Greetings. I'm now coming up on a month of pure linux. I have not touched xp at all in this time (Except for fixing my mothers computer). The journey wasnt easy and it still isnt. In the past, I have used Mandrake, Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Of all of those, Ubuntu was my favorite so I went with it. The install took all of about 36 mins and everything was detected except my wireless adapter. A driver disc, ndiswrapper, and 4 mins later my laptop was chatting away with my access point.

During this past month I don't really feel like learned a whole lot but I'm not knocking it. I have tinkered around and basically been *exploring*. Now I have a few issues that are on the top of my head. They aren't major at all, but just those type of things that nag at ya. I try to deal with things one at a time so here is my main annoyance at the moment:

Everything looks so huge. I'm using a laptop with a 15" display set at 1024x768. Most of the text displays ok. What I'm saying *seems* so huge is things like dialog boxes. Say I open up gedit, type a few things then click close, the dialog box asking me if I want to save or discard looks huge, the text looks normal but the buttons look big and the box just seems to big. I've played around gnome and flux but it seems to me an X type of thing or something. Also the buttons on menu bars for different progs (Evolution, FireFox, etc...) look about twice the size of a half-dollar. Please tell me there is a solution for this. I've spent the better part of the past two days googling and cant seem to find one. I have looked through screenies on lynucs.org and saw a few where their items seemed a bit bigger than should be. I dont think its a hardware/software error just a personal preference that I cant seem to find a way to get linux to comply with.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Are you using Gnome, KDE or, Flux? In kde you can change the size of icons separately and If I remember correctly in gnome you righ click and can change the size of things.

justanothersteve, give it some more time. you'll work those quirks out, learn how to operate linux even quicker than you could ever imagine operating in windows. before you know it POOF you'll want more hard disk space and windows xp will be GONE! It's a great feeling, and you'll learn a lot in the process.

I've never used ubunto, but with slackware it was either sink or swim though... I had to be given cpr a few times too!

Baja: I'm using Gnome atm, its not the icons, its the actual rendering of dialog boxes and menu bars. In individual programs I have changed the preferences to remove the txt from the icons on the menu bar. but I can't do much about the rendering of dialog boxes (I know I *could* since this IS linux, I just havent learned how yet). But in some programs (Ximian for one) It just looks absurdly huge

Chaos: Thanks for the words of encouragement, I'm dealing with the "dt's" of windows real well, I've got the itch to hit the down arrow a few times then enter at boot but I'm doing good with avoiding it and letting Ubuntu load.

Hi,

Try running gnome-control-center (from a console) and tweaking the fonts and the theme...

HTH

This sounds like a DPI problem.

Try opening up your gnome control center (the program is actually called "gnome-control-center"), and open up the font properties. There, you're looking for a DPI option - in my version of GNOME (probably the same as in yours), it's under the button at the bottom called "details", then at the top in the window that button opens. My DPI is set at 96, but try setting it to different values, and see if that fixes the problem for you. DPI actually stands for "dots per inch", and it refers to your monitor at the resolution you use.