Android emoticons on Ubuntu with Empathy

The default Ubuntu IM client has now been Empathy for a while. Though it supports themes, replacing the stock emoticons (which come from Gnome), unlike in Pidgin, is not a straightforward process. Which is kind of embarrassing, since the default smileys in Gnome are far from being pretty and eye-candy.

Fortunately, you can override the system emoticons for your user: just create the proper directory structure under ~/.local, and applications will use the emoticons found under ~/.local/share/icons/gnome/16x16/emotes, where 16x16 is the resolution they need.

To make it easy for Ubuntu users, we just packed the Android emoticons into a ready to use package. Once you downloaded it, untar the package into your home folder:

$ cd ~
$ tar xvzf ~/Downloads/android-emoticons.tar.gz

It will create all the necessary folders under .local, and place the smileys in different resolutions there.