Gnome3 customization -- Changing the Panel Colour and make It Transparent on Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop Edition

The /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/panel-border.svg is the main file to be changed to change its appearance. Now wake the gimp expert in you

$: sudo gimp /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/panel-border.svg

modify the file as you wish here i deleted the whole image

ctrl + a and Del

then took the brush tool choose colour black (default), set Opacity to 52 and made the brush image large enough to cover the full image painted once in the image then choose a colour, set Opacity to 100. Painted a line in the bottom, this will appear as the bottom border. Saved it as panel-border.png, because in gimp does not support saving a file in .svg format. Now open up the file /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css

$: sudo nano /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css

goto the section

#panel {
 color: #ffffff;
 background-color: black;
 border-image: url("panel-border.png") 1;
 font-size: 8.5pt;
 height: 1.86em;
 }

change the line border-image: url(“panel-border.svg”) 1; to

border-image: url("panel-border.png") 1;

save the file
reload the gnome3 desktop by hitting Alt+F2 then enter r and hit Enter

Gnome shell will work without 3D acceleration in Fedora 17

From a message posted on Nov 3 to fedora mailing list by Adam Jackson the currently rawhide[1] fedora will have a gnome-shell that no longer treat llvmpipe as an unsupported driver. This means you can run gnome-shell even on VirtualBox or any other VM or on a hardware without 3D support.

So the Gnome shell will be available to everyone What about Gnome fallback which was executed when 3D acceleration was not available. It will no longer be required.

Still the work on software rendering of Gnome shell is only 10% complete. (When i wrote this post).

Install htop

htop is an interactive process viewer for Linux. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses. Install Htop in fedora using following command:

sudo yum install htop 

GNOME 3.2 Released

There are numerous fixes and improvements in this release such as smaller title bars (for small screens), the integration of GNOME Contacts and GNOME Documents for easy data management, web application integration, many more configurable settings, and other updates such as a more unified appearance and better chat integration.