Change The IceWM Start Menu Button (On DeLi Linux)

Chang­ing the IceWM start menu but­ton is actu­ally eas­ier than I expected, and you don’t even have to be logged in as root to do it. It turns out that you can over­ride any theme image if it’s in the same rel­a­tive loca­tion under ~/.icewm. Every­thing else will remain unchanged. So let’s change the start menu but­ton for the default theme in DeLi Linux (goldiKwarc).

Open up a ter­mi­nal (mrxvt) and enter the fol­low­ing com­mands. NOTE: If you are not using DeLi Linux, your par­tic­u­lar instal­la­tion of IceWM may dif­fer, and as a result, file loca­tions may differ.

cd ~/.icewm
mkdir themes
mkdir themes/goldiKwarc
mkdir themes/goldiKwarc/taskbar
cd themes/goldiKwarc/taskbar
ln -s /usr/share/icewm/themes/goldiKwarc/taskbar/icewm-alt.xpm icewm.xpm

From the start menu, select Logout…–>Restart Icewm. Once IceWM reloads, you should see Tux smil­ing back at you. If you want to use the start but­ton from a dif­fer­ent theme, just change the sym­bolic link com­mand appro­pri­ately. If you use one your own, you can either link, copy, or move the file to this folder. This tech­nique should work for any image in a theme as long as the rel­a­tive loca­tion is the same. Of course if you change a lot of images, you may want to con­sider cre­at­ing a new theme instead.

NOTE: start.xpm is another valid name.