I'm still trying to figure out how to change the icon in the gnome main menu.

From the official gNS docs:

"4.1 Using a Custom Main Menu Icon

You can set your own icon as the Main Menu icon displayed in the GNOME panel.

...On the opened Configuration Editor's sidebar, navigate to apps > panel > objects. Under objects, you'll see a series of folders named object_0, object_1, object_2, etc... Find the folder with variable called tooltip set to Main Menu.

In this folder, enable the variable use_custom_icon by placing a check in the box placed to its left. Then, double-click on the custom_icon variable and enter the full location of your image file into the text field."

However, none of the objects in gNS version 2.1 have anything after the tooltip. I have 3 objects (object_0, object_1, object_2). None of them seem to affect the icon, so the way of changing it seems to have been altered without updating the documentation.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

This isn't really an answer to the above question, but may be a workaround. I found that if you create an "Add to Panel" applet, it allows you to create a main menu. This will make the necessary object appear in gconf-editor. It will then allow you to use a custom icon.

You can then remove the familiar gnome "Applications/Places/System" buttons on the left of the main panel. Voila! You now have a custom icon. However, "Places" and "System" are submenus in this menu instead of separate buttons. Also, unless your custom icon has a word in the picture, you will just have a picture button (I have the gNewSense tree icon). You may or may not like how it looks.

This was acceptable to me, but still I would prefer knowing how to change the default icon without creating a new menu and losing the other two buttons.

Hello, junebug.

The only way I know to do this is by changing an icon named start-here.png in the directory of the icon theme you're using. Each icon theme may provide different sizes and formats for this icon, so you should replace them all with the icon you want to use. Note that this icon is located in the icon_theme/size/places directories.

You can find the icon themes in /usr/share/icons.

Let me know if that was what you're looking for.