Knowledge is Power
Posts tagged Gnome Shell
Sabayon with a dash of Cinnamon
198 days
It’s been a while since I have taken some time to look at the development of Cinnamon the gnome-shell fork by Mint Linux. What inspired me to look at it again was confusion from users. Many people don’t seem to understand that cinnamon is not a stand alone desktop environment. Cinnamon depends on gnome as it’s a fork of gnome-shell, which belongs to Gnome 3. I would see users complain that they installed cinnamon, but it didn’t work. I found out many did not install gnome for it to work properly. So to test things out, I booted up Sabayon Forensics live USB and ran:
equo update && equo install cinnamon
Keep in mind Sabayon Forensics is a XFCE desktop environment. So once I issued that command, cinnamon pulled like 47 packages and many related to gnome of course. Cinnamon should pull the necessary gnome packages, so let it pull em.
Once that is done, log out and in your session you can choose cinnamon and watch cinnamon come to life as you log in.
Sabayon with Cinnamon
Note the images here are not the default cinnamon settings/looks upon install. I changed stuff all around for looks and settings. This was a good test for me to explore the abilities of cinnamon and I was very happy to see how much cinnamon has progress. They made promises and are delivering.
Sabayon with Cinnamon
Sabayon with Cinnamon
Sabayon with Cinnamon
Pretty slick I say. Yay for people out there fixing the default Gnome 3 GUI. Mint Linux even has forked nautilus and call it nemo after calling current nautilus a disaster. It’s sad to see what is happening in the Gnome world, but I don’t want to start a flame war so I will leave it at that.
So as you can see, installing cinnamon on sabayon should be no problem. Now if you’re using an ATI card, you may have issues with gnome-shell stuff. So please check the log files if you are having issues. I have no problems with nvidia or intel graphics.
Cheers to the cinnamon crew!
Sabayon 5.1-r1?
1257 days
Now that Fabio has released Sabayon 5.1-r1 mini-dvds, you might be wondering what is up with the -r1 appended to the iso file. This seems to cause confusion every time we do this and we try to avoid it, but we had 5.0 iso and were set to release it, but we discovered some last minute bugs and caused a slight delay in release. So our 5.1 iso was revised to revision 1 to take care of the bugs for release. It’s all good, and no there will not be a -r2 or -r3 release of 5.1. The next release at this time is slotted for a 5.2 release.
You may remember my last post on Sabayon with Gnome Shell. Well, with the release of 5.1-r1 Gnome, gnome-shell is included and you can try it out for yourself. Please see my previous post for screenshots of gnome-shell in action.
If you have 5.0 Gnome and been rolling it along and would like to have gnome-shell also to play with, you can install it via our overlay or via entropy with equo install gnome-shell or emerge gnome-shell if using our overlay. It appears we also need to install equo install gir-repository also, emerge it if using portage. To start the gnome-shell interface open up terminal and type in gnome-shell –replace as user, don’t need to sudo or su and it should kick in. To get your desktop back to normal gnome, just close the terminal box. You should be able to start it up with gnome-shell –replace& if you don’t want to keep the terminal box open. I would love to hear feedback on what you guys think of gnome-shell.
Oh yea, one big change on the mini-dvd is the usernames and passwords. They always use to be root with password root and sabayonuser with password sabayonuser. The user names are the same, but there is no passwords now. So if you punch in su on the live mini-dvd, you will get the password prompt, just hit enter and you will be root. I found that hard to get use to after all these years. I kept typing in root by habit and than it would spit the authentication fail message at me. So remember, live mini-dvd, just hit enter if asked for password.
I hope your experiences with Sabayon 5.1-r1 are good. It took a bit longer to get it here, but I think you will find it was worth the wait. I’m hoping Mitch can get the core-cd out now also, so keep an eye out for that release.
Sabayon and Gnome Shell
1265 days
by wolfden
in Sabayon Linux
This is my first look at gnome shell. I guess this is going to be the big thing for gnome when gnome 3 comes out in 2010. Gnome shell is in it’s early stages yet. I miss having the ability to place things on the panel. Normally on my gnome, I have my favorite apps on the top panel so they are easy access. With gnome shell I have to browse for my favorite apps. I don’t understand that with these desktop environments of today. Why does anyone want to scroll around looking for applications? In KDE4 I just started using the Alt F2 button and typing in the application. Well in gnome shell, it didn’t take me long to hit the Alt F2 to fire up my applications. It’s a lot faster than scrolling around looking for an application.
Some screens of Gnome Shell running on Sabayon Core-CD, click images for larger:
Here we can see activities and the menu system.
Here is the Alt + Tab function and as you hover over the items you get to see a larger version of it.
Here is where you can see all the active stuff and can click on the one you want to go to.
I installed all of this with the gnome overlay via portage. This isn’t in entropy and shouldn’t be done on a productive system. The current gnome in gnome overlay is the 2.29 unstable version. Now if you want to help out the Gentoo gnome devs and do testing and reporting, take a read here. This would only be for the experienced users.
It’s too early to give gnome shell a fair review so I will leave it at something that is going to be interesting as it matures. I still need to learn more about it and hopefully I can pass information along as I go. I guess if anyone out there gives it a whirl, I wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts on it.
