Customizing Your Settings

Contents

3.1. The Control Center
3.2. Hardware
3.3. Look and Feel
3.4. Personal
3.5. System

You can change the way the GNOME desktop looks and behaves to suit your own personal tastes and needs. Some of the settings you might want to change include:

These settings and others can be changed in the Control Center.

The Control Center

While YaST is a desktop independent system-wide tool to configure most aspects of your openSUSE installation, such as hardware settings, network devices and services, software management or virtualization, the Control Center is a GNOME configuration tool and focuses more on the look and feel, personal settings and preferences of your GNOME desktop.

To access the Control Center, click Computer+Control Center. The Control Center is divided into the following four categories:

Hardware

Allows you to configure hardware components such as graphics cards, monitors, printers or keyboard layout, and to set up your sound device and desktop sound effects. For more information, see Section 3.2, “Hardware”.

Look and Feel

Contains settings for the desktop background, the screen saver and the fonts appearing on the desktop. You can modify themes, window behavior and styles of desktop elements such as menus and scroll bars. You can also configure 3D desktop effects (Compiz). For more information see Section 3.3, “Look and Feel”.

Personal

Go here to change your login password or to configure keyboard shortcuts and keyboard accessibility settings. For more information see Section 3.4, “Personal”.

System

Lets you configure system settings such as language, network connections, software sources and updates, your preferred applications, or power management. Define how GNOME handles sessions on login or shutdown and modify the Beagle search settings. For more information see Section 3.5, “System”.

Figure 3.1. GNOME Control Center

GNOME Control Center

In order to change some system-wide settings, Control Center will prompt you for the root password and start YaST. This is mostly the case for administrator settings (including most of the hardware, the graphical user interface, Internet access, security settings, user administration, software installation and system updates and information). Follow the instructions in YaST to configure these settings. For information about using YaST, refer to the integrated YaST help texts or refer to Start (↑Start).

This chapter focuses on individual settings you can change directly in the GNOME Control Center (without YaST interaction).