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Another GNOME Shell post: what do you think about the window list?

RainCT — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:21:56 +0000

It’s already a few months since my two posts on gnome-shell, so here is another one. I hadn’t looked at it for some time, but now I’ve checked it out again and although the visible changes aren’t all too big you can see it has a bit more form now (FUSA works now on it, you can move windows from one workspace to another, the transition from the desktop to the overlay window has got a better looking animation, etc). For those who want to try it out, I’ve updated my post with the installation instructions, but following those from the official wiki should achieve the same now.

In case you are running Ubuntu Jaunty, at the moment you’ll get a build failure trying to compile gir-repository, but you can easily workaround it by opening file «~/gnome-shell/install/bin/g-ir-scanner» in your favourite text editor and changing «site-packages» in line 41 to «dist-packages»; if you’re using Ubuntu 64 bits you’ll also need to change the value of «libdir» at line 37 from «lib64» to just «lib» .

Anyway, so let’s go to the actual reason for writing this post. David Jordan has been asking about the windows list in #gnome-shell (server irc.gnome.org) and I offered to ask the question here so that it arrives to more people. So here it is:

What do people like or dislike about the current GNOME window-list?

Tell us your opinion in a comment, or jump into #gnome-shell and speak with David himelf (alias dmj726).

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Call for feedback: Removing the Run dialog with GNOME Shell

RainCT — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:23:46 +0000

I was about to do some work for GNOME Shell’s “Run Dialog” when Colin Walters raised an interesting question: « I’m sort of unsure actually whether it makes sense to have a run dialog; seems to overlap a lot with where we want to go with the overlay search» (clarification: overlay is the mode into which gnome-shell enters when you press the “Activities” button – see this screenshot to see how it looks).

So, reformulating his words to an actual question, what’s the point of having a “Run” dialog when applications can already be searched for and launched from the overlay screen? Removing this would avoid duplication and free the Alt+F2 keyboard combination so that it can be used to enter/exit overlay mode (the “super” key is already used for this, but some keyboards don’t have it). On the other hand, launching applications which have no menu entry, or calling an application with some special parameter, would have to be done from the terminal.

What do you think about this? Are we missing any use case? Could you live without the Run dialog (having gnome-shell’s awesome overlay mode)? Comment!

Another GNOME Shell post: what do you think about the window list? It’s already a few months since my two posts on...
Installing GNOME Shell in Ubuntu Intrepid I’ve read in Jono‘s blog that the development of GNOME...

Installing GNOME Shell in Ubuntu Intrepid

RainCT — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:59:02 +0000

I’ve read in Jono‘s blog that the development of GNOME Shell (which in turn may become a component of GNOME 3.0) has already started and wanted to try it out (and contribute :)). As this process wasn’t as trivial as I’d have liked (although I had awesome assistance from Colin Walters, Owen Taylor and some other people in #gnome-shell@irc.gnome.org), I’ve decided to write down the instructions on how to build it so that others have it easier.

Initial build of GNOME Shell

1. Download gnome-shell-build-setup.sh (wget http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh) and run it (bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh). This will download jhbuild into ~/Source and build it (the executables will end up in ~/bin).

2. Install the necessary build dependencies for gnome-shell (and its bundled dependencies): sudo apt-get install build-essential automake gnome-common flex bison curl git-core subversion gtk-doc-tools mesa-common-dev xulrunner-1.9-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libffi-dev libgconf2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev python2.5-dev.

3. Download and build gnome-shell (and its bundled dependencies) by running ~/bin/jhbuild build. All files are placed into ~/gnome-shell.

Running it

1. Run ~/bin/jhbuild shell to enter a subshell, and then follow the remaining steps inside it.

2. Go into the appropriate directory, with: cd ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/scripts. [Update: now ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/src]

3. Start gnome-shell, either inside a window by using Xephyr: ./start-in-Xephyr (you’ll need to have xserver-xephyr installed for this to work, or replacing gnome-panel and metacity in your “real” desktop: ./start-replace. [Update: now this is «./gnome-shell» and «./gnome-shell --replace»]

Updating it

Execute ~/bin/jhbuild build –force –clean. The two arguments, “–force” and “–clean”, are used to rebuild everything, even if it didn’t change. You can usually omit them, but in some cases not doing this may lead to GNOME Shell failing to start.

You can also rebuild only a certain element (with this I mean either gnome-shell or one of its bundled dependencies, namely clutter, gjs, gobject-introspection, gir-repository or metacity-clutter) by using ~/bin/jhbuild buildone –clean.

Problem: My computer hangs if I run it

Like the new Compiz version in Intrepid, gnome-shell uses GL_EXT_texture_to_pixmap, which is broken for some old Intel cards and causes the computer to hang if start-replace is used. You can easily disable this, though, by setting the GNOME_SHELL_DISABLE_TFP environment variable (the name of this variable may change in the future).

So, just run “export GNOME_SHELL_DISABLE_TFP=1” before you run start-replace as described in section “Running it” (or add that line to ~/.bashrc, but then remember to remove it again once the driver issue is fixed). With this, gnome-shell should be able to run so that you can try it out, but don’t expect its performance to be perfect (here I have serious issues with redrawing).

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