gTweakUI: A Utility for Accessing few "Advanced" Settings in Gnome 2.0!

gTweakUI actually is a graphical front-end that lets us access some of the Gsettings. If you're a bit new to this, then Gconf-editor/Gsettings is the now "old" (it's being replaced by a never version called "Dconf") Gnome desktop's settings editor/manager by using which we can tweak few of the Gnome 2.0 "behavior" :).

So this won't work in Unity right?

No actually. As most knows, Unity is still a new desktop module that follows a different philosophy but yet it uses a lot of Gnome's applications. For instance Nautilus is still the file manager in Unity + it uses the Gconf-editor for configuring desktop settings. So these settings do work in Unity too.

Anyway, gTweakUI is a much more simple utility that's focused on letting us editing few of the settings of chosen apps such as Nautilus, Galeon (a simple web browser), Gnome session and Gnome Menu related options.

Main features...

*. It comes with 4 separate front-ends (for accessing the above mentioned application settings).

1. gTweakUI Nautilus: 

This is the one I like the most and is the most useful one to me :). It lets you, Enable/disable "always use browser mode", show/hide computer/home/trash icons on desktop and rename the "Computer" icon label.

The "Computer" name is changed :)...

Also there is a setting called "Use Nautilus to draw desktop". I'm not sure if this is true to all the OS designs, but in GNU/Linux, almost all the desktops use their default file manager as the desktop manager (the "desktop" is actually a folder that's managed by the file manager) . So if your file manager crashes, then you'll also loose your desktop.

Anyhow, you remove the "check mark" then don't worry, your desktop won't crash :) but it'll actually disable the "desktop" (including both keyboard and mouse functions such as right-click menu, etc) related functions.

So the desktop will just sit there staring at you but you simply won't be able to do anything on it. Although I don't understand the usability of it yet you can do that using GTweakUI nonetheless (perhaps it adds a bit of a stability, I dunno).

2. gTweakUI Galeon:

As said, this lets you tweak few settings of the Galeon web browser (if you use it).

3. gTweakUI Menus:

Lets you configure 3 menus related settings such as make the de-attachable, change menu accelerators, etc.

4. gTweakUI Session:

Although Ubuntu comes with the default Gnome splash greeter disabled (helps to speed up things a bit) but even though with this you can enable it manually still it didn't work in my Laptop, enable/disable log-out menu and save desktop session (note: I'm not sure it's good thing to use this to save Unity desktop related settings, after all it is a bit different :). But you can certainly use it for Gnome classic nonetheless).

You can install gtweakui in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install gtweakui

In Gnome classic desktop you can launch the 4 separate "portions" from: "System" menu in the main desktop menu. OR just put the below 4 commands after pressing "Alt" + "F2" which should launch the appropriate configuration window. 

gtweakui-galeon

gtweakui-session

gtweakui-nautilus

gtweakui-menus

Yup that's about it.