Fedora 15 and GNOME 3: Add Shutdown Option

Fedora 15 was just released on May 24, 2011, and it comes with GNOME 3. It's looking really good despite the fact that I find the new design a bit slow over VNC. Also, the shutdown/power off button is nowhere to be found! Fret not my friend, as it's super simple to add a shell extension to include the shutdown button.

First of all, the option to shutdown is still there, however, it's hidden. In order to see it, you must click on your username (top right hand corner) and the control menu will appear. Now, if you hold the Alt key, the Power Off option will display. Clear, eh? I wonder what design whiz did that.

That's surely one extra step that I don't want to perform all the time so here's one easy way for you to permanently add the Power Off option.

1) Go to Activities->Applications and click on Add/Remove Software.

2) Search for and install 'gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu'.

3) Now simply use your handy dandy keyboard shortcut ALT+F2 then r followed by enter. Or instead, logout and log back in.

Voilà!

You may also want to read my other post on how to add a minimize button to your F15 windows.

And please see the Gnome CheatSheet for more keyboard shortcuts.

Fedora 15 and GNOME 3: Add Minimize Button

Fedora 15 was just released on May 24, 2011, and it comes with GNOME 3. However, I found it extremely annoying that all windows only had the close button option. In order to minimize the window, you have to right click in order to see that option.

So here's how you can add the minimize button back to all windows.

1) Go to Activities->Applications and click on Add/Remove Software.

2) Search for and install 'gconf-editor' which allows you to browse and modify GConf configuration sources. The application will be installed as 'Configuration Editor' under System Tools.


3) Open the app and drill down to desktop->gnome->shell->windows

4) Modify 'button_layout' and set the values as ':minimize,maximize,close'

5) Now simply use your handy dandy keyboard shortcut ALT+F2 then r followed by enter. Or instead, logout and log back in.

You may also want to read my other post on how to add a shutdown option to Fedora 15.

And please see the Gnome CheatSheet for more keyboard shortcuts.

Enable VNC Remote Desktop on Fedora 12

This is a quick write up that hopefully will save someone the time I wasted trying to figure this out.

Enabling Remote Desktop access on Fedora 12 (Gnome) is very easy as stated in the manual. Go to System->Preferences->Remote Desktop and enable it there by just checking a few check boxes.

My goal was to connect from a Win box so you need to download a VNC Viewer client such as TightVNC.

Easy, breezy up to this point but when I tried to connect to my server I'd get an error message: 'Failed to connect to the server'.

After some online research I bumped into a first possible cause. VNC connects on port 5900 so I needed to make sure that I was targeting that port. And yes, the VNC client points there by default.

A second indicator was a permissions block (server, client or router) and that's where the issue was. So to solve the problem, here's what I did:
- Go to System->Administration->Firewall
- Click on 'Other Ports'
- Then 'Add' the port 5900 TCP vnc-server
- Click on 'Apply'

Drop me a comment if this helped you solve your issue.

KDM Fails to Login in FreeBSD

After installing FreeBSD 7.1/amd64, X and KDE4, I finally decided to try using a display manager and I went with KDM (instead of simply XDM). It ran successfully but whenever I tried to login, the KDM would take my login and then throw me back at the login screen.

Just to get started, here's what you need to do to install it:
1) In /etc/ttys change the XDM line to
# ttyv8 "/usr/local/kde4/bin/kdm -nodaemon" xterm on secure

2) Link for session manager
# ln -s ~/.xinitrc ~/.xsession

3) Restart ttys
# kill -HUP 1

You should have the login screen (KDM) up and running...and here's where the problem happened. This was the error message I was getting

Apr 11 13:01:28 media kdm-bin: :0[1131]: Cannot open ConsoleKit session: Unable to open session: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory

I still haven't tracked the exact cause of the issue but if you enable dbus with the Gnome Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) then KDM will work.

1) Add to /etc/rc.conf
# dbus_enable="YES"
# hald_enable="YES"

2) Reboot or start the services
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/dbus start
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/hald start

You should be able to enjoy your display manager now just like in any desktop system.

KDE4, GTK20 and Portsdb Fail Due to Missing Ports

I had a few more problems while installing some basic ports. And in the end the issue was due to cvsup not pulling all the necessary ports due to my refuse file.

First, after installing portupgrade I ran
# portsdb -Uu

But it failed with:
perl: not found

I found some tips online and most of them pointed to a possible use of the refuse file by cvsup. I still didn't want to pull ports that I possibly wouldn't use so I manually installed Perl and, in this case, solved the problem.

Then it came up a second time while installing KDE4. At some point during installation, it stopped with an error at GTK20. The error message suggested running gnomeanalyser.sh to diagnose the problem.

I ran that script but it wasn't able to diagnose the problem and suggested removing the refuse file and re-running cvsup. So this time I did remove my entries (not the language ones) from the refuse file and ran cvsup again.

After all the ports were updated, I installed KDE4 again and it ran without a problem.

FreeBSD/amd64 Failed installworld btxlsd

In my last build of FreeBSD/amd64, installworld failed with the following error:
btxld:No such file or directory

It was a little cryptic, specially because it was a fresh install, but after a little internet search I found a possible cause/solution for the issue. The date/time was out of sync...and that was indeed the cause!

You can check the date/time by simply running this:
# date

To sync it I ran:
# adjkerntz -i

Then I re-installed world and everything went fine.

Metallica Back to the Bay Area + Free Downloads

Very exciting news that Metallica will be returning to the Bay Area (December 2009) for another concert! The last one in Oakland rocked!

And I've been enjoying the tour updates with all the interesting (historical) facts. You can also download the tracks of each concert (paid) and a bunch of other free downloads of older concerts.