Tags: gnome | ubuntu

I've finally got around to installing Gnome 3, and its new Gnome Shell on Ubuntu 11.04. Since going back to the default of Unity (and Gnome Classic) is supposed to be complicated, I tried this out with a spare laptop first. After playing with it for a while, I found it is a much better "fit" to my work style than Unity was. (Not that Unity isn't a great attempt at workflow management...)

One of Our libmozjs.so is Missing

On first running Gnome-Shell I found I had a blank screen with the Gnome3 default wallpaper that looked like blue curtains. Trying again, I used the Recovery Session, and then tried to run gnome-shell manually from the command-line. This got me:

error while loading shared libraries: libmozjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

To cure this I did:

cd /usr/lib|
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libmozjs185.so.1.0 libmozjs.so

After this, Gnome-Shell works. (Based on this link)

Eclipse Crashes Excessively

cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 libwebkit-1.0.so.2

And then add the following to eclipse.ini:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.UseWebKitGTK=true

Based on this set of forum posts.

Focus-Follows Mouse

One of the things I was worried about was that I would no longer be able to use the "focus follows mouse" setting in Gnome. This setting has historically allowed the window focus to follow the cursor. I find it slightly faster since I don't have to keep on clicking the mouse or tapping a trackpad. I was ready to be aghast and disappointed at its removal. Sad smily face. And indeed, when I got Gnome 3 running there are no settings to change this.

However, my old setting of focus follows mouse was still active. So, if you want to make sure this setting is active under Gnome 3, than first enable it under Gnome 2. When I have time I will investigate to see if there is a GUI option for this somewhere.