Change GDM login background image on OpenSUSE 11.4

First, let me start off by saying I truly dislike Gnome, and the attitude by the Gnome devs that somehow giving people options is a bad thing.  Why is it that I cannot easily change the background image of the Gnome login screen?  Why do I have to use hacks like this one?  Why do the hacks always have to change?  Anyway, for Gnome 2.32.1 which shipped with OpenSUSE 11.4 the way to change the login background image is like this:

As root:

mv your_new_image.jpg /usr/share/pixmaps/backgrounds/gnome/background-default.jpg

Where your_new_image.jpg  is the image you want to be the new background image.

Getting TweetDeck (Adobe Air) to use your default browser in Gnome

This has been a bit of an issue in the past. See this lifehacker article, which was inspired by Roy Tanck's blog post.  Currently, I am using Adobe Air 2.5.1 on OpenSUSE 11.3 - i386 (Yes, I have a crappy Atom powered net book).  Every time I would open a link in TweetDeck, it would open in Firefox rather than Chromium.  To make matters worse, the place in Chromium where I could set it as the default browser, the button is grayed out, and it says "Chromium cannot determine or set the default browser."  Bummer.  But fear not, as the solution is somewhat simple.  If you have the "custom menu bar" (not the default one which ships with OpenSUSE) you can do System->System->Preferred Applications, and change the default browser there.  Alternatively, you could run "gnome-default-applications-properties" in your shell to get the dialogue box opened up.  Once I got it open, on the "Internet" tab, I dropped down the menu under "Web Browser" and selected "Custom".  Then I put in /usr/bin/Chromium.  You would obviously replace that command with the browser you want to use.  And that's it!  I didn't even have to restart TweetDeck.  It just worked from there on out.

How to change Epiphany default search from Google to DuckDuckGo (Gnome)

I have been playing around with two new toys lately:  The Epiphany web browser, and DuckDuckGo search.  I might write more on these another time, but for now I want to show you how you can change the default setting for search (in Epiphany) from Google to DuckDuckGo, by using gconf-editor in Gnome:

Fire up a shell, and enter:

gconf-editor

A dialogue box will pop up.  Click on apps -> epiphany -> general

You will see a list of things on the right.  Scroll down until you see 'url_search'.  Click that, then right click, and select 'edit key'.  In the new dialogue box that comes up, paste the following into the 'Value' field:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Click, 'OK', and then close gconf-editor.  Now when you open up Epiphany and do a search, you should be looking at a result page from DDG, instead of Google.

Happy DDG'ing!

How to change Gnome login background image.

Update: For OpenSUSE 11.4, see this post.

As root, enter the following into your shell:

gconftool-2 --direct \
  --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
  --type string \
  --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename some_picture_filename.png

Of course you will need to change the bit in red, "some_picture_filename.png" to the one that you want as your background image on the login screen.

It seems that the method for doing this has been evolving.  What worked even six months ago does not appear to work now.  As of this writing, I am using Gnome 2.30.0 with OpenSUSE.  I found the information here.

More on changing the Gnome clock

In my previous post about the Gnome clock, I showed you how to change the clock from the default 24 hour time display to a 12 hour format. In this post, I will show how you can change things to display seconds as well. Here is my default display string in gconf-editor:

%a %b %d, %l:%M %p

From reading the date manpage, you know that this will display the Year, month, day, hours and minutes. Something like this: Sat May 01, 5:16. But what about seconds? If you want that, just add the appropriate specifier (%S) to the date string:

%a %b %d, %l:%M:%S %p

Note: You will also need to check the 'show_seconds' box roughly 11 places below the date string setting in gconf-editor. If you forget this part, the seconds portion will display, but the numbers will not actually change until the minutes portion changes because the clock isn't being updated every second.

Changing Gnome panel clock from 24hr time to 12hr time on OpenSUSE 11.2

Fire up your shell, and type in gconf-editor.  Then, on the left, select Apps --> panel --> applets --> applet0 --> prefs (This was slightly different for me between two different machines.  It might be ...applets --> clock_screen0 --> prefs.)  First you want to right click on 'format' on the right side of the gconf-editor, and select 'Edit Key'.  In the dialogue box that comes up, enter 'custom' (without the quotes).  Then click ok.  Next, you will need to enter 'custom_format' (about 6 entries above 'format').  Again, right click and select 'Edit Key'.  Here you will enter <b>%a %b %d, %l:M %p</b> and click ok.  This will get you a format such as Thu Jan 28, 12:20.  If you prefer a different format, look at some of the options available in the date man page.

Read more here.  (Don't forget to look at the comments section at the bottom as well).

How to delete the 'Desktop' folder in Gnome...

...and not have the contents of your home directory displayed on your desktop.

Maybe its just me, but I really don't like the way that a fresh Gnome install sets up a user's home directory with a bunch of empty directories, like 'Video', 'Documents', and the totally evil 'Desktop' folder.  If you are like me, you want to decide what is in the home folder, which does not include all the extra directories they offer.  A reasonable person would expect that the quick and easy solution would be to delete the unwanted directories, but not so fast my friend.  All of the directories can be safely deleted, but one.  If you remove the 'Desktop' folder, you will end up with all the contents of your home directory (not including hidden files) displayed on your desktop.   Of course fixing your 'mistake' of deleting the Desktop folder is not as easy as doing a

mkdir ~/Desktop

No no, the wonderful people at Gnome must have thought that would be too easy.  No, first you must search around on the internet and find a post like this one.  Then you have to fire up your editor and do some editing, as well as replacing the folder 'Desktop.'  Then all will be well. Except for the fact that your home directory still has a folder in it that YOU DON'T WANT!!!1!

Anyway, the solution is pretty simple.