Understand that GNOME 3 is not due out until late 2010, so it is currently very much in beta. You will be surprised just how stable it already is. Because of this stability I feel confident that, with the help of these (and more) tips, you can also become an early adopter of GNOME 3 and be ahead of the curve. In this article you will see a few more of these tips that will help you get used to what will replace the GNOME desktop that has been around since 1997.

Better use of the “overview”

Figure 1

The “overview” of GNOME Shell is what you see when you either move your mouse to the upper left corner of your desktop or press the “Super” (or “Windows”) key. When you open up the overview you will see a zoomed out view of your desktop with all the windows thumbnailed. Let’s tweak this a bit (for a good reason).

Remember the Linux desktop pager (that tool that allows you to have more than one desktop?) Let’s set our GNOME Shell up to have four desktops. To do this click the “+” symbol in the lower right corner (when you are viewing the overview) until you have four small squares in the bottom center of the window (see Figure 1).

Figure 2

Now that you have those four squares, let’s set the overview to show all of your desktops when you are in overview mode. To do this click on the small icon to the bottom left of the overview window (to the left of the menu) that looks like four small squares. Now when you view the overview you will see all four desktops at once (see Figure 2). Now it gets really cool.

When you are in the overview mode, with multiple desktops showing, you can open an application into a specific desktop. Let’s say you want to OpenOffice Writer to open up in desktop 2. To do this open up the overview mode and then click the OpenOffice Writer icon (from the menu) and drag it to desktop 2. This will then open the application up in the desktop you dragged the icon to, and only that desktop! You can also just drag a currently open window from one desktop to another when in overview mode.

Search

We can’t leave out the search feature. When you are in overview mode you will see a Find text area. When you use this feature you can search for just about anything on your machine. And not only does this search bring up files, it brings up applications as well. Say, for instance, you want to use one of your email clients. You can enter the string “mail” (no quotes) and see whatever mail clients you have (mine brings up Evolution, Claws Mail, and KMail.) This is a handy way to find applications quickly, instead of having to comb through menus or listings.

Final thoughts

There you have it, even more GNOME Shell tips to entice you to give this soon to be replacement for the aging GNOME desktop a try. GNOME Shell is one of those environments you might at first not like, but very quickly you will find yourself wishing your current environment had some of its features – so much so you’ll most like head back to GNOME Shell. And, of course, more tips to come.

And with every Linux desktop, the pager is configured differently in KDE than it in GNOME, or Enlightenment, or Afterstep, etc. In this article I will show you how to configure the pager for both normal use and for use in the KWin window decorator.

Assumptions

Naturally there are assumptions made in any article. For this particular article I will assume you are running KDE version 4.4 and KWin is installed and running. Now let’s start configuring.

Normal use

Figure 1

By normal use I mean you use the pager as any Linux desktop would (sans KWin). You use the pager to switch from one desktop workspace to another and you use those workspaces for either particular jobs or just more screen real-estate. For this, the first place you want go is Start > Computer > System Settings > Desktop. In this window you will want to click on the Multiple Desktops section (see Figure 1).

The first thing you will want to do is configure how many desktops you want. The default is 4 and is usually enough. What I like to do is configure a specific job for each space. This is different than different Activities (we will discuss KDE activities in an up-coming article). Do that by giving each desktop a job-specific name.

Figure 2

Once you have set up the number and name of each desktop, click on the Switching tab. In this section you are going to set up just how you switch from desktop to desktop. Oh sure you can just click on the KDE pager (see Figure 2) but that is not only boring, but it also takes your fingers off the keyboard (not very efficient computing now is it?).

Instead, what you want to do is set up keyboard shortcuts for switching desktops. There are two ways to do this: The KDE way and the KWin way. Let’s look at the KDE way first.

Figure 3

Click on the Switching tab in the Multiple Desktops section (see Figure 3).  From the Desktop Effect Animation you will want to select No Animation. Now take a look at the Shortcuts section. Here is where you configure keyboard shortcuts for moving around your workspaces.

Figure 4

In order to change a keyboard shortcut find the shortcut you want to edit and select it. When you select a shortcut it will change appearance and allow you to either select the default or create a custom shortcut (see Figure 4). When you click the button associated with Custom Shortcut it will wait until you input a key combination. Once you do that you will see the key combination associated with the shortcut. Click Apply to make the change.

Figure 5

To configure the pager for KWin you need to go to the Desktop Effects section and then click on the All Effects tab. Scroll down until you see Desktop Cube. Click on the settings button associated with this to reveal all the settings you need to configure your desktop cube to work in conjunction with your pager (see Figure 5).

You might notice a few of these settings overlap with what many CCSM settings are. The Background would equate to the Skydome image of KWin. Windows hover above cube would be 3D windows.

In the activation section you can configure the keyboard shortcuts to activate the cube. These are done in the same way they were above.

Once you have finished your configurations, click OK and your cube is ready to serve as your pager.

Final thoughts

No matter if you use the pager in the old school Linux way, or in the new school KWin way, you should be using it. It’s a fantastic way to keep your desktop organized. And KDE is no slacker on pager options. NOTE: I’ve updated the article to reflect KWin over Compiz. Although KDE and Compiz do work well together, until Compiz works out some of the issues it is best to stick with the KWin compositor. Hopefully the Compiz team will get the issues worked out so the Compiz decorator will work as efficiently on KDE as it does on GNOME.

But why would you want multiple desktop wallpaper? It seems like nothing more than aesthetics? To many that is true – but for some power users it can make it quite obvious what desktop is for what job. I am one of those users that prefers to work with multiple desktops. It just makes work so much more efficient. But when you’re using Compiz (and why shouldn’t you be?) Setting up multiple wallpapers isn’t as simple as adding a new wallpaper to your existing configuration.  In this tutorial you will see just how to set up Compiz to work with multiple wallpaper.

Assumptions

The first of these assumptions is that you have Compiz working and the CompizConfig Settings Manager installed.  The second assumption is that you are using the GNOME desktop environment (for this article I am using GNOME 2.28.1. The final assumption is that you have no need for desktop icons. With that out of the way, let’s get to the configurations necessary.

Compiz

The first configuration is in the CCSM tool. You will find this tool in the System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager. When you fire up that tool enter “wallpaper” in the search field. The Wallpaper settings is listing under Utility. When you see it listed click on it to open up the options.

Figure 1

As you can see (in Figure 1)  there are only two sections to configure. The first is to click the checkbox to enable the Wallpaper for Compiz. The second is to add Wallpaper(s) by clicking the New button, navigating to where you have your images saved, selecting your wallpaper, select your Fill Type (do you want the image centered, scaled, etc), and click Close.

When you have that done you can close out CCSM. If you check you will still see only one wallpaper. What gives? You’re not done. Now it’s time to fire up another tool – gconf-editor.

Gconf-editor

Figure 2

Hit <Alt>F2 and type gconf-editor to open up this tool. You need to navigate to Apps > Nautilus > Preferences (see Figure 2) . Scroll down until you see the show_desktop entry. If that checkbox is checked, uncheck it and close the tool.

Figure 3

Now check your desktop. How many wallpapers do you see? As many as you added in CCSM? That should be the case. Hopefully you can see (in Figure 3) the two different wallpapers I have added to my desktop.  Of course I also have a few other features enabled in Compiz, but you get the idea.

Don’t forget to remember how many workspaces you have enabled. Although you don’t have to add as many wallpapers as you have workspaces, you don’t want to add more wallpapers than you have workspaces.

Final thoughts

I hope you can see how this little addition can make work a little easier. Create a specific wallpaper for administrative work, put it on a specific workspace, and only do your admin work there. It’s subtle, but effective.

How many times have you had far too many applications up on your desktop and you found that wading through the windows added too much extra time to your work load? Being an IT professional or a power-user keeping your desktop organized can keep your work efficient and your desktop clean. But how is it used? Let’s find out.

What it does

The pager effectively creates multiple instances of your desktop that give you more work spaces to use. So instead of having a single screen to use you can configure your desktop for multiple desktops. This makes organizing your work very simple. Say, for instance, you want to have one desktop for writing, one desktop for on line work, one desktop for graphics, and one desktop for administrative tasks. This is not only possible but simple. And this allows you to have far more applications open without them getting in the way of one another (or having so many windows minimized to your panel that you can not tell which application is which.) Of course moving back and fourth between desktops will depend upon which desktop you are using. Let’s examine how each works.

GNOME

GNOME Pager

The GNOME pager resides in the Panel. By default it will appear in the bottom panel on your desktop. In the image to the left you can see the Pager in the left side. This pager has the default four desktops that all GNOME desktops will have upon installation. To switch from one desktop to another you can either click the desired desktop with the mouse or you can hit the key combination Ctrl-Alt-arrow (Where arrow is either the left or right arrow key.) So if you want to move from desktop 1 to desktop 2 you would hit the Ctrl-Alt-right arrow key. If you want to move from desktop 4 to desktop 1 you would hold the Ctrl-Alt keys and then tap the left arrow key three times.

To configure this pager you could right click anywhere on the pager and select Preferences. Within the Preferences you can define how many desktops you want and you can rename your desktops (to help you organize your work.)

KDE

KDE Pager

The KDE pagers functions in just the same way as the GNOME pager. The biggest difference is the aesthetic layout of the pager on the KDE Panel. Switching from one desktop to another in KDE is a bit different than in GNOME.

KDE Pager in Action

To switch from one desktop to another requires a different key combination. To move around from one desktop to another click and hold the Ctrl key and then tap the Tab key until you are on the correct desktop. When you are on the correct desktop, release both keys and you will be on that desktop. You can see (in the image to the right) this in action. You can also simply click on the desktop you want to go to in the pager and you will be zapped to that desktop.

If you right click the pager you can access the Pager Settings menu where you can configure the number of rows to display on the Panel and what to display (Names or numbers of desktops).

Final Thoughts

I could continue on with practially every desktop in the Linux operating system because each has its own version or implementation of the pager. But by showing GNOME and KDE you get to understand the fundamentals of this very handy tool. Using the pager can keep your work organized and your desktop clean.