GNOME can be easily optimized for Netbooks using configuration editor. Disabling animations, thumbnails and splash screen speeds up GNOME while scaling down icons saves space on desktop.
Metacity will give the user less feedback by using wireframes, avoiding animations, or other means if /apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources is set to true. This can be set with gconf-editor or from shell with gconftool:
When Metacity run on reduced resources it’s time to disable animations in panels and desktop:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0/enable_animations -t bool false
gconftool-2 -s /apps/panel/toplevels/panel_0/enable_animations -t bool false
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/interface/enable_animations -t bool false
Disabling splash screen:
Disabling logout effect and shading and shading the background colors:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/gnome-session/options/logout_effect -t str "black"
Finally Nautilus shouldn’t generate any images or documents thumbnails:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_image_thumbnails -t str "never"
Disable sounds on user events and playing sound from files under mouse:
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds -t bool false
When everything is disabled time to scale down icons in GNOME menu. This can be done in configuration file named ~/.gtkrc-2.0. To scale down icons create file with this content:
gtk-button-images = 1
gtk-icon-sizes = "panel-menu=16,16:panel=16,16:gtk-button=16,16:gtk-large-toolbar=16,16"
