After having updated my two workstation computers, a laptop and a desktop, from Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 9 to Fedora core 1, I thought it would be fun to test out Gnome instead of KDE, that I have used for a long time. I remember finding the Gnome desktop rather ugly, but I see now that it have developed to become a very nice looking desktop, I might even switch over entirely to it on my two workstations.
This page will be a place holder for bits and pieces that I found fiddling around with Gnome, mostly to save my findings in one place, but perhaps this can be of use for others. Please send me comments if you find anything strange in here.
Do the following
su - cd /usr/share/icons/Bluecurve/48x48/apps mv redhat-main-menu.png redhat-main-menu.png.old ln -sf ../../../../pixmaps/gnome-logo-icon-transparent.png redhat-main-menu.png exit killall gnome-panel
You will now have a Gnome foot for the menu.
By the way, the icon have changed from being a red hat that happens to be a fedora, to a fedora that happens to be red. The Red Hat icon, the Shadow man, is a face, and a red hat, a fedora.
In Fedora Core 2, and also Fedora Core 3, the names have changed, so now do
su - cd /usr/share/icons/Bluecurve/48x48/apps mv icon-panel-menu.png icon-panel-menu.png.old ln -sf ../../../../pixmaps/gnome-logo-icon-transparent.png icon-panel-menu.png exit killall gnome-panel
I do NOT like the new spatial mode in nautilus! I find it very annoying, to say the least, creating zillions of unwanted windows. It reminds me of old Microsoft Windows versions. Yuck!
What to do? Well, one can start in browser mode (the old mode) by using the right mouse button while clicking an icon, or whatever.
If you want browser mode as default, one solution mentioned by Dave Jones at RedHat in the fedora-list, is to run gconf-editor, and tick the /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser box.
What spatial mode is? It is supposed to be user friendly (?) way of accessing data. For normal users you will see the contents in the directory your in, but not anything more. The annoying part is when you traverse the directory tree. For each step you take in this tree, a new window is created. So if you go down five steps, you get five windows. There exist ways of removing these windows, but none of these are intuitive. I can not see that this mode helps a computer illiterate, it only confuses them. Browser mode give you a window with the tree at the left, and the contents on the right. You have a very good knowledge on where in the directory structure you are, and you can do this in only one window, not cluttering up your desktop with unwanted windows.
Finally they have come their senses and and added a tick-box (I think it is named) to the preferences menu in Nautilus. Fire up Nautilus and chose Edit->Preferences, then chose Behavior and you will find a tick box named "Always open in browser windows" under Behavior, tick it and you have the good old browser mode back!