SDB:GNOME: A Quick Guide - GNOME 3.x
Introduction
A great place to start learning about GNOME 3 is the official GNOME documentation, especially their Introduction to GNOME article
Highlights & Cool Features
Screencast Recording
GNOME 3 has built in screencast recording. To record a video of what is going on in your gnome-shell session, all you need to do is press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+R
A red circle is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen when the recording is in progress.
Press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+R again to stop recording
After the recording is finished, a file named 'shell-%d%u-%c.webm' is saved in the home directory. In the filename, %d is the date, %u is a string that makes the filename unique, and %c is a counter that is incremented each time a recording is made within a single gnome-shell session.
Customising GNOME 3
GNOME has a bit of a reputation for being less customisable than other Desktop Environments. However GNOME3 has a number of very interesting ways you can customise not just the look and feel but change huge chunks of the functionality
Shell Extensions
GNOME 3 on openSUSE has a number of shell extensions packaged and available in the standard repositories.
- Alternative Status Menu (Installed and enabled by default on openSUSE 12.1) - This enables Hibernate and Shutdown menu items in the User Menu in the top right hand corner of Gnome Shell.
- Alternative Tab - This allows GNOME 3 to have more traditional 'window based' ALT+TAB (like Windows and KDE), instead of the default 'application based' style
- Applications Menu - This adds GNOME 2 style Applications Menu in your activity bar
- Auto Move Windows - A specific workspace can be assigned to each application as soon as it creates a window, in a manner configurable with a GSettings key.
- Dock - Add a Dock style task switcher to the right hand side of the screen
- Removable Drive Menu - Adds a panel status menu for accessing and unmounting removable devices
- Gajim integration - Adds integration with the Gajim instant messaging client
- Native Window Placement - Adds additional configurability for the window layout in the overview, including a mechanism similar to KDE4
- Places Menu - Adds a system status menu for quickly navigating places in the system.
- System Monitor - Adds a message tray indicator for CPU and memory usage.
- User Theme - enables loading a GNOME Shell theme from ~/.themes/<name>/gnome-shell
- Windows Navigator - enables keyboard selection of windows and workspaces in overlay mode, by pressing the alt key
- Workspace Indicator - adds a system status menu for quickly changing workspaces.
- XRandR Indicator - adds a system status menu to let rotate the laptop monitor and open display preferences quickly.
Once installed, you can enable any extension in Advanced Settings (aka the gnome-tweak-tool, installed by default in openSUSE 12.1)
Multiple Monitors
If you want to change which of your multiple monitors is the Primary (with the Activities bar along the top) open up System Settings > Displays
You should be presented with an interface showing you all of your screens, one of which will have the Black Activites Bar along the top. Just click and drag to move the bar to any of your other displays and assign that display as the new Primary
NOTE: Some drivers (such as the Nvidia proprietary driver) do not show your multiple monitors in System Settings > Displays. If this is the case, you will need to use the tools provided with the driver to set which display is your primary.
Other Tips
Restarting GNOME Shell
It's unlikely, but in the unlikely event of problems with gnome-shell, you can restart the shell without needing to close any of your applications or log out of your current session
Just run 'r' in the Alt+F2 Prompt and your gnome shell should restart, clearing any shell related problems without effecting the applications you're running