Hi.

About 99.9% of the time I use kde as my window system. However, I've begun dabbling a bit in gnome. So far, one of the things I don't like about gnome is the size of icons on the desktop.
Yes I wear glasses but the icons are HUGE! Anyway, for the life of me I can't figure out how to configure the size. I know in KDE it's quite simple to modify using the 'Control Center'. The gnome control center, however, offers no such option.
Is there a way?

Thanks.

right click on the icon.
a menu will pop up
select 'stretch icon'
it will let you kinda drag it however big (or small) you need the icon to be.

Thanks much for the info. How simple! Must be my simple mind!

dont knock yourself, your smart enough to use linux, and get gnome installed .
cheers

You can change the default size for all of the icons on the Gnome desktop and the file manager, Nautilus.
type "nautilus" into a terminal. The nautilus GUI will appear. In the edit menu select preferences. Under "Icon View Defaults" and "List View Defaults" change the zoom level to 75% or whatever. The results are both immediate and lasting.

James Hall
http://home.comcast.net/~jhall4888

Stealing thread ...

I also found this information very helpful. Thank you.
However, I found that a side effect of this is that the width of the caption space under the icons is also squished, which causes the captions to truncate if the words are too long. Can the caption width stay wider, while still decreasing the size of the icons? I have already set my Desktop font size to 8pt in the Gnome fonts manager.

Edit ...
I found and unchecked "Use compact layout" in Nautilus preferences, which worked pretty well. Though, I still think it would be nice to know if it can be done in such a way as to leave the Nautilus display while still changing the desktop.

This might be what you want...

http://gnome-hacks.org/hacks.html?id=8

Great solution mate!
Thanks for the info provided here.