Gnome 2.10 and Mounted Volume Icons

I’ve been enjoying the subtile improvements in Gnome 2.10 over the last two or so days.

One of the most noticable improvements is the new Places menu and the trash panel applet. Between the Applications and Places menus and the trash can applet sitting on a panel there is no need to interact with the naked desktop ever. The Places menu allows you to open file manager windows directly to your home directory, places you have bookmarked in file open/save dialog boxes, and mounted network volumes.

The Places menu and Trash Can applet are always visible no matter how many windows you have on top of the desktop. Nice and easy. It always annoyed me having to move windows out of the way, switch to a clean virtual desktop or use hacks like the “Show Desktop” buttons and keyboard combinations just to interact with the filesystem and mounted volumes.

At least in Ubuntu the desktop ships bare. No icons at all and I’ve come to prefer it that way. The only icon type they forgot to turn off is the Mounted Volume icons. I was a tad annoyed by this but it has an easy fix:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/nautilus/desktop/volumes_visible -t boolean -s false

You can also use the graphical gconf-editor tool to browse the settings tree with helpful descriptions of most settings.