Improvements to the Gnome 3 PPA (5 May Edition)

Before today Gnome 3 PPA users on Ubuntu were unable to log in to Unity or Ubuntu Classic unless they kept gnome-session at version 2.32. I got this bug fixed. Basically, gnome-session changed the login configuration format. While both the old and new formats work on 2.32, at least in Ubuntu 11.04, with gnome-session 3 only the new format is supported. KDE’s login was unaffected as it uses a different mechanism.

Remaining issues: Unity 2D has not been updated with the new login format so you will still be unable to log in to that version. I’m not sure whether this will be backported to  11.04 or not. I might package this in my own PPA but this isn’t something that I expect the official Gnome 3 PPA to include, as it would be a maintenance headache to keep the PPA version up-to-date with whatever updates Unity 2D puts out. Also, I helped break the Guest login feature as the name for the sessions have changed to use the upstream gnome-fallback naming.

Another bug I fixed this week was that telling gnome-tweak-tool on the File Manager tab to Have file manager draw the desktop didn’t actually work. Now it does. Be aware that actually setting this will cause the file manager to not open when you tell it to from several of the most obvious links in the interface. You can still run nautilus .  from the command line (and yes, the period is important) to work around this bug which will be fixed in the next version of nautilus but it might be a few weeks before that fix reaches the PPA or Oneiric. I still don’t know whether we’ll turn on desktop icons by default; I presume we will as right-clicking to change the desktop background won’t work otherwise.

I also restored the “Home Folder” shortcut to Unity’s Launcher, although since I guess many people weren’t using Nautilus 3 and Unity at the same time, few noticed it was broken.

Since this is my first post about Gnome 3 fixes, I’ll also mention some older fixes I did to get Gnome 3 working better for Ubuntu. I restored the missing “System Settings” link to the Session menu and I fixed the “Sound Preferences” link in the Sound menu. I also fixed a cheese dependency so video effects would work instead of crashing cheese when clicked.

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5 comments on “Improvements to the Gnome 3 PPA (5 May Edition)
  1. Valtteri Vainikka says:

    Thanks for your work 🙂 Hopefully all your fixes will get included in the official PPA. Personally I’m waiting for Gnome 3 to be uploaded into oneirc, but if the PPA version starts working before that, I’ll gladly just use it instead.

  2. bm werks says:

    does this mean that the ability to run unity will now be included by default, or will i have to wait for awhile to benefit from this fix on my system?

  3. jeremy says:

    bm, this fix is in the Gnome 3 PPA now. All you have to do is install the updates.

  4. magesh says:

    i was trying to install gnome3 in ubuntu 11.04,, i was getting an error saying the gnome-session-bin (< 2.33),, but you said it is fixed????
    Can you help me in fixing this so that i can install gnome3..

    Cheers

  5. jeremy says:

    magesh, you’ll need to make sure you upgrade gnome-session, gnome-session-bin, and gnome-session-common at the same time. You’ll also likely want gnome-session-fallback too.

    The Gnome 3 PPA is not meant for normal users though.

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Jeremy Bicha

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