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Using Mac icons on your Linux Desktop

One of the first things I noticed about the KDE and Gnome desktops, was how ugly the icons were.

I searched the net and found several Linux icon sites, none of which were as nice as an average Mac icon site. In addition, most had huge 48x48 icons, and I like mine 32x32. After a little experimentation, this is how I converted some favorite Mac icons for use in Linux.

Linux Desktop environments support many graphic formats for their icons: png, xpm, TIFF, jpg, and gif. Unfortunately, ResEdit resources are not directly supported.

For my icons, I chose to use the gif format. Since I'm not a graphics wizard, a 256 color palette is enough for me. Plus GIF-89 supports one color transparencies.

Converting:

To start, under the MacOS, select an icon from a Get Info window and copy it to the clipboard. Do this instead of copying the ResEdit icl8 image because you can get a start with a 32 bit image instead of the ResEdit 8 bit.

Once on the clipboard, open a new 32 x32 pixel image in a graphics program. (I use Photoshop, but GraphicConvertor also works well.)

Paste the clipboard into the new drawing. Before reducing the color palette to 256 for gifs, pick an odd color and fill in the white space around your icon.

In my example on the left, I chose green because that color is not used in the icon. Now you can reduce the image to a custom 256 color palette. There will be some dithering, but since you are using a custom palette of 256 colors, it should be minimal.

When saving/exporting the image in GIF 89 format, set the green color to be transparent.

Once you have your converted icons, copy them to a shared HFS partition, or email them to yourself to get them somewhere you can open them under Linux.

Using the Icons in Gnome:

To assign a new icon to an item, right-click the item and select Properties from the contextual menu. Under the Options tab, you will be presented with the original icon, in this example, a silver folder.

Clicking on the folder icon on the Options page brings up a dialog box. Using the Browse button, you can work you way into the directory where you stored your custom icons. Select an icon to se its preview. Notice in the example above that the green is not present in the icon because it's transparent. Once you have selected your new icon, click OK and you're all set.

Using the Icons in KDE:

Assigning the icons in KDE is very similar to Gnome, right-click the item and select Properties from the contextual menu. Under the Dir tab, you will be presented with the original icon. There is one notable exception. While you can browse the drive for icons in Gnome, KDE limits you to two directories.

To use your icons, you will need to place them in one of these two locations. You can then select between them from a popup menu.