All entries for Friday 15 July 2011

Gnome 3 / gnome–shell on Ubuntu Natty

OK, so I’m not the first to do this by a long chalk, but here’s what worked for me:

1: Install the gnome 3 PPAs (c.f. http://nirajsk.wordpress.com/category/gnome-3/) :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions-user-theme

For some reason, the default theme (Adwaita) was missing, as was the default font (Cantarell). (Could be because I didn’t install gnome-themes and gnome-themes-extra – see here). You can download Adwaita from here Get Cantarell from here, copy to /usr/share/fonts/ttf, and sudo fc-cache -rv to update.
I wasn’t too keen on the fat titlebars in adwaita, so I used this to shrink them down:

sed -i "/title_vertical_pad/s/value=\"[0-9]\{1,2\}\"/value=\"0\"/g" /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml

You can set the theme and the font using gnome-tweak-tool (aptitude install it if it didn’t arrive with gnome-shell). I’m still looking for a nice icon set; the ubuntu unity ones are a bit orange, and the gnome ones are an unispiring shade of khaki. For now I’ve settled on the KDE-inspired Oxygen (aptitude install oxygen-icon-theme) which is OK, but still doesn’t quite look right.

There’s an adwaita theme for chrome which is nice, and makes everything a bit more consistent.

The London Smoke gnome-shell theme is really nice

Switching from pidgin to empathy gets you nice, clickable message notifications, although I’d rather they were at the top of the screen than the bottom.

Aero-style snap-to-window-edge works fine, except that for nvidia graphics cards with TwinView, you can’t snap to the edges that are between two monitors. Right-click context menus look weird in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on, but they function as expected.

Other than that, it pretty much just works. The only glitch I’ve yet to work out is that spawning a new gnome-terminal window freezes the whole UI for a second or so. Not got to the bottom of why that might be yet; if I find it I’ll post something. In gnome 2 there was a similar problem with the nvidia drivers, which could be “solved” by disabling compiz, but that’s not an option here. Update it seems to be connected to using a semi-transparent background for the terminal; if I use a solid background the problem goes away.

Things I like better than Unity, after a week of playing:
– Clickable notifications from empathy. The auto-hiding notification bar at the bottom of the screen is great, although I’ve found it can sometimes be a bit reluctant to come out of hiding when you mouse over it.
– alt-tab that shows you the window title (good when you’ve got 20 terminals open). I like the ability to tab through multiple instances of the same app in order, too. To get alt-shift-tab to work, I used these instructions
– menus on the application. Fitt’s law can go hang; I like my menus to be connected to the window they control

Chris May : 15 Jul 2011 12:51 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem