Gnome-Shell Extensions, Themes & Tweaks

English Applications
1

What are your favorite “Must Have” Gnome-Shell Extensions, Themes or Tweaks?

Based on some other threads and blog posts found on the web, it seems that too many people are unaware of how customizable Gnome-Shell can be and complain bitterly because they don’t like the defaults. I’m hoping that this thread can help dispel the myths and allay the fears of Gnome users upgrading to OpenSUSE 12.1.

Here are a few of mine:

https://github.com/simon04/gnome-shell-extension-weather - add your local weather to the top panel
GNOME Shell Frippery - provides a Gnome2 user experience (I don’t like this one – but many people do)
Places Status Indicator - adds a “Places” menu to the top panel (is in the OpenSUSE repositories)
User Themes Extension - needed to install themes using Gnome-Tweak-Tool (is in the OpenSUSE repositories)

And here is a link to some themes for Gnome Shell. I haven’t tested them, but it can help get the ball rolling:

Top 10 GNOME Shell Themes | Tech Drive-in

2

gnome-tweak-tool is well worth knowing about. You can use it to enable maximize/minimize buttons. I’ve also used it to configure middle click on a windows titlebar to maximize that window vertically.
You can run gnome-tweak-tool from a command prompt, of you hit the Super (Windows logo) key and type in ‘tweak’ it shows up as an icon labelled ‘Advanced Settings’.

Also if you want to change what runs when you log in use gnome-session-properties. I couldn’t find any other way to access that other than running it from a command prompt. You’d think it would show up in System Settings (selected from the Status menu or whatever that thing that appears when you click your name in the top right is called), but it doesn’t. Useful if you want to disable that tracker stuff because you’re tired of it thrashing the disk. (I tried removing all the tracker packages but zypper wanted to remove a bunch of stuff I actually want along with it.)

3

Been trying to get the Linux Mint menu working. So far every extension except the menu is functional, only the install script invokes the wrong permissions and needs to be fixed (755).

https://github.com/linuxmint/MGSE

4

Hi and thanks for that! Do you happen to know how to access screensaver settings and also how to change the size of the icons in the Application view. They are massive at the moment and I simply want to see more than just 5 in a row on my massive screen :wink:
Many thanks!
Leo

5

I found this how-to with a quick search: OH! Gnome 3: Gnome3 Customization | Change Icon Size

I haven’t tested it on my machine. Please let us know how it works out for you!

So far, I haven’t found anything for screensavers. My understanding is that there are no official plans to include screensavers in Gnome 3. However, it wouldn’t surprise me to see something pop up eventually, since there seem to be a lot of people asking for it. One thread I was reading suggested that it is something that could be supported under the extension framework. In any case, my experience with Linux tells me that if enough people want something, somebody will develop a solution… eventually.

But keep searching and exploring and if you find something that I missed (quite likely!) please let us all know about it.

6

Hi, sunscape!

Thank you for the information and link to the Linux Mint extension set. They are quite lovely. I was not able to replicate the problems you described. I installed them per the README file included in the MGSE download and everything, including the menu, worked as expected with no modifications with the exception of the MGSE-noa11y extension when the places indicator extension included in OpenSUSE is enabled. Of course, a proper Icon for the Menu would be nice and I’ll look into that this afternoon. Could you provide more detail about the problems you ran into? Perhaps I simply didn’t test something and missed the problem somehow.

For anybody interested in trying the MSGE extensions, this worked for me:

Go to the link kindly provided by sunscape and download the archive by clicking the “zip” icon near the top-left of the page. Go to the folder that you downloaded the file to and then right-click on the file and choose “extract here” and then navigate to the newly created directory. Right-click in the folder and “open in terminal.” To install:

sudo ./test

Then restart Gnome-Shell (alt+F2 and type r then press enter). Open the gnome tweak tool (Advanced Settings – thank you, mikewillis) and start playing.

Whenever I install and test new extensions, I usually disable the ones that I have currently enabled so that I don’t run into incompatibilities between extension sets. Later, I enable my old extensions one at a time to see what will work together and what won’t.

7

Ok, this was TOO easy. :slight_smile: Just copy your favorite icon(s) to /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/menu@linuxmint.com/icons – make sure you have them named as follows and in the proper format (png or plain svg as indicated):

menu.png
menu-bottom.png
menu.svg

(I don’t know what menu.svg is used for. In the original icons, it is a linux mint branding… but I never saw it appear anywhere).

I found this icon looks quite nice but please use whatever you like and makes you happy (that IS what is important, isn’t it?): http://www.otto-diels-institut.de/contact/icons/opensuse.png

8

WHOOPS! The noa11y extension provided by the MGSE extensions works perfectly – no conflict with places indicator. I had another noa11y extension installed and enabled, which is where the problem occurred.

Way to take my own advice. D’OH!

9

Am 20.11.2011 20:56, schrieb HotShotDJ:
> For anybody interested in trying the MSGE extensions, this worked for
> me:
>
> [snip]

This is very interesting, may I ask you to consider posting some
screenshots of the final look and feel of your gnome 3/msge with the
icons you applied?

–
PC: oS 11.4 (dual boot 12.1) 64 bit | Intel Core i7-2600@3.40GHz | KDE
4.6.0 | GeForce GT 420 | 16GB Ram
Eee PC 1201n: oS 11.4 64 bit | Intel Atom 330@1.60GHz | KDE 4.7.3 |
nVidia ION | 3GB Ram

10

My pleasure:

648×576 181 KB

Here is the icon I settled on… http://sunq.jp/style/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bw_uploadsGeeko_head_simple.png

11

sorry for being ignorance here :shame:

how do we create shortcut into the desktop, since there are no launcher there? thanks

12

Am 21.11.2011 05:16, schrieb HotShotDJ:
>
> martin_helm;2407409 Wrote:
>> This is very interesting, may I ask you to consider posting some
>> screenshots of the final look and feel of your gnome 3/msge with the
>> icons you applied?
> My pleasure:
>
> [image:
> https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-UOTBsx_rl0I/TsnLm74DcnI/AAAAAAAAAAw/5xegc_QJfzY/s648/Screenshot_Zoom_MGSE_4_SUSE_Menu.png]
>
> Here is the icon I settled on… [image:
> http://sunq.jp/style/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bw_uploadsGeeko_head_simple.png]
>
>
Thanks, that menu looks great. I have to try that on my 12.1 machine.
And also thanks for your detailed description.

–
PC: oS 11.4 (dual boot 12.1) 64 bit | Intel Core i7-2600@3.40GHz | KDE
4.6.0 | GeForce GT 420 | 16GB Ram
Eee PC 1201n: oS 11.4 64 bit | Intel Atom 330@1.60GHz | KDE 4.7.3 |
nVidia ION | 3GB Ram

13

By default, the desktop doesn’t have icons/launchers on it. However, you can enable desktop icons by launching the gnome-tweak-tool (Advanced Settings), click on “Desktop” and then turn on “Have file manager handle the desktop” along with any of the default icons listed that you want. Then you can put launchers or files on the desktop to your heart’s content.

14

Thanks for the quick reply, in actual case I am just downloaded Frostwire in tar.gz, successfully installed it and running from it’s default folder in /home. I am thinking to make it easier and going to make a shortcut into the desktop, in other forum (ubuntu) some says just right click onto and run the launcher to create the symlink, but there are none in openSUSE except the option of create new folder and create new document.

15

To create a launcher, you need to create a new document on your desktop. Name it something like “frostwire.desktop” (the .desktop is the important part!). Now edit the document so it looks something like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Name=Frostwire
Comment=A GNUTella P2P Client
Type=Application
Exec=/home/user_name/bin/frostwire
Icon=frostwire.png
Terminal=false
Categories=Internet
StartupNotify=true
Name[en_US]=FrostWire

Be sure that you change the “Exec=” line to the correct path to the executable. Also, be sure to place the icon file in the .icons directory in your home directory and be sure to change the “Icon=” line to the correct file name (you won’t need the full path if the icon is in your .icons directory).

Rather than putting this file on your desktop, consider placing it in .local/share/applications – then it will appear in the proper location in your menu (under Internet) and you can add it to your favorites dock as you would any other application. This way, you don’t clutter up your desktop and cover up what I’m sure is a perfectly lovely desktop background wallpaper!

16

Well done, HotShotDJ, for starting this thread! This kind of information should have been in the release notes, as it is we’re struggling to catch up with what Fedora, and now Ubuntu, users have found out for themselves over the last few months. A good start is to install the package gnome-shell-extensions which calls in a lot of these desktop tweaks - logout/in required for this, not just shell restart.

17

I’m not sure why but using ‘sudo ./test’ to install the extensions does so with drwx------ rather than drwxr-xr-x for each folder in /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions

So, I disabled all extensions other than themes and changed menu@linuxmint.com to match the permission of the other extension folders (drwxr-xr-x). Otherwise the menu extension does not appear in gnome-tweak-tool. Enabling the menu extension after restarting gnome-shell doesn’t do anything and it turns itself off. I have no idea why…

18

How curious! I noticed that the archive that I downloaded from the link you provided did have some recent modifications. I’m wondering if you may be working from an older version of the the extensions?

I would start first by manually removing the *@linuxmint.com folders from /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions and restarting gnome-shell. Then download a fresh archive and install the extensions using sudo ./test (as an aside – I’ve found that mc is a great file manager for working as root from the command line interface: zypper in mc)

It just doesn’t seem right that the person who first clued me in to the Linux Mint extensions is having trouble with the very feature that I’m enjoying on my system at this very moment. We MUST make this right!

19

Thank you for the kind words and for pointing out a glaring omission in my original post. Yes, of course the very first thing one should do is install the gnome-shell-extensions from the openSUSE repositories. (One stupid complaint of mine regarding the extensions provided in the repository – what is the gajim extension doing there when gajim isn’t provided? I’m sure these kinds of “nit-picky” things will be worked out over time.)

20

Hi
One of the issues with extensions is the move to extensions.gnome.org
(along the same lines as firefox add-ins) coming online. Word is this
should be earlier December. Hopefully a lot of the extension developers
will move their extensions there and there will be no need to
download/install (The main reason I haven’t packaged any).

The infrastructure is in place as well as sweetooth built into the
shell, so it’s just a waiting game.
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/SweetTooth

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.4 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.37.6-0.9-desktop
up 4 days 18:28, 4 users, load average: 0.06, 0.11, 0.12
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - Driver Version: 285.05.09