Showing posts with label gnome-control-center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gnome-control-center. Show all posts

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Gnome goodies: How to set gnome-screenshot default saved directory. How to add network speed applet on gnome panel.

This is another gnome3 applet howto blog. The reason pretty much stated in the previous blog. Read it here. So today, we will configured two more applets.

How to set gnome-screenshot default saved directory


When you pressed the 'Print Screen' button on your keyboard, you start to wondering where has the screenshot saved to by gnome-screenshot. The configuration in org.gnome.gnome-screenshot.auto-save-directory in dconf-editor no longer seem to take effect. See the screenshot below. No matter what value you configured, the value just won't take effect if you print screen.

dconf-editor-gnome-screenshot

Apparently there is a change in gnome3. Let's see the keyboard shortcuts in gnome-control-center. See screenshot below, apparently all screen shots are saved to Pictures. You can change the shortcut here but can you change where it saved to?

keyboard-shortcut-screenshot

To do that, you need to change the value in a configuration file in $HOME/.config/user-dirs.dirs . Hence, XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures" always point to user home directory and a folder called Pictures. You can change the value in this configuration file or you can change using xdg-user-dirs-update command. I choose the latter.
user@localhost:~$ xdg-user-dirs-update --set PICTURES "$HOME/myScreenShot"

Logout and login again to the gnome environment. Now when you print screen, the screenshot will saved to $HOME/myScreenShot. :-)

 

How to add network speed applet on gnome panel.


For some reason, there is no network applet for gnome3 in debian repository. Not sure what was the reason but hey, we are not going to pursue the why and why not. Rather, I find an alternative gnome3 network applet from ubuntu. There are some network applets and I will list them down unfortunately not all of them work. At least not at the time this blog is written. But I suggest you revisit this network applet, someone nice out there might put efforts to include it into debian repository.

As you can read, there are many network applets listed above and it could be at this point of time, someone else written one for debian too. So choose whichever one suit you best but today, we are going to install the package indicator-multiload from ubuntu repository.

So get the package from the repository and install. You can visit this link. Pick the latest version and at this time of writing, I'm using version 0.5-0~131~31~25~ubuntu14.10.1. To install, run the command $ sudo dpkg -i indicator-multiload_0.5-0~131~31~25~ubuntu14.10.1_amd64.deb . If there is any unsatisfying dependency, you can apt-get install the dependency. My system does not have libappindicator3-1 installed, so I installed using command $ sudo apt-get install libappindicator3-1 . Repeat the same steps for any library that is required by indicator-multiload.

Then launch dconf-editor and go to the entry de->mh21->indicator-multiload->general . If the property autostart is not check, then check it. See screenshot below.

dconf-editor-indicator-multiload

It's such a pity, this applet is not showing on the top gnome panel. Rather, it is hidden under message tray. You can bring up the message tray by pointing mouse cursor on bottom right and click or using keyboard shortcut key super+m. See screenshot below, it show statistics of cpu, mem, net (the one we want in this howto), swap, load and disk.

indicator-multiload

There is a nice gnome extension known as TopIcons where it will place legacy tray icons on top panel. Unfortunately, it does not work for me. I have download the master version at of this writing, according to description, it mentioned it support gnome version 3.14. I extracted the zip to /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/topicons-master. User logout and login, reboot unfortunately it does not work. If you know how to get it to work, please leave a comment below.

Thank you and that's it. Happy gnome-ing. :)