GNOME 3.6 Upgrade GuidePlease see the GNOME 3.6 Release Notes for what is new in this major release of GNOME. Current users of GNOME 2 would also want to glance at the release notes for 3.0, 3.2, and 3.4. Briefly: GNOME 3 includes two desktop modes—standard and fallback. Fallback mode uses gnome-base/gnome-panel and x11-wm/metacity, and is similar in appearance and behavior to GNOME 2. Standard mode uses gnome-base/gnome-shell and x11-wm/mutter, and looks and behaves completely differently from GNOME 2 releases. By default, the choice of desktop mode is determined by the system's graphics hardware and drivers (standard mode requires modern 3D graphics capabilities). There is a quick tour of standard mode's GNOME Shell available on the GNOME website. For an in-depth guide to using GNOME Shell, see the GNOME Shell cheat sheet. GNOME Shell at first may feel alien and limited to an experienced GNOME 2 user. We strongly encourage users to persist and make themselves use it for a few days; those who take the time to get used to GNOME Shell's behavior usually grow to love it and don't want to go back to a GNOME 2-like desktop environment. 2. Changes affecting current GNOME 3.4 or GNOME 2 users Keyboard layouts and input methods GNOME 3.6 does not use traditional xorg.conf keyboard layout settings. Instead, keyboard layouts and input methods are configured via ibus which is integrated into GNOME Shell. To add a keyboard layout, open System Settings (or gnome-control-center from the terminal) and go to Region & Language → Input Sources. Unfortunately, in GNOME 3.6 the System Settings GUI does not allow setting the usual shortcuts (e.g. Alt Shift) for switching keyboard layouts. Users who use multiple keyboard layouts and need to switch between them from the keyboard will need to use gnome-tweak-tool and select their desired shortcut from the Typing → Modifiers-only input sources switcher shortcut menu. Alternatively, from a terminal:
GNOME Shell 3.6 (unlike earlier GNOME 3 releases) always shows a Power Off menu item by default in the upper-right corner menu. However (unlike earlier GNOME releases) it now no longer shows a Suspend menu item by default. The Suspend menu item becomes visible after clicking on the upper right corner menu and holding down the Alt key. Laptops can also be suspended simply by shutting the lid. If you need an easily discoverable GUI for suspending the machine, you can install the alternative-status-menu extension. To do so, emerge gnome-extra/gnome-shell-extensions and run
to enable the extension for all users by default, or use gnome-tweak-tool (Shell Extensions tab) to enable it on a per-user basis. Current versions of evolution-exchange and evolution-groupwise are incompatible with Evolution 3.6, and you will need to uninstall them before upgrading to GNOME 3.6. Users of evolution-exchange should try switching to evolution-ews as evolution-exchange development is abandonned. Since Gnome 3.0, some applications stopped switching tabs when scolling over them. This is behavior is intended by upstream actually covers at least app-editors/gedit, gnome-base/nautilus and www-client/epiphany. This behavior will not be patched by Gentoo Gnome team so if you find it annoying, please report directly at Gnome bugzilla. If you were used to move and resize windows using Alt + middle click, Gnome 3.6 replaced the Alt key with the Super (Windows Logo) key. If you wish to change back to the old behavior, this can be done using gnome-tweak-tool (Windows tab), or from the terminal:
If you were used to find the logs of the current session in ~/.xsession-errors, the file has now moved to XDG compliant location: ~/.cache/gdm/session.log. 3. Changes affecting current GNOME 2 users GNOME 3 obtains user language settings from sys-apps/accountsservice. The language can be set in GNOME from the My Account entry in the upper right corner menu. Alternatively, you can directly edit AccountsService user files. For example, to have user jrandom use British English, you can (as root) edit /var/lib/AccountsService/users/jrandom so it reads the following:
GNOME 3 uses media-fonts/cantarell as its default font. Unfortunately, Cantarell currently only includes a subset of Latin and Cyrillic characters. Users of languages with alphabetic writing systems which are not yet covered by Cantarell will probably want to switch to another font, such as media-fonts/dejavu. This can be done using gnome-tweak-tool (Fonts tab), or from the terminal:
GNOME 2 applets cannot be used in GNOME 3. Fallback mode allows applets, although some have not yet been ported to the new, gtk3-based APIs. In standard mode, there are no applets at all. Some traditional applet functionality can be replicated using third-party GNOME Shell extensions. In order to manage fallback gnome-panel settings (either add/remove or rearrange applet positions) one has to hold down the Alt key when clicking on the panel. This opens relevant menu for changing either panel or applet settings. GNOME 3 will, by default, suspend a laptop when the lid is closed. If you do not like this behavior, you can change it via the gnome-tweak-tool GUI (Shell tab), or using gsettings from the terminal:
One of the most common reasons for not wanting to suspend on laptop lid close is to carry a laptop to another room without losing the network connection. To do so, you can install gnome-extra/office-runner, which allows temporarily inhibiting GNOME's suspend-on-lid-close behavior for up to 10 minutes. In GNOME 3, Nautilus by default no longer manages the desktop, and the ~/Desktop folder is simply treated as a normal folder with files. If you want to have Nautilus manage the desktop like in GNOME 2, you can change the corresponding setting in the gnome-tweak-tool GUI (Desktop tab), or use the gsettings command from the terminal:
GNOME 3 standard mode (i.e. GNOME Shell) is incompatible with Compiz. GNOME 3 requires media-sound/pulseaudio for audio support. Ensure that you have the pulseaudio USE flag enabled globally (it will be enabled by default if you use the desktop/gnome portage profile). For troubleshooting PulseAudio problems, see documentation on pulseaudio.org. Touchpad and other input device customization In GNOME 3.6, if you have "disable touchpad while typing" selected, the touchpad will be disabled for 1 second after a keyboard key is pressed. In GNOME 2, this interval was 500 milliseconds. If you like to disable the touchpad while typing, but prefer the shorter timeout interval like in GNOME 2, you can emerge gnome-base/gnome-settings-daemon with the short-touchpad-timeout USE flag enabled. GNOME 3 allows setting a custom command for advanced customization of input device settings. For example, suppose that you want to configure your touchpad to enable two-finger scrolling (both vertical and horizontal) and edge scrolling (vertical only). You could do
and edit input-device.sh so it ends as follows:
If, for whatever reason, you want to completely prevent GNOME 3 from automatically modifying your mouse and touchpad settings (note that this will also prevent custom input hotplug commands, such as input-device.sh above, from modifying mice and touchpads!), you can run the following:
General configurability and extensions GNOME 3 is designed to appear significantly less configurable than GNOME 2. For example, by default there is no easily discoverable GUI for changing the Gtk+ theme. Many configuration settings are hidden, but can still be changed using the gnome-extra/gnome-tweak-tool GUI, or from gsettings (can be explored using dconf-editor, part of gnome-base/dconf) or gconf (can be explored using gnome-extra/gconf-editor). Discussion of most of these settings is outside the scope of this guide. GNOME Shell's behavior can be significantly altered using extensions. Gentoo packages the extensions from the official GNOME repository as gnome-extra/gnome-shell-extensions. GNOME Shell comes with a browser plugin that allows users to install extensions from the https://extensions.gnome.org/ web interface; there are also numerous developers publishing extensions on various third-party websites. Gentoo uses eselect gnome-shell-extensions to manage system defaults that control whether extensions that were installed systemwide (i.e. in /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions) should be enabled. Newly-installed systemwide extensions start out disabled by default.
Defaults managed by eselect gnome-shell-extensions can be overridden on a per-user basis using the extensions.gnome.org web interface, via gnome-tweak-tool (Shell Extensions tab), or from the command line using gsettings. For example, to load the alternative status menu and dock extensions, and disabling all other extensions, a user can run
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