So I am basically done with tuning my new installtion of Fedora 16 Verne. Let me summarize this a little bit over here now.

Gnome Shell Extensions

Before I can start I have to bind F1-F4 keys to swtiching workspaces one to four. It's pretty easy to do it in the Gnome 3 keyboard settings, but the thing is you can only bind numbers 2, 3 and 4 when they exist. To do that, one need to place some windows there, keybinding items won't show up otherwise.

The very first thing I need to disable is desktop effects for changing workspaces, because I switch it like thousand times a day. On top of that, I don't like dynamic workspace feature and prefer fixed number of workspaces (four). I use two extensions for that - disable-window-animations and static-workspaces. Both are not in Fedora 16 yet, but installation is as easy as dropping them in the .local/gnome-shell/extensions.

If you want to check out other extensions, I would recommend yum search gnome-shell command. There are many from which I use gnome-shell-extension-alternative-status-menu, gnome-shell-extension-auto-move-windows and gnome-shell-extension-gpaste. Try them out! Update: I found one of those two extensions causing Shell crashes and turned them off both.

Annoying software

When a command is not found, Fedora now follows Ubuntu-based pattern searching package database for given command trying to give a package recommendation. That drives me crazy. Easy help:

# yum remove -y PackageKit-command-not-found

I also do not want Tracker to index me bunch of things, for searching I use grep and mlocate. Since there is no UI for turning off autostart applications in Gnome 3 we need to do it manually. Copy those files to your .local/autostart directory:


$ locate tracker | grep desktop
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-flickr.desktop
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop


And using a decent editor (vim, to give you an example) set this option to false in all of those:

$ grep Autostart *desktop
tracker-miner-flickr.desktop:X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false
tracker-miner-fs.desktop:X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false
tracker-store.desktop:X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false

Update: There is a GUI for that, it is just not accessible from the Gnome Shell (desktop entry is missing - a bug). Type # gnome-session-properties on a terminal and unclick all three Tracker entries and you are done.

Feel free to remove it's huge cache, for me it was 1 GiG of mess.

$ rm -rf ~/.cache/tracker

Sudo thing

I am a sudo guy. No shame. The following can cause headache to security experts, but I do this:

$ visudo
Defaults    timestamp_timeout = -1
Defaults    passwd_timeout = 0
Defaults   !tty_tickets
Defaults   !lecture

Hey, experts, that's not all. Look what I just did:

$ grep SELINUX /etc/sysconfig/selinux 
SELINUX=disabled

Well, it's not that bad. I encrypt my laptop and lock my screen, I recommend you to do the same.

Tune grub

I do not enjoy graphical startup as well as long bootloader timeout. Easy help, but things are different now starting with Fedora 16 as there is Grub2 deployed as default. The key thing is to set two options in the /etc/default/grub: GRUB_TIMEOUT and GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX (delete rhgb option there). Do this then:

$ grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Preferred packages

I would expect this is different for you, but I am fan of:

$ yum -y install terminus-fonts terminator vim-X11 mutt offlineimap msmtp rednotebook xchat2 bitlbee autojump keepassx git tig gitk lzma ncompress p7zip

Okay, enough today.