faustus's profile - activity

Did you install Fedora in UEFI mode? Fedora installation and live CD or DVDs can be booted either in legacy mode or in UEFI mode (on hardware that supports it). If you boot the Fedora media in legacy mode then it will install that way, and the GRUB menu will not be UEFI aware, so no easy dual-boot with Windows. To test this, when you are running your Fedora installation, see if there is anything listed as follows:

ls /sys/firmware/efi/vars/

If there are entries in that directory, then you are running Fedora in EFI mode; if not, then your don't have a UEFI Fedora installation.

From Fedora running in UEFI mode (either your installed system as confirmed above, or a Live DVD booted explicitly in UEFI mode) you can use the "efibootmgr" command to add/remove entries from the computer's UEFI menu.

There are workarounds that will let you backport gnome-classic-session to F18, but do you really need to do that? If you really want gnome-classic-session, is there a strong reason you don't want to upgrade to F19 with Gnome 3.8 where it is officially supported?

The gnome-tweak-tool package, by itself, is not enough to enable the feature you are looking for. You need to do this too:

yum install gnome-shell-extension-user-theme.noarch

Then, relaunch gnome-tweak-tool, go to the "Shell Extensions" pane, and turn on "User Themes." After that, the menu you want should be available. Of course, it might not have many, if any, themes to choose from in the menu until you install some more. A few theme packages are also available and easy to install through yum, or you can install additional themes manually (how is beyond the scope of this question, but a search will show it has been answered many times before).

Were you running a proprietary graphics driver (e.g. kmod-nvidia)? Precompiled graphics kernel modules need to match the kernel version exactly. If your yum update installed a new kernel and your graphics driver is not in sync with it, it could be the culprit.

I have the exact same problem in F19. I have installed themes, through yum. Clearly the packages have installed folders in /usr/share/themes, right alongside the default Adwaita theme. However, none of the gtk+ themes are available in gnome-tweak-tool. They simply do not appear in the menu.

Yes, you can execute it from the live system, either immediately after you run the installer, or, since you probably have already shut down your computer since then, you can boot to the Live desktop and run efibootmgr after the fact. Be sure to boot in EFI mode, though. You don't need to be booted into the installed system itself, since efibootmgr actually writes to the motherboard's NVRAM, not to your disks. This all assumes that Anaconda correctly formatted and populated your /boot/efi partition. You will need to pass the device node of your installed system to efibootmgr.

Have you tried using efibootmgr to manually add the new boot entry? If you are running anaconda from the Live DVD, after the installation completes (with your error), you should still be able to open a shell and tweak your system. Running efibootmgr as root, without arguments, should show you your current boot settings. You can, of course, also add a new entry, change the default, etc. I refer you to the manual page for further details. If nothing else, assuming it also fails, it may provide a more detailed error message as to what went wrong.

Alacarte is partially functional. I tried it before even posting this question, and it showed so many bugs and crashes I just assumed it was never updated to work with Gnome 3. Trying again, however, I find I can at least disable certain menu items, which is something. I still can't delete the entries entirely, or move them around, without an immediate crash. Perhaps it is the way forward though, with some bug fixes/upgrades to improve compatibility with the Gnome 3 Classic Applications menu.

Thanks for the XFCE suggestion. I was actually using Cinnamon up until very recently, for usability reasons. While I appreciate the speed and lightweight factors you point out, in theory, they really aren't a practical issue for me personally; I'm not going to notice a performance difference of nanoseconds on my overkill hardware. When I heard about Classic Mode being promoted from a fallback shell to a fully supported Gnome desktop option, I decided to give Gnome 3 another shot. In spite of a few annoyances, I am finding it mostly usable. I'd like to give Gnome a chance to improve.

It may have been a bug indeed, but it seems to have been corrected by the recent kernel update I installed (3.9.9-301.fc19). Selected keymap is now honored in virtual consoles. Thanks for your response.

I use a dvorak keyboard layout in Fedora 19, and it works just fine on the X11 desktop. However, if I try to switch to a virtual console (e.g. with ctl-alt-F2), the layout is qwerty.

I have tried using localectl to change the layout. It reports the following:

System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    VC Keymap: dvorak
   X11 Layout: us
    X11 Model: pc105
  X11 Variant: dvorak

...which would seem to indicate the Virtual Console (VC) Keymap is "dvorak" but it is a lie; when I switch to the VC it uses qwerty.

localectl populates the /etc/vconsole.conf file, which contains "KEYMAP=dvorak" as expected. I have also tried "us-dvorak" to no effect. How does one change the console keymap in Fedora?

The added cynicism in no way diminishes the question; with or without, the question remains the same, though I will expand upon it: In Gnome 2, one used to have the option to edit the Applications Menu by right-clicking on the menu or running alacarte. Neither option is available now. I want to be able to edit the menu in the most simple and obvious ways: adding and removing application launchers, or recategorizing them.

Does anyone who's used the new "classic-mode" in Gnome 3.8 (Fedora 19) know how to edit the contents of the Applications menu? Right-clicking on the menu has no effect. Of course it doesn't! What was I thinking? Anything that makes so much sense has been stripped from Gnome 3.x.

Classic mode looks to be almost a return to sanity, but I'd really like a way to fully customize the Applications menu.