Of course other Desktop Environments do things differently but in GNOME those icons are part of a theme and there are only two ways of changing them that I know of:
1) Create an icon theme package much like found here:
http://art.gnome.org/themes/icon/
Then just drag and drop it into the theme manager and use it. This will only effect your user as it will install in your home directory (~/.icons). If you want to install one of these packages so it is available to everyone extract it under /usr/share/icons (you'll need to su to root for this).
or
2) Find the icons on the file system and replace them. For instance, say you have the "gnome-themes" package installed and you are using the "Smokey-Blue" icon theme but you wanted different trashcan icons. You would have to replace the trashcan icons from that icon theme installed on your drive. By looking at the files in the gnome-theme package with "Smokey-Blue" and trashcan in their name you can find which icons need to be changed:
- Code: Select all
$ find /usr/share/icons/Smokey-Blue | grep trash
/usr/share/icons/Smokey-Blue/64x64/filesystems/gnome-fs-trash-empty-accept.png
/usr/share/icons/Smokey-Blue/64x64/filesystems/gnome-fs-trash-empty.png
/usr/share/icons/Smokey-Blue/64x64/filesystems/gnome-fs-trash-full-accept.png
/usr/share/icons/Smokey-Blue/64x64/filesystems/gnome-fs-trash-full.png
This will effect all users and of course changing icons in these directories require root level access.
I know that probably isn't the answer you were hoping for but that is GNOME. If you want to be able to perform more desktop customizations you might check out KDE. Each desktop environment does things differently so you can pick one that suits your needs. I used to really be a tweaker and though KDE was better because of it. Now I don't care about tweaking desktops because I do all my work at a shell prompt as you know so I want something clean and easy. GNOME fits my needs rather well at the moment.