Many of the following notes are reproduced in the online help for GNOME 3. To start the help application, move your mouse to the Activities hotspot at the upper left. Then type "help" to find the application, or choose Applications and locate Help in the menu.
The new GNOME Shell is a new way for users to interact with their systems and be productive. The shell features a completely redesigned interface and tools for elegance and ease of use:
A top bar that provides immediate access to settings, calendar, and major hardware
An Activities hot corner on the top left provides easy access to all applications and searching, as well as a dock for favorite apps
Notification improvements, such as messaging support without having to switch context to another application
Access throughout the shell for keyboard-centric as well as point-and-click users
A control panel that integrates system and personal settings in one location
The following wiki pages describe the major changes and explain different workflows.
The new GNOME 3 user experience requires a video card capable of 3D acceleration. Fedora 15 supports the widest possible range of these cards through free software drivers, including the
nouveau driver for NVidia graphics cards, the
radeon driver for AMD graphics cards, and the
intel driver for Intel graphics cards. In situations where properly supported 3D acceleration is not detected, GNOME 3 offers a fallback mode that models the GNOME Shell behavior. 3D support in Nouveau is now available by default, and the
mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package no longer needs to be installed.
2.1.1.1.1. How do I find applications?
Go to the top left corner to activate the hotspot and then click on . Alternatively, click on the Super key (also known as the Windows key) or Alt+F1, and start typing the name of the application or a related term.
2.1.1.1.2. How do I change settings?
Click on the user menu at the top right and select . For more advanced preferences, install the gnome-tweak-tool package.
2.1.1.1.3. How do I shutdown/power off or restart the system?
Hold down the Alt key and click on the user menu. The menu item at the end of the menu will change into . While holding down the Alt key, click on that item. You will get options to shutdown or restart the system.
2.1.1.1.4. How do I change the behavior on laptop lid close?
The default behavior when a laptop lid closes is for the system to suspend. This default can be changed (and made different depending whether the system is running on battery or mains power, if desired).
Use gnome-tweak-tool or use either or both of the following commands:
2.1.1.1.5. How do I maximize or minimize windows?
Owen Taylor from Red Hat, one of the primary developers of GNOME Shell, explains the rationale
here for removing these buttons by default. Minimize and maximize are still
available on the context menu if you right click on the window title or hit
Alt+
Space. You can also maximize by double clicking on the window title, or dragging the window over the top edge of the desktop. If you want to configure button appearance, use
gnome-tweak-tool.
2.1.1.1.6. Is there any way to tile windows?
You can tile windows by dragging them against the left or right side of the desktop. The window is automatically sized to take up that half of your desktop.
2.1.1.1.7. How do I make the panel display the full date/time?
Use gnome-tweak-tool or use either or both of the following commands:
2.1.1.1.8. What happened to applets?
Traditional GNOME panel applets are not supported in gnome-shell as explained
here. The general design of GNOME 3 puts more emphasis on full applications, instead of squeezing too much into a small strip or space at the edge of your screen. There are, however, people working on an extension mechanism for the shell, similar to Firefox extensions. The code lives in
this git repository. We don't expect this to be available in polished or packaged form for GNOME 3.0, though.
Any existing applets that have been adapted to use the new
libpanel-applet will be available in
fallback mode. However,
fallback is not considered the default mode of operation and will not be actively developed in the future. For more information on applets and transitioning to gnome-shell, see
this GNOME wiki page.
Some applets support a -w
switch that allows them to run in a dedicated window if needed.
2.1.1.1.9. How do I start more than one instance of the same application?
Right click on the icon in the dash bar on the left side and click on "new window". You can do the same action from the applications window. Also several applications themselves offer a option to open a new window within the file menu.
2.1.1.1.10. How is multi-monitor support?
2.1.1.1.11. What about themes?
GNOME Shell does not support theming by default. There are extensions that support themes via CSS, however. Themes can be changed system-wide or per user. As an example, a reference for a theme is provided below and instructions on using them:
Advanced users:
For system-wide theme changes, you can use
this third-party tool. For per-user changes, a GNOME Shell extension is
available. If the extension is installed, you can use
gnome-tweak-tool to change the themes.
2.1.1.1.12. What about hardware/drivers without acceleration support?
For such users, GNOME offers a fallback mode that uses updated versions of Metacity and GNOME Panel, and works without any hardware acceleration. Fallback mode is automatically activated if GNOME Shell cannot be started. Note that fallback mode is not the same user experience as GNOME 2.x. It follows the user experience of GNOME Shell as much as possible. Adam Jackson from Red Hat has been
working on making GNOME Shell work just using software acceleration and made some progress already.
2.1.1.1.13. Does GNOME Shell work under a virtual machine?
If your virtualization solution supports hardware acceleration, then yes. Otherwise it would automatically use fallback mode.
2.1.1.1.14. How can I force fallback mode?
Click on the user menu on the top right, Select -> -> and toggle the Forced Fallback Mode switch to on.
2.1.1.1.15. What happened to the Fedora 14-vintage GNOME shell design?
It was an experiment that was part of the iterative design and learning process leading to the final GNOME 3 design. The code has developed beyond that design to make the GNOME Shell more usable.
2.1.1.1.16. Where is the desktop?
The desktop workspace no longer displays the contents of the user's ~/Desktop
directory. That directory and its content are still accessible through the Files application. To access the Files application, move your mouse to the Activities hotspot, use the Super key, or use the Alt+F1 key combination to see the overview. Then type "files
" or select the menu and choose Files. You can attach the Files application to your dash, the set of favorite applications on the left side, if desired.
2.1.1.1.17. How I start programs automatically when logging in?
Use gnome-session-properties to configure programs to start automatically. You can also create a desktop file or copy one from /usr/share/applications
to ~/.config/autostart
in your home directory.
2.1.1.1.18. How can I turn caps lock into an additional control?
Click on the user menu on the top right. Select
-> -> -> ->
2.1.1.1.19. Screen recording
The Shell includes a built in screencast recording function. To activate recording, hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R and a recording icon appears at the lower right hand corner of the screen. To finish recording, hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R again. By default screencasts are recorded in a file named shell-YYYYMMDD-N.webm
, where YYYYMMDD represents today's date and N is incremented for each additional screencast.
2.1.1.2. GSettings and dconf
GConf is a legacy system for storing application preferences used in previous versions of GNOME. It has been replaced by GSettings in GNOME 3.0, and many core programs have already migrated. Fedora 14 was the first Fedora release to include GSettings. GSettings supports multiple backends, and the default in Fedora 15 is
dconf. The
gsettings command line utility is the equivalent of
gconftool-2 in previous releases, although
gsettings is more functional since it supports automatic completion of schemas and keys at the command line. The
dconf-editor provides a graphical editor for managing settings similar to
gconf-editor in previous releases.
Some examples of using gsettings follows:
gsettings
Usage:
gsettings COMMAND [ARGS...]
Commands:
help Show this information
list-schemas List installed schemas
list-relocatable-schemas List relocatable schemas
list-keys List keys in a schema
list-children List children of a schema
list-recursively List keys and values, recursively
range Queries the range of a key
get Get the value of a key
set Set the value of a key
reset Reset the value of a key
writable Check if a key is writable
monitor Watch for changes
Use 'gsettings help COMMAND' to get detailed help.
gsettings list-schemas
org.gnome.nautilus.desktop
org.gnome.color-manager
org.gnome.gedit.plugins.filebrowser.nautilus
org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.wacom
...
gsettings list-schemas | grep shell
org.gnome.shell
org.gnome.shell.clock
org.gnome.shell.recorder
org.gnome.shell.calendar
gsettings list-keys org.gnome.shell
command-history
development-tools
disabled-extensionsdisabled-open-search-providers
enable-app-monitoring
favorite-apps
looking-glass-history
Example: Using gsettings to tweak the digital clock on the top panel to show the date and seconds