Those icons are BIG.
I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on my Samsung NC10 netbook. One thing that really started to bug me right off was the size of the icons on the desktop, normally this would not be a problem but on a 10" screen real estate is precious. If you right click on any of the icons on the desktop you have the option to "stretch" the icon, which allows you to increase or decrease the size of that icon. The problem with this solution is that you have to do this for each individual icon and you cannot hope to get them all the same size..............i needed to find out how to change this.......here's how.
Start the Nautilus file manager, you can do this by clicking 'Places' on the top menu panel and click on your 'Home' folder, although any folder will do. Whilst in the file manager click on 'Edit' then 'Preferences' from the drop down menu which then opens the 'File Management Preferences' dialog box. Here, if you change the value of 'Icon view defaults' this will change the icon size within Nautilus and on your desktop too, i set mine to 66% as you can see from the attached screenshot and it works well for me. Have a play around with those settings until you get the desired effect your looking for.
