Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Installing FreeBSD in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine

2nd March 2014

With UNIX being the basis of Linux, I have a soft spot for trying out any UNIX that can be installed on a PC. For a while, I had OpenSolaris on the go and even vaguely recall having a look at one of the BSD’s. However, any recent attempt to install one of the latter, and there are quite a few around now, got stymied by some sort of kernel panic caused by using AMD CPU’s. With the return to the Intel fold arising from the upgrade of my main home PC last year, it perhaps was time to try again.

The recent release of FreeBSD 10.0 was the cue and I downloaded a DVD image for a test installation in a VirtualBox virtual machine with 4 GB of memory and a 32 GB virtual hard drive attached (expanding storage was chosen so not all the allocated space has been taken so far). The variant of FreeBSD chosen was the 64-bit x86 one and I set to installing it in there. Though not as pretty in appearance as those in various Linux distros, the installer was not that user unfriendly to me. Mind you, I have experience of installing Arch Linux so that might have acclimatised me somewhat.

Those installation screens ask about the keyboard mapping that you want and I successfully chose one of the UK options. There was limited opportunity for adding extras though there was a short list of few from which I made some selections. User account set up also was on offer and I would have been better off knowing what groups to assign for my personal user account so as to have to avoid needing to log in as root so often following system start up later. Otherwise, all the default options were sufficient.

When the installation process was complete, it was time to boot into the new system and all that was on offer was a command line log in session. After logging in as root, it was time to press pkg into service in order to get a desktop environment in place. The first step was to install X:

pkg install xorg

Then, it was time to install a desktop environment. While using XFCE or KDE were alternatives, I chose GNOME 2 due to familiarity and more extensive instructions on the corresponding FreeBSD handbook page. Issuing the following command added GNOME and all its helper applications:

pkg install gnome2

So that GNOME starts up at the next reboot, some extra steps are needed. The first of these is to add the following line into /etc/fstab:

proc /proc procfs rw 0 0

Then, two lines were needed in /etc/rc.conf:

gdm_enable=”YES”
gnome_enable=”YES”

The first enables the GNOME display manager and the second activates other GNOME programs that are needed for a desktop session to start. With each of these in place, I got a graphical login screen at the next boot time.

With FreeDSB being a VirtualBox Guest, it was time to consult the relevant FreeBSD manual page. Here, there are sections for a number of virtual machine tools so a search was needed to find the one for VirtualBox. VirtualBox support for FreeBSD is incomplete in that there is no installation media for BSD systems though Linux and Solaris are supported along with Windows. Therefore, it is over to the FreeBSD repositories for the required software:

pkg install virtualbox-ose-additions

Aside from the virtual machine session not capturing and releasing the mouse pointer automatically, that did everything that was needed even if it was the open source edition of the drivers and their proprietary equivalents. To resolve the mouse pointer issue, I needed to temporarily disable the GNOME desktop session in /etc/rc.conf to drop down to a console only session where xorg. conf could be generated using the following commands:

Xorg -configure
cp xorg.conf.new /etc/xorg.conf

In the new xorg.conf file, the mouse section needs to be as follows:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier  “Mouse0”
Driver      “vboxmouse”
EndSection

If it doesn’t look like the above and it wasn’t the case for me then it needs changing. Also, any extra lines from the default set up also need removing or the mouse will not function as it should. The ALT+F1 (for accessing GNOME menus) and ALT+F2 (for running commands) keyboard shortcuts then become crucial when your mouse is not working as it should and could avert a panic too; knowing that adjusting a single configuration file will fix a problem when doing so is less accessible is not a good feeling as I discovered to my own cost. The graphics settings were fine by default but here’s what you should have in case it isn’t for you:

Section “Device”
### Available Driver options are:-
### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: “True”/”False”,
### <string>: “String”, <freq>: “<f> Hz/kHz/MHz”
### [arg]: arg optional
Identifier  “Card0”
Driver      “vboxvideo”
VendorName  “InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH”
BoardName   “VirtualBox Graphics Adapter”
BusID       “PCI:0:2:0”
EndSection

The next step is to ensure that your HAL settings are as they should. I needed to create a file in /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy called 90-vboxguest.fdi that contains the following:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<!--
# Sun VirtualBox
# Hal driver description for the vboxmouse driver
# $Id: chapter.xml,v 1.33 2012-03-17 04:53:52 eadler Exp $
Copyright (C) 2008-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
This file is part of VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE, as
available from http://www.virtualbox.org. This file is free software;
you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software
Foundation, in version 2 as it comes in the “COPYING” file of the
VirtualBox OSE distribution. VirtualBox OSE is distributed in the
hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY of any kind.
Please contact Sun Microsystems, Inc., 4150 Network Circle, Santa
Clara, CA 95054 USA or visit http://www.sun.com if you need
additional information or have any questions.
-->
<deviceinfo version=”0.2″>
<device>
<match key=”info.subsystem” string=”pci”>
<match key=”info.product” string=”VirtualBox guest Service”>
<append key=”info.capabilities” type=”strlist”>input</append>
<append key=”info.capabilities” type=”strlist”>input.mouse</append>
<merge key=”input.x11_driver” type=”string”>vboxmouse</merge>
<merge key=”input.device” type=”string”>/dev/vboxguest</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

With all that set, it is time to ensure that the custom user account is added to the wheel and operator groups using this command:

pw user mod [user name] -G wheel operator

Executing the above as root means that the custom account can run the su command so that logging in as root at the start of a desktop session no longer is needed. That is what being in the wheel group allows and the anyone in the operator group can shut down or restart the system. Both are facilities readily available in Linux so I fancied having them in FreeBSD too.

Being able to switch to root in a terminal session meant that I could go on to add software like Firefox, Libreoffice, GIMP, EMACS, Geany, Netbeans, Banshee and so on. There may be a line of opinion that FreeBSD is a server operating system but all of these make it more than passable for serving as a desktop one too. There may be no package management GUI as such and the ones that come with GNOME do not work either but anyone familiar with command line working will get around that.

FreeBSD may be conservative but that has its place too and being able to build up a system one item at a time teaches far more than getting everything already sorted in one hit. So far, there is enough documentation to get me going and I hope to see where else things go too. So far, the OS hasn’t been that intimidating and that’s good to see.

A fallback method of installing Nightingale in Linux

3rd December 2013

When I upgraded to Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 and went for the 64-bit variant, I tried a previously tried and tested approach for installing Nightingale that used a PPA only for it not to work. At that point, the repository had not caught up with the latest Ubuntu release (it has by the time of writing) and other pre-compiled packages would not work either. However, there was one further possibility left and that was downloading a copy of the source code and compiling that. My previous experiences of doing that kind of thing have not been universally positive so it was not my first choice but I gave it a go anyway.

In order to get the source code, I first needed to install Git so I could take a copy from the version controlled repository and the following command added the tool and all its dependencies:

sudo apt-get install git autoconf g++ libgtk2.0-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libtag1-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev zip unzip

With that lot installed, it was time to checkout a copy of the latest source code and I went with the following:

git clone https://github.com/nightingale-media-player/nightingale-hacking.git

The next step was to go into the nightingale-hacking sub-folder and issue the following command:

./build.sh

That should produce a sub-directory named nightingale that contains the compiled executable files. If this exists, it can be copied into /opt. If not, then create a folder named nightingale under /opt using copy the files from ~/nightingale-hacking/compiled/dist into that location. Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 comes with GNOME Shell 3.8, the next step took a little fiddling before it was sorted: adding an icon to application menu or dashboard. This involved adding a file called nightingale.desktop in /usr/share/applications/ with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Nightingale
Comment=Play music
TryExec=/opt/nightingale/nightingale
Exec=/opt/nightingale/nightingale
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/nightingale.xpm
Type=Application
X-GNOME-DocPath=nightingale/index.html
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Bugzilla=Nightingale
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Product=nightingale
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Component=BugBuddyBugs
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Version=1.1.2
Categories=GNOME;Audio;Music;Player;AudioVideo;
StartupNotify=true
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;
Keywords=Run;
Actions=New
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=nightingale

[Desktop Action New]
Name=Nightingale
Exec=/opt/nightingale/nightingale
OnlyShowIn=Unity

It was created from a copy of another *.desktop file and the categories in there together with the link to the icon were as important as the title and took a little tinkering before all was in place.  Also, you may find that /opt/nightingale/chrome/icons/default/default.xpm needs to be become /usr/share/pixmaps/nightingale.xpm using the cp command before your new menu entry gains an icon to go with it. While the steps that I describe here worked for me, there is more information on the Nightingale wiki if you need it.

Setting up a WD My Book Live NAS on Ubuntu GNOME 13.10

1st December 2013

The official line from Western Digital is that they do not support the use of their My Book Live NAS drives with Linux or UNIX. However, what that means is that they only develop tools for accessing their products for Windows and maybe OS X. It still doesn’t mean that you cannot access the drive’s configuration settings by pointing your web browser at http://mybooklive.local/. In fact, not having those extra tools is no drawback at all since the drive can be accessed through your file manager of choice under the Network section and the default name is MyBookLive too so you easily can find the thing once it is connected to a router or switch anyway.

Once you are in the servers web configuration area, you can do things like changing its name, updating its firmware, finding out what network has been assigned to it, creating and deleting file shares, password protecting file shares and other things. These are the kinds of things that come in handy if you are going to have a more permanent connection to the NAS from a PC that runs Linux. The steps that I describe have worked on Ubuntu 12.04 and 13.10 with the GNOME  desktop environment.

What I was surprised to discover that you cannot just set up a symbolic link that points to a file share. Instead, it needs to be mounted and this can be done from the command line using mount or at start-up with /etc/fstab. For this to happen, you need the Common Internet File System utilities and these are added as follows if you need them (check on the Software Software or in Synaptic):

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

Once these are added, you can add a line like the following to /etc/fstab:

//[NAS IP address]/[file share name] /[file system mount point] cifs
credentials=[full file location]/.creds,
iocharset=utf8,
sec=ntlm,
gid=1000,
uid=1000,
file_mode=0775,
dir_mode=0775
0 0

Though I have broken it over several lines above, this is one unwrapped line in /etc/fstab with all the fields in square brackets populated for your system and with no brackets around these. Though there are other ways to specify the server, using its IP address is what has given me the most success and this is found under Settings > Network on the web console. Next up is the actual file share name on the NAS and I have used a custom them instead of the default of Public. The NAS file share needs to be mounted to an actual directory in your file system like /media/nas or whatever you like and you will need to create this beforehand. After that, you have to specify the file system and it is cifs instead of more conventional alternatives like ext4 or swap. After this and before the final two space delimited zeroes in the line comes the chunk that deals with the security of the mount point.

What I have done in my case is to have a password protected file share and the user ID and password have been placed in a file in my home area with only the owner having read and write permissions for it (600 in chmod-speak). Preceding the filename with a “.” also affords extra invisibility. That file then is populated with the user ID and password like the following. Of course, the bracketed values have to be replaced with what you have in your case.

username=[NAS file share user ID]
password=[NAS file share password]

With the credentials file created, its options have to be set. First, there is the character set of the file (usually UTF-8 and I got error code 79 when I mistyped this) and the security that is to be applied to the credentials (ntlm in this case). To save having no write access to the mounted file share, the uid and gid for your user needs specification with 1000 being the values for the first non-root user created on a Linux system. After that, it does no harm to set the file and directory permissions because they only can be set at mount time; using chmod, chown and chgrp later on has no effect whatsoever. Here, I have set permissions to read, write and execute for the owner and the user group while only allowing read and execute access for everyone else (that’s 775 in the world of chmod).

All of what I have described here worked for me and had to gleaned from disparate sources like Mount Windows Shares Permanently from the Ubuntu Wiki, another blog entry regarding the permissions settings for a CIFS mount point and an Ubuntu forum posting on mounting CIFS with UTF-8 support. Because of the scattering of information, I just felt that it needed to all together in one place for others to use and I hope that fulfils someone else’s needs in a similar way to mine.

Installing Citrix Receiver 13.0 in Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 64-bit

28th November 2013

Installing the latest version of Citrix Receiver (13.0 at the time of writing) on 64-bit Ubuntu should be as simple as downloading the required DEB package and double-clicking on the file so that Ubuntu Software Centre can work its magic. Unfortunately, the 64-bit DEB file is faulty so that means that the Ubuntu community how-to guide for Citrix still is needed. In fact, any user of Linux Mint or another distro that uses Ubuntu as its base would do well to have a look at that Ubuntu link.

For sake of completeness, I still am going to let you in on the process that worked for me. Once the DEB file has been downloaded, the first task is to creating a temporary folder where the DEB file’s contents can be extracted:

mkdir ica_temp

With that in place, it then is time to do the extraction and it needs two commands with the second of these need to extract the control file while the first extracts everything else.

sudo dpkg-deb -x icaclient- ica_temp
sudo dpkg-deb --control icaclient- ica_temp/DEBIAN

It is the control file that has been the cause of all the bother because it refers to unavailable dependencies that it really doesn’t need anyway. To open the file for editing, issue the following command:

sudo gedit ica_temp/DEBIAN/control

Then change line 7 (it should begin with Depends:) to: Depends: libc6-i386 (>= 2.7-1), lib32z1, nspluginwrapper. There are other software packages in there that Ubuntu no longer supports and they are not needed anyway. With the edit made and the file saved, the next step is to build a new DEB package with the corrected control file:

dpkg -b ica_temp icaclient-modified.deb

Once you have the package, the next step is to install it using the following command:

sudo dpkg -i icaclient-modified.deb

If it fails, then you have missing dependencies and the following command should sort these before a re-run of the above command again:

sudo apt-get install libmotif4:i386 nspluginwrapper lib32z1 libc6-i386

With Citrix Receiver installed, there is one more thing that is needed before you can use it freely. This is to put Thawte security certificate files into /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts. What I had not realised until recently was that many of these already are in /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla and linking to them with the following command makes them available to Citrix receiver:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/* /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/

Another approach is to download the Thawte certificates and extract the archive to /tmp/. From there they can be copied to /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts and I copied the Thawte Personal Premium certificate as follows:

sudo cp /tmp/Thawte Root Certificates/Thawte Personal Premium CA/Thawte Personal Premium CA.cer /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/

Until I found out about what was in the Mozilla folder, I simply picked out the certificate mentioned in the Citrix error message and copied it over like the above. Of course, all of this may seem like a lot of work to those who are non-tinkerers and I have added a repaired 64-bit DEB package that incorporates all of the above and should not need any further intervention aside from installing it using GDebi, Ubuntu’s Software Centre, dpkg or anything else that does what’s needed.

Sorting out hogging of the Super (or Windows) Key by GNOME Shell

12th November 2013

Most of the time, GNOME Shell’s use of the Super (or Windows) key on a standard keyboard to open up its dash area is no issue and is a handy counterpart to what you might do in Windows, especially in its latest incarnations. However, it does cause trouble if you are using a VirtualBox virtual machine with Windows installed in there. While VMware Player is immune to this problem I thought that I would see if there was a workaround for it.

The issue might arise from VirtualBox’s non-grabbing of the Super key like others but a solution can be found in GNOME itself. Opening up dconf-editor and navigating to org > gnome > mutter. In there, you will find a setting called overlay-key and this can be changed. One option is to delete the SUPER_L value and leave it that way. My own preference was to set it to a different key and, to do that, I needed to know what the various key identifiers were. To get these, I ran the following command (just replace any quotes with alternatives in the shell before executing this):

xev | grep -A2 --line-buffered ‘^KeyRelease’ | sed -n ‘/keycode /s/^.*keycode \([0-9]*\).* (.*, \(.*\)).*$/\1 \2/p’

This opened up an Event Tester window that will need closing when testing is complete. More importantly, the aliases for any keys that were pressed to are issued to the terminal session so you can see what’s what. Initially, the one for the Alt Gr key appealed to me and I set “ISO_Level3_Shift” as the value of the overlay-key property in dconf-editor. When that didn’t work, I set the value to “Menu” and it behaved as expected. While this will mean that context menus will have to be accessed by right-clicking in a Windows session, that is what I do anyway so there isn’t going to be much of a loss in what I have done. A function key might have been another option but I reckon that the context menu key will do me.

Surveying changes coming in GNOME 3.10

20th October 2013

GNOME 3.10 came out last month but it took until its inclusion into the Arch and Antergos repositories for me to see it in the flesh. Apart from the risk of instability, this is the sort of thing at which rolling distributions excel. They can give you a chance to see the latest software before it is included anywhere else. For the GNOME desktop environment, it might have meant awaiting the next release of Fedora in order to glimpse what is coming. This is not always a bad thing because Ubuntu GNOME seems to be sticking with using a release behind the latest version. With many GNOME Shell extension writers not updating their extensions until Fedora has caught up with the latest release of GNOME for a stable release, this is no bad thing and it means that a version of the desktop environment has been well bedded in by the time it reaches the world of Ubuntu too. Debian takes this even further by using a stable version from a few years ago and there is an argument in favour of that from a solidity perspective.

Being in the habit of kitting out GNOME Shell with extensions, I have a special interest in seeing which ones still work or could work with a little tweaking and those which have fallen from favour. In the top panel, the major change has been to replace the sound and user menus with a single aggregate menu. The user menu in particular has been in receipt of the attentions of extension writers and their efforts either need re-work or dropping after the latest development. The GNOME project seems to have picked up an annoying habit from WordPress in that the GNOME Shell API keeps changing and breaking extensions (plugins in the case of WordPress). There is one habit from the WordPress that needs copying though and that is with documentation, especially of that API for it is hardly anywhere to be found.

GNOME Shell theme developers don’t escape and a large border appeared around the panel when I used Elementary Luna 3.4 so I turned to XGnome Enhanced (found via GNOME-Look.org) instead. The former no longer is being maintained since the developer no longer uses GNOME Shell and has not got the same itch to scratch; maybe someone else could take it over because it worked well enough until 3.8? So far, the new theme works for me so that will be an option should there a move to GNOME 3.10 on one of my PC’s at some point in the future.

Returning to the subject of extensions, I had a go at seeing how the included Applications Menu extension works now since it wasn’t the most stable of items before. That has improved and it looks very usable too so I am not awaiting the updating of the Frippery equivalent. That the GNOME Shell backstage view has not moved on that much from how it was in 3.8 could be seen as a disappointed but the workaround will do just fine. Aside from the Frippery Applications Menu, there are other extensions that I use heavily that have yet to be updated for GNOME Shell 3.10. After a spot of success ahead of a possible upgrade to Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 and GNOME Shell 3.8 (though I remain with version 13.04 for now), I decided to see I could port a number of these to the latest version of the user interface. Below, you’ll find the results of my labours so feel free to make use of these updated items if you need them before they are update on the GNOME Shell Extensions website:

Frippery Bottom Panel

Frippery Move Clock

Remove App Menu

Show Desktop

There have been more changes coming in GNOME 3.10 than GNOME Shell, which essentially is a JavaScript construction. The consolidation of application title bars in GNOME applications continues but a big exit button has appeared in the affected applications that wasn’t there before. Also there remains the possibility of applying the previously shared modifications to Nautilus (also known as Files) and a number of these usefully extend themselves to other applications such as Gedit too. Speaking of Gedit, this gains a very useful x of y numbering for the string searching functionality with x being the actual number of the occurrence of a certain piece of text in a file and y being its total number of occurrences.GNOME Tweak Tool has got an overhaul too and lost the setting that makes a folder path box appear in Nautilus instead of a location part, opening Dconf-Editor and going to org > gnome > nautilus > preferences and completing the tick box for always-use-location-entry will do the needful.

Essentially, the GNOME project is continuing along the path on which it set a few years ago. Though I would rather that GNOME Shell would be more mature, invasive changes are coming still and it leaves me wondering if or when this might stop. Maybe that was the consequence of mounting a controversial experiment when users were happy with what was there in GNOME 2. The arrival of Fedora 20 should bring with it an increase in the number of GNOME shell extensions that have been updated. So long as it remains stable Antergos is good have a look at the latest version of GNOME for now and Cinnamon fans may be pleased the Cinnamon 2.0 is another desktop option for the Arch-based distribution. An opportunity to say more about that may arrive yet once the Antergos installer stops failing at a troublesome package download; a separate VM is being set aside for a look at Cinnamon because it destabilised GNOME during a previous look.

A look at Ubuntu GNOME 13.10

12th October 2013

With its final release being near at hand, I decided to have a look at the beta release of Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 to get a sense of what might be coming. A misstep along the way had me inadvertently download and install the 64-bit edition of 13.04 into a VirtualBox virtual machine. The intention to update that to its soon to be released successor was scuppered by instability so I never did get to try out an in situ upgrade to 13.10. What I had in mind was to issue the following command:

gksu update-manager -d

However, I found another one when considering how Ubuntu Server might be upgraded without the GUI application that is the Update Manager. To update to a development version, the following command is what you need:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

To upgrade to a final release of of a new version of Ubuntu, drop the -d switch from the above to use the following:

sudo do-release-upgrade

There is one further option that isn’t recommended for moving between Ubuntu versions but I use it to get updates such as new kernel subversions that are released:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Rather than trying out the above, I downloaded the latest ISO image for the beta release of Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 and installed onto a VM that instead. Though it is the 32 bit version of the distro that is installed on my main home PC, it has been the 64 bit version that I have been trying. So far, that seems to be behaving itself even if it feels a little sluggish but that could be down to the four year old PC that hosts the virtual machine. For a while, I have been playing with the possibility of an upgrade involving an Intel Core i5 4670K CPU and 16 GB of RAM (useful for running multiple virtual machines at a time) along with any motherboard that supports those so looking at a 64 bit operating system has its uses.

The Linux kernel may be 3.11 but that is not my biggest concern. Neither is the fact that LibreOffice 4.1.2.3 was included and GIMP wasn’t, especially when that could be added easily anyway and it is version 2.8.6 that you get. The move to GNOME Shell 3.8 was what drew me to seeing what was coming because I have been depending on a number extensions. As with WordPress and plugins, GNOME Shell seems to have a tempestuous relationship with some of its extensions and I wanted to see which ones still worked. There also has been a change to the backstage application view in that you either get all installed applications displayed when you browse them or you have to start typing the name of the one you want to select it. Losing the categorical view that has been there until GNOME Shell 3.6 is a step backwards and I hope that version 3.10 has seen some sort of a reinstatement. There is a way to add these categories and the result is not as it once was either; also, it shouldn’t be necessary for anyone to dive into a systems innards to address things like this. With all the constant change, it is little wonder that Cinnamon has become a standalone entity with the release of its version 2.0 and that Debian’s toyed with not going with GNOME for its latest version (7.1 at the time of writing and it picked a good GNOME Shell version in 3.4).

Having had a look at other distribution that already have GNOME Shell 3.8, I knew that a few of my extensions worked with it. The list includes Frippery Bottom Panel, Frippery Move Clock, Places Status Indicator, Removable Drive Menu, Remove Rounded Corners (not really needed with the GNOME Shell theme that I use, Elementary Luna 3.4, but I retain it anyway), Show Desktop Button, User Themes and Ignore_Request_Hide_Titlebar. Because of the changes to the backstage view, I added Frippery Applications Menu in preference to Applications Menu because I have found that to be unstable. Useful new discoveries have included Curtains Up and GNOME Shell Open Terminal while Shell Restart User Menu Entry has made a return and found a use this time around too.

There have been some extensions that were not updated to work with GNOME Shell 3.8 that I have got working. In some cases, it was as simple as updating the metadata.json file for an extension with new version numbers of 3.8 and 3.84 to the list associated with the shell version property. All extensions are to be found in the .local/share/gnome-shell/extensions location in your home directory and each has a dedicated file containing the aforementioned file.

With others, it was a matter of looking in the Looking Glass (execute lg in the box that ALT + F2 brings up on your screen to access this) and seeing what error messages were to be found in there before attempting to correct these in either the extensions’ extension.js files or whatever JavaScript (*.js) file was causing the problem. With either or both of these remedies, I managed to port the four extensions below to GNOME Shell 3.8. In fact, you can download these zip files and install them yourself to see how you get on with them.

Advanced Settings in User Menu

Antisocial Menu

Remove App Menu

Restart Shell Entry

There is a Remove Panel App Menu that works with GNOME Shell 3.8 but I found that it got rid of the Places menu instead of the panel’s App Menu so I tried porting the older extension to see if it behaved itself and it does. With these in place, I have bent Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 to my will ahead of its final release next week and that includes customising Nautilus too. Other than a new version of GNOME Shell, it looks as if it will come with less in the way of drama and a breather like that is no bad thing given that personal computing continues to remain in a state of flux these days.

Customising Nautilus (or Files) in Ubuntu GNOME 13.04

12th September 2013

The changes made to Nautilus, otherwise known as Files, in GNOME Shell 3.6 were contentious and the response of the Linux Mint was to create their own variant called Nemo from the previous version of the application. On the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments, the then latest version of GNOME’s file manager would have looked like a fish out of water without its application menu in the top panel on the GNOME Shell desktop. It is possible to make a few modifications that help Nautilus to look more at home on those Linux Mint desktops and I have collected them here because they are useful for GNOME Shell users too. Here they are in turn.

Adding Application Menu entries to Location Options Menu

The Location Options menu is what you get on clicking the button with the cog icon on the right-hand side of the application’s location bar. Using Gsettings, it is possible to make that menu include the sort of entries that are in the application menu in the GNOME Shell panel at the top of the screen. These include an entry for closing the whole application as well as setting its preferences (or options). Running the following command does just that (if it does not work as it should, try changing the single and double quotes to those understood by a command shell):

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides '@a{sv} {"Gtk/ShellShowsAppMenu": <int32 0>}'

Adding in the Remove App Menu GNOME Shell extension will clean up the GNOME Shell a little by removing the application menu altogether. If, for some reason, you wish to restore the default behaviour, then the following command does the required reset:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides '@a{sv} {}'

Stopping Hiding of the Application Title Bar When Maximised

By default, GNOME Shell can hide the application title bars of GNOME applications such as Nautilus on window maximisation and this is Nautilus now works by default. Changing the behaviour so that the title bar is kept on maximised windows can be as simple as adding in the ignore_request_hide_titlebar extension. The trouble with GNOME Shell extensions is that they can stop working when a new version of GNOME Shell is used, so there’s another option: editing metacity-theme-3.xml but /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1. The file can be opened using superuser privileges using the following command:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml

With the file open, it is a matter of replacing instances of ' has_title="false" ' with ' has_title="true" ', saving it and reloading GNOME Shell. This may persevere across different versions of GNOME Shell should the extension not do so.

Disabling Recursive Search

This discovery is what led me to bundle these customisations in an entry on here in the first place. In Nemo and older versions of Nautilus, just typing with the application open would lead you down a list towards the file that you wanted. This behaviour was replaced by an automatic recursive search from GNOME Shell 3.6 where the search functionality was extended beyond the folder that was open in the file manager to its subdirectories. To change that to subsetting within the open folder or directory, you need to install a patch version of Nautilus using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dr3mro/personal
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

The first of these adds a new repository with the patched version of Nautilus while the second combination installs the patched version. With that done, it is time to issue the following command:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences enable-recursive-search false

That sets the value of the new enable-recursive-search option to false for searching within an open directory. It also can be found using Dconf-Editor in the following hierarchy: org -> gnome -> nautilus -> preferences. The obsession of the GNOME project team with minimalism is robbing users of some options and this would be a good one to have by default too. Maybe the others should be treated in the same way even if you need to use Gsettings or Dconf-Editor to change them to avoid clutter. Having GNOME Tweak Tool able to set them all would be even better.

Restoring GNU Parallel Functionality in Ubuntu GNOME 13.04

31st July 2013

There is a handy comand line utility called GNU Parallel that allows you to run Linux commands on more than one CPU core at a time to perform parallel processing of the task at hand. Here is a form of the command that is similar to one that I often use:

ls *.* | parallel gm convert -sharpen 1×3 {} sharpened_images/{}

What it does is pipe a list of files in a folder to GraphicsMagick for sharpening and outputting to a sharpened_images directory. The {} in the command is where the filenames go in the sharpening command.

This worked fine in Ubuntu GNOME 12.10 but stopped doing so after I upgraded to the next version. A look on the web set me to running the following command:

parallel --version

That produced output that included the following line:

WARNING: YOU ARE USING --tollef. IF THINGS ARE ACTING WEIRD USE --gnu.

Rerunning the original command with the --gnu option worked but there was a more permanent solution than using something like this:

ls *.* | parallel --gnu gm convert -sharpen 1×3 {} sharpened_images/{}

That was editing /etc/parallel/config with root privileges to delete the --tollef option from there. With that completed, all was as it should again and it makes me wonder why the change was made in the first place. Perhaps because of it, there even is a discussion about the possibility of removing the --tollef option altogether since it is raising more questions than it answers.

Dealing with the Lack of Categories in the Application Overview Screen for GNOME Shell 3.8

10th July 2013

One thing that I like to do is peruse the installed applications on any computer system. In most cases, this is simple enough to do but there are some who appear to believe in doing away with that in favour of text box searching. It also seems that the GNOME have fallen into that trap with version 3.8 of GNOME Shell. You could add the Applications Menu extension that is formally part of the GNOME Shell Classic interface and I have done this too. However, that has been known to freeze the desktop session so I am not that big a big fan of it.

However, there is a setting that brings back those application categories in the overview screen and it can be set using dconf-editor. After opening up the application, navigate to org > gnome > shell using the tree in the left hand panel of the tool. Editing the app-folder-categories entry in the right hand panel is what adds the categories back for you. The default is [‘Utilities’, ‘Sundry’] and this needs to be changed to [‘Utilities’, ‘Games’, ‘Sundry’, ‘Office’, ‘Network’, ‘Internet’, ‘Graphics’, ‘Multimedia’, ‘System’, ‘Development’, ‘Accessories’, ‘System Settings’, ‘Other’].

Once the above has been completed, a change is noticeable in that you get a list of categories in the application overview screen and a split of application icons in the middle and categories down the right hand side. Clicking on a category brings up a new panel that contains the application within it and this can be closed again. Cycling through the categories is a process of opening and closing the different panels. The behaviour may be changed but the functionality remains and I have heard that this will be polished further in release 3.10 of GNOME Shell.

For those wanting to to exit all of this and get something like the old GNOME 2, it is possible to add the Classic Session. In Fedora 19, it’s a matter of issuing something like the following command:

sudo yum -y install gnome-classic-session

In reality, this is a case of adding a number of extensions and changing the panel colour from black to grey but it works without needing the category tweak that I described above. The Application Menu extension does need more stability hardening before I’d trust it completely though. There’s no point having a nicer interface if it’s going to freeze up on you too often.

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