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CHAPTER 3:CHAPTER 3
GNOME
GNOME is one of the two most popular desktop environ-
ments for Linux, and it is the default GUI for the Fedora and
Ubuntu distributions. Gentoo does not favor a particular
desktop environment and provides pretty much the same
GNOME experience as you would get by installing GNOME
manually.
Because it is impossible in a book this size to describe every
minor difference between each distribution’s GNOME
implementation, I’ll have to shoot for the largest target,
Fedora, and hope that the information I give can be used
with only minor adjustments with any other configuration of
GNOME. Usually the only differences are placement of
menu choices and subtle variations in menu and option
names.
GNOME Desktop
Once you log in to GNOME, you’ll find that it resembles a
Macintosh layout more than Windows. This is because most
GNOME setups place a panel along the top and bottom of
the screen. The panel at the top commonly holds one or
more menus, several quick-launch icons, and, at the far right,
the clock, applets, and notifications are displayed. The panel
on the bottom acts as a taskbar and displays a desktop pager
to allow you to switch between virtual desktops (commonly
called workspaces).
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Chapter 3: GNOME
The basic use of the desktop environment is as you’d expect.
Click once on menu and panel icons, double-click desktop
icons to launch the programs, and right-click anywhere
you’re curious to see if there are options available on a
context-sensitive menu.
You can freely move items in the panels (even to other pan-
els), add new items, and delete existing ones. To do this,
either right-click on an item to move or delete it, or right-
click an empty space to add new items. All of the applets that
you can add to the panel are conveniently located in a single-
level menu with basic descriptions of each choice. Each panel
also has its own properties, which you can access from the
right-click menu. In all, you’ll find panel configuration and
placement very flexible with GNOME, but with fewer
options than what KDE gives you. This is one reason many
people like GNOME—simplicity.
This simplicity extends to other areas. For example, most
configuration dialogs don’t require you to click OK or Apply
for your changes to take affect. Instead, they happen
instantly. This is slightly disconcerting at first, especially
when making changes to options on a tab—you might worry
that switching to another tab will cause you to lose your set-
tings. Don’t worry, the changes are always saved.
Most distributions place launchers for programs and utilities
into special-purpose menus placed on the left side of the top
panel. Having more than one high-level menu leads to less
clutter in the menus themselves and makes it easier for you
to find what you want. In Fedora Core 4, these menus are:
Applications
This is the typical program launcher menu you expect to
find on a panel.
GNOME Desktop
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Places
The links here open specific places on your filesystem.
The Computer link displays your storage devices, while
“Connect to Server” option opens a dialog where you can
connect to a remote server using a limited set of protocols.
Desktop
You can log off or lock your screen from here. More
importantly, you can configure your desktop under the
Preferences and System Settings menus. Preferences
apply to your personal desktop, while System Settings
allows you to make changes that affect the entire system
for all users.
There are a few keyboard shortcuts, listed in Table 3-1,
which you might find useful. You can modify these short-
cuts, or create new ones, with the keyboard shortcut utility
found at Desktop
➝ Preferences ➝ Keyboard Shortcuts.
Table 3-1. GNOME keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcut Action
Ctrl-Alt-right arrow Moves to a desktop to the right of the current one.
Ctrl-Alt-left arrow Moves to a desktop to the left of the current one.
Ctrl-Alt-up arrow Moves you to one above your current desktop if there are
multiple rows of desktops in the pager.
Ctrl-Alt-down arrow Moves you to the desktopbelow your current one ifthere
are multiple rows of desktops in the pager.
Shift-Ctrl-Alt-any arrow Moves the active window to the workspace that sits in
the direction of the arrow you click. This also makes the
indicated workspace active.
Alt-Tab Cycles through windows on the current desktop.
Alt-Shift-Tab Cycles backward through the windows of the current
desktop.
Ctrl-Alt-D Toggles between minimizing and restoring all windows
on the desktop.
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