Fedora 15 Fixes

Spending all my time at work with Redhat’s suite of products and at the same time sticking to having my primary working OS to be Ubuntu was causing too much dissonance. So I finally decided to move to Fedora as my primary OS after 6 years of Ubuntu. My guess was that as a desktop user, beyond packaging issues, the transition is going to be minimal. But as with any new release, there are always some niggling issues, and I am going to document them here in one place as I continue to find them.

Selinux issues

SElinux is enforced by default on F15. For once I think I will not fight this. This would be a good opportunity to learn selinux properly. However, there are some application errors because of this:

• Google chrome config files have wrong selinux labels causing some extensions to repeatedly crash. [Bug 710273]. The fix is to run restorecon -R ~/.config. (Source: Randell’s Blog)

Gnome issues

Fedora 15 includes Gnome 3, which requires a major re-learning for doing every day stuff. The settings applications is missing a lot of config options which I was using earlier in Ubuntu. It turns out that Gnome 3 hides a lot of these settings by design. Unfortunately, this means that people will need to learn additional tools to do what they want.

• Appearance changes: Install the gnome-tweak-tool package to customize fonts, window behaviour, etc. (Source: Rajaseelan.com)

• Virtual Workspace location direction in Gnome 3 changes from left-right to up-down. So to move from workspace 1 to workspace 2, you need to press Ctrl-Alt-Down.

• Application menu and shortcut toolbar has disappeared. To see it, take the mouse cursor to the upper-left corner of your screen (hot spot).

• No visible option to shutdown. Lock screen, logout, switch user, suspend, but no shutdown. To do this, you need to press the Alt key, while clicking on the status menu (the one with your name in the top right corner) and the “suspend” key will change to shutdown. (Source: Arch linux wiki)

Lots of Gnome 3 tips at the Archlinux wiki.