Chapter 6. The GNOME Control Center

Introduction

The GNOME Control Center allows you to configure various parts of your system using a collection of tools called caplets. These caplets may be associated with the core set of GNOME applications or applications in which the developers have written caplets for. Your Control Center may contain more caplets than are documented here depending on the applications installed on your system.

The Control Center is divided into two main sections, the menu of configurable caplets and the main work space. Working with the Control Center simply requires you selecting a caplet from the menu on the left and double clicking on it. Once this is done, the workspace will change accordingly allowing you to configure the item.

Multimedia

Sound

The Sound caplet allows you to set the system sounds for your GNOME session. There are two tabs to select in the sound caplet: General and Sound Events.

At this point you have two options to choose from in the General tab, enabling sound for GNOME and for events. If you select Enable Sound for GNOME you will make sure that GNOME's sound engine (ESD) will be launched every session of GNOME you run. Enabling sound for events will launch any sound files you have set in the Sound Events tab when those events occur. With these two items enabled you will utilize GNOME's session management which will remember your sound settings whenever you log in or out. If you enabled sound for events

The Sound Events tab contains all of the events which can have sounds associated with them and which sound, if any, is currently associated to the event. Within this tab you can navigate through the sound events in GNOME and change their sounds.

To change a sound associated with a GNOME event select the event in the hierarchical list on the left and press the Browse button to find a sound file on your system that you wish to associate with that event. Once you have found a sound file you may press the Play button to test the sound and see if you like it enough to hear it every time the event occurs.

Appearances

TO BE DONE...

Look and Feel

The first option in the Appearances menu is the Look and Feel caplet. This caplet allows you to change the look and feel of certain components and widgets within GNOME applications.

There are three tabs to choose from within the Look and Feel caplet, Dialogs, Application, and MDI.

The Dialogs tab will allow... TO BE DONE...

Theme Selector

The Appearances caplets contains the Theme Selector which allows you to select which GTK theme you would like to run.

GTK themes are themes which allow the GTK widget set to change look and feel. The widget set is the set of tools that provide buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc. to applications. GNOME compliant applications use the GTK tool set so most of your GNOME applications will change look and feel if you change the GTK theme.

To change your GTK theme select a theme from the Available Themes list on the left side of the main workspace. If you have Auto Preview selected you will be able to see what the theme looks like in the preview window below. If you like the theme press the Try button on the bottom of the GNOME Control Center to install it.

There are a few GTK themes that come loaded with GNOME when you install it. If you would like more themes you can check resources on the Internet like http://gtk.themes.org . Once you have found a theme you like, all you have to do to install it is to unpack it into your ~/.themes directory by typing

tar -zxvf [theme filename]

Once the theme has been unpacked into the .themes directory it will be listed in the available themes window the next time you start the GNOME Control Center.

Workspace

The Workspace menu contains caplets that control the functionality associated with your workspace or desktop. If you are using a GNOME compliant window manager you will find the configuration items for the window manager under Workspace. Changing the background image and screen saver can be done here as well.

Background Properties

The properties for your background image can be set here by either selecting a color or an image. If you select a color you have the option of having a Flat color or Gradient colors. If you choose to have Gradient colors you may choose between a Vertical or Horizontal gradient and choose the second color for the gradient to end on.

If you decide to have an image as wallpaper you may browse for the image you wish to use. Once you have found your image you need to decide whether you would like to have the image tiled, centered, scaled while keeping aspect, or simply scaled. Once you have changed your background properties you may press the Try button at the bottom of the Control Center to make the change.

Screensaver

In this caplet you can change your xscreensaver properties. This caplet contains a list of available screen savers you may choose and a demo screen. Below these two dialogs you will see a set of tools which allows you to change the settings for the global screen saver properties. If the screen saver you choose has particular settings you can change those by pressing the Settings button that appears below the Screen Saver list.

Global Screen Saver settings - In this section of the caplet you can change the time, password, and power management properties. You can decide how long you would like the screen saver to wait before starting by typing the number of minutes in the Start After text box. If you would like a password to return to your desktop click the Require Password. Your account login password is the password set for the screen saver.

You are also given the option of using power management if your monitor is capable of it. You may set how much time you would like before the monitor is shutoff by typing the time in the Shutdown monitor text box.

Input Devices

The caplets in this section of the Control Center will help you configure hardware input devices including keyboard, and mouse properties.

Keyboard Properties

There are currently two settings for the keyboard in this caplet. You may change the properties of Auto-repeat and the Keyboard click. The Auto-repeat enables you to hold a key down and have it repeat the character at the rate and delay you set in this caplet. The Keyboard click enables a small click sound to play at each key press.

Mouse Properties

The Mouse Properties caplet allows you to change between left and right handed mouse buttons and define the Accelerations and Threshold properties. The Accelerations setting allows you to change the speed the mouse moves across the screen in relation to the movement of the mouse on your mouse pad. TO BE DONE...