Icon Themes

Version 0.6.0 introduced several improvements in the way icons are handled in KSetiSpy. First of all, icons are now in a directory of their own, separated them from other pictures used by the program. Secondly, most icons are rendered at all the resolutions allowed by KDE, instead of just one. Finally, we also install vector descriptions (SVG) of all the icons, so that future versions of KDE will be able to scale the icons to arbitrarily large sizes.

All these changes have improved the visual quality of the icons of KSetiSpy. They also made it easier to customize KSetiSpy's look by installing different icon themes. At the time of this writing, there's already another theme available, Redmond-XP, with more under construction. In this section we describe the steps required to replace KSetiSpy's icon theme.

A choice you have to do is whether to install the new icons locally (only for your user account), or globally (for all users in your system). In the latter case you'll need to login as superuser (root).

Regardless of your choice, it is useful to check what are the local and global prefixes in your KDE installation. Use the kde-config to find out what they are:

% kde-config --prefix
/usr/
% kde-config --localprefix
/home/rvirga/.kde/

The location where you'll have to install the new icon theme will be obtained by appending share/apps/ksetispy/icons/crystalsvg/ to one of the prefixes above.

In what follows, I'll assume:

The instructions for your install should be easily obtainable by making small and obvious changes to the ones presented here.

While the directory for the global installation will always exist (it is created during the installation of KSetiSpy to store the default theme), the directory for a local installation most likely won't exist and will need to be created using the command mkdir. Therefore the installation steps will be the following:

% mkdir -p /home/rvirga/.kde/share/apps/ksetispy/icons/crystalsvg
% cd /home/rvirga/.kde/share/apps/ksetispy/icons/crystalsvg
% tar jxvf ~/redmond-xp.theme.tar.bz2

After you restart KSetiSpy, it now should look like this: