openSUSE 11.4 -- GNOME3 Shell (Recommended Tips and Tweaks!)

WORK IN PROGRESS!!!

Hi all, this is my first post here on this wonderful SUSE community! I’ve loved the OS since 11.2, but one thing I never liked that well about openSUSE was the GNOME edition, that was until I tried the 11.4 version of it and it was rocking, but when I found out I could upgrade it to GNOME 3 FULLY (not like the Ubuntu PPA which updates alot but not many (Gnome Panel!)) more likely seamlessly, It won me as one of my favorite GNOME 3 distros at this moment from Fedora 15. Although the road wasn’t that smooth, and even though I know this is last minute, with 2 months about until 12.1 (WHOO!) Im gonna go ahead with 11.4 and some tweaks to make GNOME 3 (with the shell) more or less how it was with GNOME 2.32.1, so lets get started…

  1. Of course you will want to upgrade GNOME 3 to begin these tweaks so follow this link for instructions!
    openSUSE:GNOME 3.0 - openSUSE

Now if you did all that correctly, you should end up at least with GNOME fallback and an ugly Raleigh theme (They port that to GTK3 and not Clearlooks?). Unless while the system was upgrading you also installed the shell and the sexy default Adwaita GNOME3 theme. So after you have done all that your system should look like GNOME3 as it does when you install it in Arch, the default look.

  1. Make your GNOME3 desktop look more SUSE-ish… green… when the upgrade path first came out there was no Sonar theme to support this and some ended up keeping the titlebar style with the adwaita theme! Well now this is still the case but there is a port of this theme made by Half-Left (and excellent designer of gnome shell themes and other artwork, love it) on Deviant-Art here: Sonar - GTK3 by *half-left on deviantART

This step may only apply to 11.4, since 12.1 will have GNOME3 by default and from the looks of it, the team will include it from this link: /dev/random: Porting Sonar Theme to GTK3

So once you download the theme pack, ALT+F2 and type

gnomesu nautilus

Enter your root password and nautilus will appear, as root! Now go into your home folder, (path is usually /home/<usernamehere>) and go into the folder that you downloaded the theme into. Extract this to /usr/share/themes and exit.

After you done that you might also want to set the background back to the default

From the title:

Recommended Tips and Tweaks!

It is not clear to me who recommended this to whome and what for. In any case it is not recommended from anybody on the Forums staff.

One thing I would certainly not recommend is to use ‘gnomesu nautilus’ to copy over themes to /usr/share/themes. First, there’s no need to do it this way, themes can be installed in the user’s homedir in ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/data/theme, requiring no root permissions. Second, the theme would be gone on a reinstall/install of newer version, where it wouldn’t be when put in the user’s homedir.

BTW, Welcome here