it here files so just install that this action will also remove the following package i mean i didn't have that on my chrome book i'm not sure what that is i'll just carry on that's fine so that's just downloading i'll quickly skip the video to get to where

04:14

we need to be okay so that's installed that took quite a few minutes compared to my a6 high chromebook it installed much quicker so it just showed the more powerful chromebooks with ssd but i assume my chromebox had ssd storage as well anyway we're going off track so as

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you can see here we've we've now installed this and you can see that's the icon there okay but when if we go to linux you'll see it's that and it's this that's what we're going to be doing in this video we're going to be changing it so you don't have that generic penguin

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icon there but we do need files as well so i didn't just download it so you could see that we actually need files as well so what we're going to do we're going to go into first we're not going to change the files one we're going to download another program as well so

05:04

you don't obviously need to download this program you need to download the files program but i'm just downloading this program because this is another program that doesn't use there you can see the icon but when it's actually installed it doesn't actually that was installed a

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lot quicker um we just wait for to see what it's doing it doesn't actually use that icon there still looking let's have a look if it's in linux yeah there we go so there that's there so the handbrake is there and the files is the one what we need to use but both of them you can change both

05:41

of these but we're going to be changing handbrake today so first of all what you need to do i'm just going to i don't i think we can safely close that now i think that's all okay let's install let's look handbrake yep so that's the amperage program um okay so first of all what you need to do is go

06:02

to your chrome os file manager there so i'll put that there like that and then you also need the linux file manager which is this one and we put that one there so these are both the same the difference is this this is your chrome os files and these are your linux files

06:26

so first of all i've only just set this up so i make that will obviously be shared because it's linux files and that's all okay there so what we need to do and as i said bear with me make sure you follow it completely because you may miss steps so what we need to do here then if you go to file

06:44

system that takes you to the file system there so on here we need to go to linux files and we need to create a folder and you can call the folder whatever you like so i'm just going to call it dan's just my name dans docs for documents so i'll just call it dan's docs that's fine

07:05

and then what i need to do is as we saw that handbrake program is just using that so i want to get the icon for handbrake so i'll go on to google and just type in handbrake linux icon and hopefully it will come up go to images and this one looks like it's the one so click on there and that is okay

07:36

is there one no that's fine we use that one it's 250 by 250 which is fine that's exactly roughly what you want it to be if you if you couldn't get an image that was 250 by 250 that's fine because you can download it and change the dimensions so we'll use that so we'll just save images

07:56

and we'll just call it handbrake okay and then that's in our downloads folder so you could download you'll see it there like i said if the image was too big that's fine but if it was you downloaded a real big image that you wanted to use just change the dimensions here to around 250 and 250 but that

08:18

one's fine we don't need to do that one okay so we've got the actual logo that i mean the icon that we want to use so we need to copy cut doesn't really matter but i'll copy that into linux files and i'm going to put it inside the dan's docs folder that i created so just paste it in there like that

08:40

okay and then from there what we need to do is to go back to uh a linux file manager just go into file system and then we're looking for user and then share and then in here go into applications so it's used user which is usr share and then applications i assume that's

09:13

what it means usr user i don't know what else it would be go into applications and here you'll see these are the actual linux programs that are on your chromebook or can be used on your chromebook and what's quite frustrating is you can actually see handbrake there

09:32

and it uses the icon correctly there which is really bizarre so it just doesn't for some reason on here put it on here so that's what we're going to be doing creating that icon to do that so what you need to do is if you just right click on that and do copy now you can't essentially what we're

09:54

going to be doing we're going we're going to be using this inside chrome os file explorer but you can't copy that like so and then paste there like that you can but it won't work it won't give you the data you need if you do it like that you'll see it's got zero bytes there

10:14

it's just not what we want it to do so you delete that that's fine you need to copy it from here and then you need to paste it in this location and go back one in this location here but do it from here so go to your file system we'll just go to home sorry and this location here dan

10:33

linux now that will be whatever you set up when you set up linux so usually it uses your gmail address by default so when you first initially set up linux it will use your gmail address or you can change it i've just changed to dan linux and that's important because

10:50

you'll be using this in this video okay so this location here now is where we are there so we just want to paste and we're pasting that file that we created just paste there and then you can see it's showing on this side but it's actually got bytes so that's why you can't just copy it like

11:11

that you have to do it that way okay then what we need to do we need to open this up once it's open you'll see here this is essentially a shortcut icon here this is what we're editing now so handbrake we're going to leave it as handbrake exec here means executes so that's the

11:31

program that's executed so you don't want to change that what that means is when you double click on the icon that's the program that loads up you don't want to change that so that's fine everything else you can leave as it is it's this here that we want to change icon equals fr handbrake.ghb

11:48

so for some reason it's not bringing it over so what we're going to do here if i remember correctly the address which is fine yeah so just get rid of that and we're trying to find the address and the the location we're finding is this location here okay where this dan's docs is here

12:12

so we find in this location here so to find that location go to icon so it's backward slash and then home and then backwards slash and then it's my actual linux name so my linux name is dan linux so there or is it dan's linux let's just open up a terminal i forgot yeah so it's dan linux there so it's

12:43

that there that's what we put in here so home then dan linux or whatever yours would be another forward slash there so that's put that's put us to essentially here that's where that's taken us to so far so now we need to go into dan's docks so just put in dans docks or whatever you call yours you can

13:07

call it whatever you want that folder and forward slash and then we need to tell it the icon here so here go handbrake dot png and then save okay and then close that and then if we go back to linux files it's this is what we've just edited if you open it up opens up the two i'll just close them

13:37

open it up like i'll just show you that actually when you use the text editor it keeps the old ones that you've used as well which is fine but i tend to close them so i get a brand new fresh one from start so open that one up and we should see the changes we've made which is there icon home dan linux

13:56

dansdox handbrake.png okay so that's fine now what we need to do we need to now move that into a directory or a folder sorry in chrome os so it shows down here so there's handbrake there okay so what we'll do is go to here go to show hidden files so it's now showing you hidden files as

14:28

well just copy that file that we've just edited there so copy and then where we want to go in here is dot local share and then from inside here you want to create a folder called applications so just put it all lowercase applications go inside there and then paste that file that we edited

14:57

now that should in theory change the icon and this is where i said in theory because it doesn't necessarily change it straight away as you can see now i'm going to show you that we've changed that although the icon's not changed straight away because but don't get wrong in this

15:16

video we will try and get to a stage where we've got that icon changed it might just mean i need to restart my computer and then we will take it from there okay so i'm going to show you now that this this will change but it just takes a while to change the icon so i'll

15:31

change that name so you can see that name change so if we open this up just close these down this is the only thing if you work on the wrong ones so i'm just going to close them down open up a fresh one there i'm going to change this to h break like that okay and the actual icon is still there

15:53

save that close that go back in just to make sure it's done it h break there close that now hopefully if we go to the start menu there you can see that it has actually changed the name so it shows you that it does change it if we go to linux apps as well you can see it's changed the name

16:15

so it is registering what we're doing it's just not registering the fact that the icon has changed yet and as i said that's something to do with the cache i think i i assume it's something to do with a cache so what i'll do is i will restart my chromebook and we'll take it

16:32

from there and hopefully it's been updated so we can see that it's changed okay so here i am back so as i said it is a bit of a strange one to change it but i'll show you that it has changed so if we go to the chrome os start menu you can see that it's now the hp what we called it

16:50

but we've also got the icon as well so it's now using that handbrake icon if you're going to linux as well it's there as well so don't just stop this video right now because there's loads more i need to explain to you so you understand so it doesn't get you frustrated because

17:04

if you don't follow the steps correctly you may get frustrated if it doesn't work for you so there's still things i need to let you know about using this way of doing it but i just wanted to show you that it's worked and as as you can see has done and i'll show you the

17:19

steps that i had to do to get it to work but essentially what i would suggest is you could just be patient and just leave it and then hopefully the next day when you log in it's done what it needed to do now here you'll see the files one there i'm going to do exactly the same one with

17:38

that because that's that's where that's the chrome os that's the linux file manager which is really important so it's really important to have linux file manager of huge linux quite a lot but as you can see it uses that penguin there i'm going to change that so it changes

17:54

to a different one as well so these are the things i need to let you know what i did just then to try and get it to work is i turned off my chromebox and logged back in didn't change it i did um an update that may have changed it but what i when i did the update at first

18:19

and tried it it didn't work so what i did is i then signed out logged in with another user which you may not have if you only have one user and then when logged back out went back in it had changed but it may have been the update that did it and then up and then close it down so i'll show you what

18:35

i mean by that so after you've followed all of them steps what you could do is go to here and just type in um sudo at get apt gets update so that's s-u-d-o space apt hyphen g-e-t space update and then hit return this is what i did and then i did sudo sudo space apt hyphen get get space upgrade

19:14

so i did that as well and then i exited out there closed that down and that's when i went to switch to another user so that may have done it as well it may have speeded up the process but like i said it may not work straight away okay so one thing i need to show you is that now you've

19:31

installed this here it's just a shortcut it's not no longer seen as the program and what i mean by that is if you right click on it it gives you the options to pin to shelf but it doesn't give you the option to uninstall so if you go to here for example if you right clicks on the files one you get

19:50

the option to uninstall so it removes the option to uninstall so even if you remove handbrake by using a different method that may still stay there so if it does what you need to do is go to here and i would do this before you want to on if you want to uninstall

20:07

handbrake because if you do it this way first then you get the original handbrake back which you can then uninstall from the app launcher menu so go into here go into linux files show hidden files go into dot local go into share go into applications and just simply

20:26

delete that and once you've deleted that what would happen is handbrake would still show but it would be the original penguin icon and it would be the original handbrake name and then you could right click and uninstall so that's the only thing you need to remember

20:41

so if you use linux quite a lot it's really useful as at the moment i've only just started using my chromebox again for linux i've been using my asus chromebook and it's a bit that's the one thing if you're using two different um computers because the linux install will be separate on each one i'm

21:01

not too sure if i like that process so i might actually stop using my chromebook and just use my chromebox in future for linux so i haven't got different files everywhere it's not the same as if you use android apps which just sync as such so um if you are using linux a lot and you've

21:20

got lots of programs like a lot of them now do come over with the icon but it's good that the ones that you don't if you install quite a few if all you can see is loads of these penguin icons it can make it really hard to see so it is really good and like i said you don't

21:35

need you don't need to use that icon you can use any icon you like you can just go onto google find the icon download it like i said you want it to be about 250 pixel by 250 pixel and that's fine so i think i've showed you everything that you need to think about um in relation to the linux files um

21:56

whether you need to leave this here i i think you would because if the when it when it when the cache refreshes you can't find it it wouldn't be there so you would have to leave that folder in your linux files as that for whilst you're using it and essentially you

22:13

could use this for all of different um apps as well so if you wanted to for example under that files one where at the moment i've just got that ugly penguin files there what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go on to here and just put in file manager and just look for one that i think looks

22:33

nice essentially like that one for example and i'll just download that save image as i could just put straight into linux files dance docs and i'll just put that i'll just change that to linux file manager and then i can use that one at a later date to change the other ones so you like

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this video if you did please like below and subscribe to the channel for future videos and thanks for watching [Music] you