Skip to main content

How To Make GNOME 3 Looks Like Gnome 2 Desktop Experience (Gnome Fallback Review)

(Click at the picture to enlarge)
Ubuntu 11.10 With Customized GNOME 3 Gnome Fallback Desktop,
Appears Almost Exactly Same As Gnome 2 Desktop (Minus System Menu)

Gnome 3, alongside its controversies, has redeemed itself at the first its release. Alongside gnome-shell, Gnome 3 project also brings fallback-session, a 2D desktop that very similar to the previous Gnome 2 interface, with several minus changes. I've installed and tried it in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot by apt :

sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback

At the first look, I felt so familiar but annoyed with these things :

1. The top panel appears big and very ugly with size 30 pixels and unable to be resized into 24 pixels as in Gnome 2 desktop.

2. Top panel theme is not consistent at the applets each others. Looks so bad and crappy.

3. System menu gone. There are just Applications and Places menu.

4. Distributor logo officially hidden.

5. Removable media is not shown in the desktop.

To fix those minus changes, here are the steps :

1. I've posted the way to resize top panel size in GNOME 3 gnome-fallback desktop HERE.

2. We could use Solid Color instead of Background image theme to fix this problem. To do this, press Alt and right click, select Properties>Solid Color, set the transparency into 100 and pick the color into semi-black like the color of window border.

3. Apparently, System menu in GNOME 3 gnome-fallback is absolutely dropped by the developer. We have nothing to do (and we will always miss this pretty and usable menu).

4. I've posted the way to put or show back the distributor-logo in GNOME 3 gnome-fallback menu HERE.

5. To show removable media icons in the desktop, we have to install and use a tool called gnome-tweak-tool. It is installable through apt : sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool.

After installation, run it by Alt+F2 and type : gnome-tweak-tool, or by accessing it in the menu Others>Advanced Settings.

In the gnome-tweak-tool, Select Desktop option in the sidebar, and check/turn on the option “Show Mounted Volumes on the Desktop”.

That's all, and now, we have our familiar Gnome 2 interface lives again and gives us efficient and productive desktop to use.

Long Live Linux ! Long Live Gnome Fallback ! :D

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Q4OS 4.6 "Gemini" Review: A Real Hidden Gem

Distro hopping is a fun adventure. It's a pure joy you can only find in GNU/Linux world. It's a nature you want to escape from what I call 'comfort ecosystem'. You need to play, trying something new even for a few little differences. For a long time I've been using Ubuntu family as my daily driver. The main reason is probably just same as any other Ubuntu user: it's reliable. You can't go wrong with Ubuntu. It works almost in any device, even for the newest one. It is the ultimate Linux distro you can rely on. However, sometimes, you will feel bored. The temptation to flirt with other new distro is unbearable. There are a lot of hot new Linux distros waiting to try.  A Real Hidden Gem I've known this distro for a quite long time. At first, it offered Trinity Desktop as the main desktop, which brings me the sweet memories about KDE3. It is simply fast, stable, almost without any issue, and it is based on Debian. I install it on my old machine and I love t

How To Install Mac OS X Lion Theme On Lubuntu / LXDE

Lubuntu 12.04 with Mac OS X Lion Theme, xcompmgr & cairo-dock [click to enlarge] Mac OS X is the special one in the Desktop market. So many people admire it because of its beauty, safety (yes, it is an UNIX) and its profesional image as “an OS for profesional modern art designer”. Yeah, Mac OS X has beautiful look and I do like its look-n-feel. And so, there are so many theme patcher to make our Microsoft Windows or Linux OS become Mac OS X in the appearance. In Linux Desktop, there are some project specialized in designing theme transformation pack to make our Linux desktop to be looked like Mac OS X. The most popular project probably is Mac4Lin. But, all of those projects was designed only for GNOME or sometimes support XFCE and how about LXDE? Our Star in the current lightweight Linux desktop? (Yes, LXDE is the most light-but-complete Linux desktop for now). Until now, there is no project that officially support LXDE. Basically, LXDE uses gtk (now still stay w

Howto Connect To Windows Share Network (Connect To Server) Easily in PCManFM

In Nautilus 3.4, Nemo, or Caja, there is a very useful menu called "Connect to Server". This menu allow us to connect to a Windows Share network via Samba. If you are using another desktop environment such as LXDE, there aren't such menu, and we need to install third party tool called Gigolo . But apparently, PCManFM (the default file manager of LXDE) already has such function. We could connect to a Windows Share network in PCManFM easily. Here are the simple steps : 1. Open PCManFM and go to adress bar, and type this command : smb://username@server/folder example : smb://staff@192.168.1.69/document then press Enter 2. Once you will be asked to input the Windows Share Network password (if exists), select Remember Forever option. 3. You are connected to Windows Share Network ;)