Documentation / Chapter 3. Customizing Your Settings
	2.17. For More Information		3.2. Hardware

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:

Keyboard and mouse configuration, as described in Section 3.2.1, “Modifying Keyboard Preferences” and Section 3.2.2, “Configuring the Mouse”
Desktop background, as described in Section 3.3.1, “Changing the Desktop Background”
Screen saver, as described in Section 3.3.4, “Configuring the Screen Saver”
Password, as described in Section 3.4.1, “Changing Your Password”
Sounds, as described in Section 3.5.10, “Setting Sound Preferences”

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

The Control Center

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 network devices and configure your network connection. 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 date and time, language, sound 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

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-Up (↑Start-Up).

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