Showing posts with label extensions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label extensions. Show all posts

11 June 2012

186. Installing gnome shell extensions in gnome 3.4 on debian wheezy-- frippery panel, menu etc.

Gnome 3.4 frippery extensions in Debian Wheezy: bottom panel, favourites etc.
Upgrading to gnome 3.4 disabled all my extensions. It also remove all my keyboard shortcuts.

Update: Interesting take on ther GNOME 3/KDE 4releases  http://www.datamation.com/open-source/the-gnome-exodus-and-kde-2.html I think the idea of a lack of trust is a valid one: I might be able to get GNOME to do what I want today, but whatabout tomorrow? How much longer can I manually patch my screenshot app?

So, we need to get:
* move clock
* favourites
* application menu
* bottom panel
* static workspaces

Btw, extensions.gnome.org doesn't do International English. Try searching for favourites. And that's just the beginning of the headaches. I had problems finding any extensions compatible with gnome 3.4.

Anyway, as usual frippery (http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/extensions/index.html) comes to the rescue of the users (and by extension to the rescue of Gnome -- I'd already be long gone if I couldn't revert some of the more insane behaviour of gnome-shell...)

In your ~ folder (in order that the files get untared to the correct location)
wget http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/extensions/gnome-shell-frippery-0.4.1.tgz
tar xvf gnome-shell-frippery-0.4.1.tgz 

Hit alt+f2 to bring up the launcher thingy, type 'r' and hit enter. You're done!


To make life worth living again, also do
sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool
if you haven't already

That way you can get the Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons back on your window border.

Another noticeable change is that it's become very difficult to resize windows using the mouse -- expand horizontally or vertically is like before, but dragging a corner is tough -- it takes a lot of fiddling to be able to grab the corner in the first place.

Finally, ctrl+b is mapped to some bookmark function in epiphany/web which is annoying, since it's universally used to make things bold. The gnome developer instructions even say not to do this:
http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.4/input-keyboard.html.en (see table 10.8)


Interesting side-effect:
my fancy gnome-screenshot.debugged isn't called anymore -- and the metacity/keybinding_commands list is depopulated in addition to the gnome system settings/keyboard/shortcuts/Custom. Gnome shell 3.4 seems to mark the point where gconf-editor is deprecated. See the gnome-screenshot compilation post for more info.


At any rate, the keyboard shortcuts related to Screenshots now contains five different combination commands. Seriously -- they 'simplify' gnome-screenshot, then they want users to learn four different key combinations in addition to vanilla prtscr? And none of them does what I really need -- i.e. a quick and simple way to save screenshot with the name I want in the location I want.


Links to this post:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/how-to-add-panel-in-gnome-debian-wheezy-4175463451/

05 December 2011

22. gnome-shell/GNOME3 -- acceptance

So after the turmoil of being thrown into a new desktop metaphor, I've finally reached a stage where I'd feel less at home in Gnome 2.3 than 3.0. Truth be told, the new gnome is both pretty and quite responsive. Key to making Gnome 3 usable is, however, that enough shell extensions are installed that it works similar to the old gnome. The application centric desktop may work for casual users (email/browser), but not for traditional linux/unix applications where different parts of a work flow is handled by different applications (e.g. latex -- scripting/composition in one application, compilation by another, inspection in a third; or gnuplot -- data preparation, gnuplot scripting, visualisation of output file).

But once all the shell extensions are installed, it's back to business as usual.

Even Linus seems to be coming around to Gnome 3 after mumbling about defecting to xfce4: https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts

So far I've only had one unresolved problem - an 'old' desktop with a radeon 5400 hd card won't run gnome-shell on debian testing. No acceleration. Oh well. At least all my other computers are reasonably happy so far.