[ale] gnome desktop: icon size control

[Jim Kinney]

Heh, heh. Your rant is a solid view of the OS world. People drop some
serious coin to buy windows and it just blows donkey schlong all day
long. Yet this free Linux crap _can't be any good?!?!?

Sheesh. other than my screen turning itself off until I wiggle the
mouse on my Dell laptop at work, it runs for days until I stop
suspending it and shut it down. OK. I do have a special button I
hacked that kills networking, network manager, dumps the wireless
module in the trash and reloads it all to stop association thrashing.

To answer your question, gconf editor is your friend. Go to
apps->nautilus->icon view and change "thumbnail size"

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 10:46 PM, Tim Watts<timtw at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm setting up a Gnome desktop for a friend who likes to collect all her
> pictures, docs etc. on the desktop. That's fine except that the thumbnail
> icons (jpeg, bmp & pdf) are unreasonably large (about 1" square). Is there a
> way to control the size as a general policy -- other than turning off
> thumbnails? I see how I can do this on a case by case basis but that's not
> good enough. (This is on ubuntu jaunty.)
>
> == BEGIN RANT ==
> BTW, I got started on this when she asked me if I could look into why her
> laptop spontaneously shuts down several times a day -- usually while in the
> middle of capturing some thoughts for her business. It's running vista so I
> wasn't terribly surprised to hear this. What I wasn't prepared for was how
> UNBELIEVABLY BAD this OS is. (I'm pretty confident it's not a hardware problem
> -- batteries are good, no viruses found (sigs up to date), no serious hardware
> alerts etc. This is reinforced by the fact that it's been running linux off a
> flash drive for over 24 hrs with no problems -- writing on the ntfs
> partitions, wireless internet, yada, yada...) It's been a while since I've had
> to deal with a windows machine and my dealings with vista have mostly been
> from my armchair. I guess I'm lucky. So you'll pardon me if I just can't get
> over the fact that Linux is the free OS while windows it the one people pay
> for. It just makes no sense. Vista is bad from so many viewpoints: usability,
> stability, security, speed, resource consumption... But it is shiney, I will
> give you that.
>
> Let's start with security and the endless popups where windows asks you if
> it's ok to perform an action you just asked it to perform because it's not
> really sure YOU asked it to perform it. What!? So it can't acertain the origin
> of a mouse click but it's going to use a mouse click to decide whether to
> proceed. If you were writing malware wouldn't you naturally send a button-
> click message to the dialog? Even if they made it difficult to get the window
> handle, what about popup fatigue? A basic interaction design priciple says
> that to make popups effective, avoid using them. So this popup strategy is no
> security at all but shameless CYA. Mind you, these popups aren't isolated to
> "commit" actions (in fact, all the commit action popups I saw appeared to be
> normal parts of the application). Just *opening* the Event Viewer will trigger
> one.
>
> Each time I booted the machine, the system was unusable for 15 minutes AFTER
> the desktop appeared, no lie. A lot of this seemed to be because the internet
> connection hadn't been established -- but I couldn't establish it because the
> system was thrashing.
>
> I suspect much of the instability she experiences comes from the fact that she
> (probably unknowingly) never shuts the system down but rather puts it to
> sleep. I've never had a good experience with windows hibernate on any system
> (but very good with Ubuntu on my Dell). I say "unknowingly" because the button
> you would expect to shutdown the system doesn't do that and you'd only notice
> this if you paid attention to the tool tip (but why would you? you know an off
> button when you see one, right?). I don't know if this is a customization on
> her part (doubtful), the OEM (Acer) or just standard vista behaviour, but it's
> a poor choice. And given the lengthy startup/shutdown time for a full vista
> boot/shutdown I can imagine why someone opted for this little deception.
>
> Resource consumption: the vista footprint on her system is about 17GB. Her
> personal data and software is less than 5. The hard drive light almost never
> stopped during any given session (and no i/o error / controller events in the
> logs).
>
> Speed: I downloaded a large file (~700MB). Windows initial estimate was 198
> hours (don't tell me stupid shit when you know it's just plain stupid) but
> finally settled at around 51 minutes. However, we'll never know how accurate
> it was because it could never finish the job. The furthest it got along was
> around 10MB. But it aways hung. Same file, same machine, same network under
> linux: completed the job in a little over 40 minutes.
>
> Bear in mind this machine has not been a sand box for endless software
> experiments. Basically, she has QuickBooks and some flash-based courseware
> installed (that's going to be a problem, linux-wise). I could go on but I'm
> really more interested in an answer to my original question. I do feel about
> 10 pounds lighter, however. Thanks for listening if you read this far.
>
> Well ok one last thing: in fairness, a lot of Gnome/KDE stuff has a few miles
> to go in the usability arena. And I've had X go ballistic a few times. So I'm
> not trying to claim that the linux desktop is some kind of utopia. But
> stability?, speed?, security? Linux all the way!
>
> == END RANT ==
>
>
> --
> It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
>  -- Abraham Lincoln
>
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>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness