GNOME 3 - A Quick Review

I have been experimenting with the latest and greatest version of GNOME desktop for the last 4 days. I was allured by the Simply Beautiful tag line of GNOME 3, and it was not completely wrong. The new desktop is really clean, simple and elegant. But there are some usability issues which made me crazy while using the new desktop. I did an upgrade to the beta release of Fedora 15 to test GNOME 3.


I don’t want to re-iterate all the fancy features of GNOME 3 which have been discussed else where. This scribbling is basically about the issues I faced while using the desktop and I'm not sure whether it qualifies as a review. May be the issues I faced are side-effects of a better desktop architecture and it’s due to my ignorance or unfamiliarity with GNOME 3.


The notable change in the new desktop is the absence of the bottom panel, which saved some space for the opened windows, but it costs several clicks to re-open a window. In GNOME 2, I need only a single click to re-open a window from the bottom panel, but in 3 I have to click on the Activities, and then click on the Favourites icon to get the previously opened window. If you have multiple windows opened, then you have to do another click to open the window other than the last one.


I was really frustrated, whenever I need a fresh Terminal. I was able to open a new terminal only by right clicking on the Favourites icon, if there is already an open terminal.


The Activities-->Applications has a section called Other. I thought that it may be some less important applications/utilities for the desktop. But, later I discovered that it had some really important utilities such as Firewall, Network, Input Method, Date & Time, Printing, etc... I’m not sure why these are aggregated under Other.


GNOME 3 doesn’t have a easy Shut down button to power off the machine. However, if I click on the username on the top-right corner and then hold the ALT key, I can see the Power off menu item.


I cannot change the format of date & time displayed on the top panel. The main issue is that if I have to check today’s date, then I have to click and open the calendar every time. The panel displays only the weekday and hours. I still can’t figure out how the date can be displayed.


A really great application I missed in GNOME 3 is the Hamster Time tracking applet. I know that it’s not a GNOME issue, but I have to return to gnote for tracking time at work.


There are no Minimize and Maximise button for the windows, but it’s not a big issue since I rarely used them. I always preferred double-clicking on top of the window to maximise/minimise them.

The keyboard shortcut to move files to trash have changed in Nautilus. I have to press control+delete(Same as copy, paste, etc..) to move files to trash. This is useful, since it avoids accidental removal files to trash. But it's an important usability change and users should get used to it.


I’m still exploring the new features and I wish to update the list as I progress. Since I’m using the bleeding edge of Fedora, things may change in the GA release.

Update - 6/6/2011

Solved the date issue on panel by running the following command:
$ gsettings org.gnome.shell.clock show-date true

You can also install gnome-tweak-tool(available in YUM repository) to change the advanced settings in GNOME 3.

Fedora 12 - a quick review

Fedora 12 was officially released on Wednesday(Nov 18th) and I installed it on my office desktop today. The installation took less than 45 minutes(of which I spend 15 minutes to clean my two hard disks and select packages). Within 1 hour I was able to login to the fresh Fedora 12 desktop. As per the Fedora Project Wiki, there were lots of new features and changes. Some of them caused minor issues, but I was able to quickly overcome those and return to normal work within another 1 hour.

Here is a list of some quick changes in Fedora 12:

1. Gnote is the default note taking application.
2. Empathy is the default Instant Messenger.
3. Enhanced PackageKit for installing new software
4. The Download folder in the desktop is renamed to Downloads. (Of course the word Downloads makes more sense).

However, I had some issues with the new desktop. The most disturbing issue was about the screen resolution - I was able to get only a resolution of 800x600. The desktop had a Intel Original Motherboard and LG Flatron L1730S monitor. I have to install system-config-display from the yum repository to manually configure the display, but it didn't succeeded. After some quick search in Fedora Wiki, I tried the nomodeset option in boot parameters and I was able to get 1024x768.
Reference: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs

The second issue was not that much important - missing menu icon for Epiphany Web Browser. This was not a big issue, but it will surely affect the look and feel of the desktop.

Last but not least, I took some screenshots while installing the OS, but unfortunately I couldn't find the images after logging to the desktop. I found a folder named anaconda-screenshots in /tmp, but it had only one screenshot of the 15 screenshots.

Overall, the desktop is really good and is performing very well. There are yet more features to be explored, and I will update this post as I progress.

Update 1:
The Epiphany icon problem was solved after updating the gnome-desktop package(gnome-desktop.x86_64 0:2.28.1-3.fc12)

Update 2:
The screen resolution issue was reported in redhat bugzilla and it is fixed:
See the bug here #538761

First time on Fedora Live CD

I have been using Fedora GNU/Linux since it's first release and have worked on almost all versions of Fedora. But I never got a chance to test or use the Live CD version of Fedora. It is this post(appeared in fedora-india mailing list) that tempted me to download and install the Live CD version of Fedora.

The booting procedure was straight forward and plymouth(the graphical boot loader for Fedora) is really fast. It's much faster when compared with Ubuntu boot proces, but the desktop preparation process took more time than Ubuntu.

For testing purpose I used the Malayalam interface. It's really cool to see the traditional Malayalam font(Meera) on the desktop interface.The default input scheme, SCIM, supports four input methods - inscript, itrans, mozhi and swanalekha. Here is a screenshot

The Fedora Live CD contains almost all of the popular applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Pidgin Instant Messenger, Transmission BitTorrent Client, Totem Movie Player, RhythmBox Music Player, GIMP, Gthumb, Gedit, SCIM, etc.. But it's really disappointing that OpenOffice.org is not included in the Live CD version, instead Abiword is included. Abiword is a great word processor, but it's not at all a complete office suite.

Live CDs are commonly used by end users who only requires a web browser, instant messenger or an Office suite. It may be nice if the Fedora community takes steps to include OpenOffice in the Live CDs so that it can gain more popularity among end users.

A Quick Glance at Fedora 10 beta

Note: This article is not a comprehensive review of all the features in Fedora 10 beta.

The Fedora 10 beta or more precisely Fedora 9.92 was released on 30th September 2008. I decided to give it a try using Xen virtualization in Fedora 9, as I don't want to install a "bleeding edge" distro in my desktop. But unfortunately, Fedora 9 has an issue with Xen Virtualization and the only work around was to get it installed through qemu. The documentation at the Fedora wiki is enough to get it started.

However, I had a bad luck with with CD-ROM image, except that I was able to run anaconda. The first thing I noticed is the Malayalam strings in anaconda interface was not properly displayed. I discussed this matter in the IRC channel of SMC, and filed a bug in Redhat Bugzilla. I was also struck with another bug when I tried to disable the installation media and use only the Rawhide repository. The good news is that Fedora developers responded quickly to the two bug reports. Since I didn't bothered to download minimal set of the CD-ROM images, I decided to proceed with netinstall image available at Fedora download server.

A fresh installation attempt using the netinstall image was problematic. But after several failed attempts I could connect to the fedora mirrors and start the installation. The installation took more than 4 hours. All the packages where downloaded from Internet and qemu environment was also slow. At the end anaconda hanged with the message "installing kernel-2.6.xx... ". I just closed the qemu window and boot the newly installed system using the following command:

# qemu fedora.qcow -boot c -net nic -net user -m 512 -localtime -no-kqemu

The graphical boot loader, rhgb has been replaced by Plymouth and if you press ESC key, then you can view the entire boot messages. After several minutes of wait, I was able to login to the new Fedora 10 desktop. may be the virtualized environment degraded the performance of the desktop.

As soon as I logged in, the first major change I noticed is the new Echo-Icon theme. The icon set is great and gave the desktop an elegant look and feel.


Malayalam Support

I was curious about the Malayalam rendering and language support. Fortunately, Malayalam rendering was perfect with the patches from SMC and the new Malayalam font, Meera developed by SMC itself. Mozilla Firefox 3 and OpenOffice.org 3.0 rendered Malayalam perfectly. However, in OpenOffice there were some issues with some complex conjucts. But I won't think that these are used frequently in Malayalam content.

The font size problem which was a major issue in the prior release was resolved and it's really cool to see Malayalam on the desktop without any rendering errors.

Fedora also has 7 other unicode Malayalam fonts - smc-anjalioldlipi, smc-kalyani(previously MalOtf), smc-rachana, smc-raghumalayalam, smc-dhyuthi, samyak-malayalam and lohit-malayalam. However, I'm not sure whether the issues with lohit-malayalam is resolved.

The input method configuration is also very easy. The im-chooser application guided me to configure all the required input methods in different languages. There are 4 Input schemes for Malayalam - inscript, itrans, mozhi and swanalekha.

I think Fedora 10 may be the first GNU/Linux distribution with complete Malayalam rendering and input methods.

Other Applications

Fedora 10 comes loaded with GNOME-2.24 which provides many robust desktop applications. The prominent change is the inclusion of Empathy instant messenger which supports gtalk(voice and video), yahoo and several other IM protocols.

I was also curious about the webkit powered Epiphany. But the webkit switch was not complete and the version 2.24 still uses the Gecko engine. Visit here for more details.

This release also has better webcam support through the GNOME application called Cheese.

There is also some menu re-arrangements in the new desktop. The Dictionary application have been moved to the Office section, earlier it was included in the Accessories section.

To summarize, I believe that Fedora 10 is a distribution which is worth waiting for. Here is the schedule. The stable release is planned for November 2008.

Ubuntu 8.04 - Review by a Malayalam User

I was very much excited when I saw the announcement about the new release of Ubuntu in the mailing list and curious to give it a try. The new release, according to http://www.ubuntu.com is a Long Term Supported(LTS) version for 5 years and has numerous features including virtualization. It took almost 7 hours to download and upgrade the latest Ubuntu 8.04, code named Hardy Heron, in my office desktop. I preferred network upgrade since I don't want to affect my office tasks during upgrade process. The download started on Friday(25th April) and then I have to suspend it for a while and completed on Saturday. (Even though Saturday was a holiday, I couldn't wait till Monday :) ).

The upgrade completed successfully, but the new Ubuntu booted up with the old kernel which was installed with 7.10. I have to modify the grub configuration file in Fedora 8 to include Ubuntu in the grub. So I copied the following lines to the /etc/grub.conf and it was done.

title Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
root (hd0,8)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=9c040612-4dbd-4dd8-9845-9a1050d7cbfe ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic

I did another reboot to pick the latest kernel with 8.04 and now I am ready with the login screen.

Cool desktop and Applications:
The artistic login screen and the desktop wallpapers are appealing and cool. The panel has a new icon named Search Tracker which allowed to search the desktop files and emails. It's a very user friendly and unlike other GNU/linux searching tools, it was very fast also. The new desktop came with the latest version of OpenOffice-2.4 and Mozilla FireFox-3 (beta 5). Even though , Firefox is still in beta, the new location bar search and unicode URLs are noticeable features. It seems that firefox is much faster than it's predecessors.

The desktop effects have been enabled by default and this gives more dynamic look for the desktop. In earlier versions, the desktop effects tend to consume more system resources, but 8.04 has improved a lot I didn't realised any performance issues. However, if you are upgrading from 7.10, then you probably need to delete all the preference files(files startiing with . (dot)) in your home directory and files related with your username in /tmp.

Disappointment for Malayalam users
I was very keen about the Malayalam support in the new release. Recently the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) community have conducted aggressive campaigns for translating the interface and as a result more than 80% of the translation has been completed in GNOME. See the screenshot:


The new Ubuntu is not that much appealing to Malayalam desktop users. However experienced user can tweak the system so that it correctly renders the language. The only noticeable feature is the Firefox's ability to interpret the URLs in unicode. Earlier the unicode URLs seems to be a junk of characters and even techies can't interpret it correctly. I'm sure it's a wonderful feature for non-english users.

The Malayalam support in 8.04 is not installed by default and the first step is to install it from System --> Administration --> Language Support. Ubuntu will then automatically install the packages related to Malayalam including m17n, aspell and Malayalam fonts.

Unfortunately, the Malayalam rendering in 8.04 is very bad and when I opened the Malayalam wikipedia in Firefox most of the sections are unreadable. See the screenshot :
The rendering issues are mainly due to font issues and the Malayalam fonts developed by SMC, which is available for debian, resolved majority of the issues. I have to manually download the fonts from the debian repository and install them using the dpkg command.

# dpkg -i ttf-malayalam-fonts_0.5.2_all.deb

Here is the screenshot with Meera fonts maintained by SMC:

Now the rendering is perfect except this bug.

Since the rendering was OK, my next objective was to set up the Malayalam input in the desktop. Of course this is one of the failure with 8.04. The scim-m17n packages where not installed by default and I have to manually install them using the Synaptic Package Manager. I searched for "scim-m17n" and then applied it. SCIM was then configured using System-->Preferences-->SCIM Input Method The irritating stuff is that I have to start scim manually before typing anything in Malayalam. The following commands helped me to set up SCIM in startup:

sudo -i
touch /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
chmod 646 /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
echo 'export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"' >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
echo 'export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"' >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
echo 'export XIM_PROGRAM="scim -d"' >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
echo 'export QT_IM_MODULE="scim"' >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
chmod 644 /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup

Reference : http://www.mrbass.org/linux/ubuntu/scim/

The scim setup was complete, but again there were problems when using ZWJ and ZWNJ. Both these characters were not properly identified and this caused problem with chillus when typing Malayalam. I was using the default inscript tables by scim, and it had some bugs. To correct this I have to install another package named m17n-contrib which also has a transliteration based input method. I searched for "m17n-contrib" in Synaptic Package Manager and applied it and then I have to relogin to effect the changes in scim. Thanks to Santhosh Thottingal who guided me to troubleshoot this issue.

The Dejavu and freefont packages installed in Ubuntu has included Malayalam glyphs but it seems that they have some bugs. This may prevent rendering Malayalam perfectly in OpenOffice Writer and rich text boxes in Firefox. Even though it's not recommended, finally, I have to remove them from the system.

The Padma extension, which is used to read Malayalam news papers in dynamic font, is not supported in Firefox 3beta5. This turned to be another disappointment as a Malayalam user. Now, I may have to search for the Padma patch developed by Sri. Anil Kumar K V, one of my favourite teachers :).

Even though the issues discussed above can be solved easily, these are real obstacles for an average Malayalee desktop user. I hope that the issues may be resolved soon and shortly we may have a complete GNU/Linux desktop.

Experimenting with Fedora 8

The Fedora Community released the latest version of Fedora on Thursday, 8th November 2007. The new Fedora 8 came with numerous enhancements and features and I was thrilled to start experimenting the new distro. Since I don't want to hinder my work at the office, I tried to upgrade my desktop using YUM. The upgrade instructions can be found here : YumUpgradeFaq

The upgrade process was smooth, except it took too much time, because of slow Internet connection. The process took place in one of the text console, and I was able to work on the desktop without any problem. The process took about 6 hours and then I rebooted the machine.
The desktop graphics looks very cool and nice. But there are couple of issues that I had to came across with the new desktop. Some of them are listed below:

1. Unable to set the Screen Resolution
But I was struck with the screen resolution in the newly upgraded machine. I tried to set the resolution to 1024x768, but each time I login, the screen resolution immediately changed to 800x600 after a while. I had a Intel Original Motherboard and /etc/sysconfig/hwconf said that the Graphical Controller is "Intel Corporation 82915G/GV/910GL Integrated Graphics Controller".

I tried to upgrade the kernel and different options in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. But all the experiments failed. Finally, with the help of the guys from #fedora@freenode.net I tried to install 915resolution. After installing 915resolution using YUM, I have to reconfigure the display and now the screen resolution issue is solved. Thanks to the guys at #fedora.

Info: The Summary in the 915resolution rpm package says the reason:

Intel video BIOS hack to support certain resolutions.

915resolution is a tool to modify the video BIOS of the 800 and 900 series Intel graphics chipsets. This includes the 845G, 855G, and 865G chipsets, as well as 915G, 915GM, and 945G chipsets. This modification is necessary to allow the display of certain graphics resolutions for an Xorg or XFree86 graphics server.

915resolution's modifications of the BIOS are transient. There is no risk of permanent modification of the BIOS. This also means that 915resolution must be run every time the computer boots inorder for it's changes to take effect.

915resolution is derived from the tool 855resolution. However, the code differs substantially. 915resolution's code base is much simpler. 915resolution also allows the modification of bits per pixel.

2. Too Small desktop Fonts in GNOME-2.20
Fedora 8 uses GNOME-2.20 and I was faced with unusual(small) size of the fonts in the desktop and Google fetched me to the fedoraforums.org. The small fonts issue can be resolved by setting the default font dpi to 96 (This value can be found at /etc/X11/Xresources, the Xft.dpi: 96). The exact reason why this happens in GNOME is still unknown to me. May be I have to dig the gnome bugzilla.

Apart from the font issue, the GNOME desktop looks extraordinary, one of the best experience ever had, since I started using it on 2001.

3. Reading and Typing Malayalam
I was very much disappointed when I accessed the Malayalam Wikipedia page in Firefox. In Fedora 7, there were some issues, but in Fedora 8 it was really worse. The default Malayalam font used in Fedora 8 was lohit-malayalam and I removed it and installed Rachana-g02, but it didn't helped. This was a known bug(#242016) in lohit-malayalam and pango in Fedora 7 and 8, and I have added some screenshots for a comparison of the issues.

With guidance from the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) community I tried the Suruma patch. Since there was no Suruma patch for Pango-1.18, I tried patch4pango-1.16.4.

Installing Suruma was very easy, I need to just run the install script and the installation wizard guided me to complete the operation. Then I installed the Rachana-g02 fonts which render traditional Malayalam glyphs.

To install Rachana fonts, download the fonts from here
Copy the fonts files(*.ttf) to /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm/
Change to /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm and run the following commands

# cd /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm
# mkfontscale
# mkfontsdir
# chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm
# fc-cache

Open your Mozilla Firefox and access http://ml.wikipedia.org to check whether the fonts are correctly displayed.

In order to type Malayalam, you should first set the Input Method:
To chose the Input method go to System --> Preferences -->Personal --> Input Method.


Enable SCIM and now click the Input Method Preference :

In the Global Setup you can configure the trigger key, which is CTRL+SPACE by default. In the IMEngine menu, you have to chose which languages you need support. You can also chose transliteration or the inscript method. Apply all the changes and re-login to your desktop. If everything is OK, then you will be able to read and type Malayalam in your desktop.