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Q Icon inconsistencies

I know this isn’t the worst problem to have, but it’s driving me mad. I’ve used Linux Mint for about three years and now that I’m more experienced I’ve successfully made the move to Garuda Linux, based on Arch, while still using the Cinnamon desktop.

I have eight USB sticks with various things on them. When I insert four of them (individually, of course), they display as removable with a cool USB Icon as attached. The other four display as removable but with a hard disk icon. It’s driving me mad.

The USB Sticks are one Kingston Data Traveller 101 GS and 3 Sandisk Cruzers.

Kevin Scholey

A From the images you sent, it appears that removable drives, including USB sticks, get the removable drive icon while the “cool USB icon” appears for other devices, such as a camera. It appears the desktop is interrogating the drive information and picking an icon accordingly. There may be a way to alter this with some dconf setting, but nothing obvious. However, there’s a way to attach custom icons to drives. It needs you to repeat the process for each removable drive that you use, but it does enable you to use any icon on any drive.

First, get yourself an icon. This can be a PNG image or a Windows format .ico file. There are plenty of resources for free icon collections out there, for example https:// freeware.iconfactory.com. These are all oriented towards Windows and MacOS systems, but the icon files work with Linux, too. Of course, you already have a large collection in /usr/share/icons that were installed along with your desktop themes. You can also create your own icons, but make sure the image file is square.

However you find your icon file, copy it to the root of the USB device. Then create a text file called autorun.inf in the root of that device containing:

with the correct name for the icon file. There’s one caveat: the file name cannot contain any spaces, so rename it if necessary. Save the file and the next time you plug in that drive, it’ll be mounted showing your custom icon. This approach does mean more work if you have many devices, although you can reuse the files across similar devices. On the other hand, once you put an icon on a device, it’ll be used on any Linux desktop you mount it on.