To try GNOME Shell Extensions, you’ll need to be running GNOME 3.2. Ubuntu 11.10 only has GNOME 3.0, but the GNOME3 Team PPA provides packages to update it. I added this PPA on my netbook to update my existing GNOME Shell installation in Ubuntu 11.10.

Extensions are installed using a plugin, included with GNOME, that currently only works with Firefox. When it’s working, an extension’s page has a large switch to enable and disable the extension. Flip the switch, select Install in the confirmation dialog, and the extension almost immediately activates. Disabling an extension is just as easy. Here’s the Applications Menu extension in action:

I’d like to see an extension that maximizes screen space on my netbook by hiding the title bar of maximized windows like Unity does.

Could GNOME Shell extensions become a killer feature for GNOME 3?

• qgit, as the name suggests, uses the QT GUI toolkit. qgit is a gitk-style interface for viewing revisions. Before you can see uncommitted changes, you’ll have to open Edit->Settings->Working dir->Diff against working dir. There is committing support, but with a very basic interface. In the Actions menu, you can define custom actions to run other git commands and see their output.



• SmartGIT is a very advanced Git interface that is closed source but free for non-commercial use. I wanted to try this out, but it refuses to run without the Sun/Oracle Java runtime. I didn’t feel like disturbing my OpenJDK installation, and in Ubuntu 11.10 Sun/Oracle Java is no longer supported at all. From the screenshots though, it looks very comprehensive.
• Geany is a simple IDE similar to Gedit. The geany-plugins package in Ubuntu provides GeanyVC, a basic version control plugin for Geany supporting six different VCSs. Once the plugin is enabled, the Tools->VC menu provides simple actions for the current file, directory, and base directory of the repository. The interface is very minimal; viewing any information like the log will open a new document containing raw output from git.



• RabbitVCS provides a set of tools for working with both Git and Subversion. Nautilus file browser and Gedit integration are provided, as well as dialogs for Git actions. I haven’t tested RabbitVCS yet, and the version in the Ubuntu repositories doesn’t support Git. However, instructions and a PPA are available for installing the latest version.

The new upload plugins seem to be very well implemented. To upload to Dropbox for the first time, all I needed to be was click a button in my browser to authorize Shutter’s access to my Dropbox account.

I’ve had Shutter installed for a while, but I haven’t been using it much. However, after taking another look I seem to have solved all my problems with it:

• It’s not obvious how to resize an image, but it can be done with Shutter. Right click on an image, select Run a Plugin, select Resize, and click Run.
• By default Shutter likes to run in the background rather than quitting. Stop this by opening Edit->Preferences->Behavior and uncheck Minimize to tray when closing main window.
• By default Shutter will save every image you capture. To stop it from littering your home directory with files you don’t want, open Edit->Preferences->Main and select Do not save file automatically.

Ubuntu 11.10 and 11.04 both have an older version of Shutter in their repositories. To get version 0.88 with the new upload plugins, you’ll need to follow the directions to add the official Shutter PPA.

• git gui is one of the two official graphical tools available for git. It lets you create commits by staging changes and writing a commit message. There are many more features for remote repositories and branches. The major downside is that the UI and fonts look awful. (Ubuntu package git-gui)
• gitk, the other official tool, allows viewing a repository through the commit log. Selecting a commit shows its details, including diffs for all or a selected file. gitk has the same awful UI as git gui. (Ubuntu package gitk)
• Giggle has a browse view for viewing the repository tree and selecting files to see what commits affected each file and how. The history view is similar to gitk, but with a nice graph view column showing branching and merging. (Ubuntu package giggle)
• Git Cola is a tool similar to git gui for committing and pushing changes. There are buttons for common actions like staging files, pulling, and pushing, as well as an area to write new commit messages. (Ubuntu package git-cola)
• gitg (linked website appear to be down) can both view repositories and make new commits. Its history tab is similar to both gitk and Giggle, but also has graphs showing the amount of changes made to files and a tree view similar to Giggle’s. The commit tab is similar to git gui, but doesn’t have as many advanced features for branches or remote repositories. (Ubuntu package gitg)

gitg is the most promising tool for my purposes. It combines both gitk and git gui-style interfaces in one program. I wish it it had an easy way to push to a remote repository – and there’s only a fetch button that’s tucked away in the File->Repository Properties dialog. [Update It's possible to push after all: right clicking on a branch label in the commit log will show more actions. The branch labels can also be drag-and-dropped on each other.]

VLC media player supports network streaming from a YouTube. Select Media->Open Network Stream, paste a YouTube URL, and click Play. This seems to work for any YouTube video, and plays back noticeably smoother than Flash on my netbook.

VLC isn’t a perfect solution. First, there’s the inconvenience of copying and pasting a URL for each video. Second, there doesn’t seem to be a way to change the resolution (but it defaults to 480p, which happens to be what I want). Third, VLC doesn’t seem to handle buffering as well as Flash does. While YouTube can play continuously, VLC sometimes has to stop and buffer more video. Selecting Show more options and increasing the cache size to something like 20000 ms seems to help a bit.

I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.10′s VLC for this. While Ubuntu 11.04′s VLC seems to support YouTube, I’ve only been getting VLC can’t recognize the input’s format errors with this version.

It would be nice if the spell checker would skip LaTeX commands. It looks like this issue is being worked on, but is waiting for a patch in the underlying spell-check library. I’ve also noticed that if you’re selecting text while the preview refreshes, the selection gets stuck (bug report).

Ubuntu packages for Gummi are available from the Gummi PPA.

gedit-autotab is a plugin for gedit that solves this problem by automatically changing the indentation settings to match the style detected in each file. The plugin works with gedit 2 (Ubuntu 11.04), and there’s a forked version available for gedit 3 (Ubuntu 11.10).

For gedit 2 / Ubuntu 11.04: Download this archive file and open it. Put the autotab.py and autotab.gedit-plugin files in ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins (create the plugins folder if it doesn’t exist).

For gedit 3 / Ubuntu 11.10: Download the archive file from this page and open it. Put the autotab.py and autotab.plugin files in ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins (create the gedit/plugins folder if it doesn’t exist).

Finally, open Edit->Preferences->Plugins, and select Auto Tab to activate the plugin. You will get a new item on the status bar showing the current indentation style, which will change depending on the files you open.

ddclient is a dynamic DNS update client which runs in the background periodically checking your external IP address and sending an update to your dynamic DNS provider if it changes. I was ready to edit configuration files and set up a cron job, but none of that was needed because ddclient has a graphical install interface that makes the setup very easy.

I’m using the free version of DynDNS but ddclient also has build-in support for easyDNS, DSLReports, and ZoneEdit.

Search for and install the package ddclient from the Ubuntu Software Center. During installation, you will be prompted for your dynamic DNS provider, credentials for that provider, and the hostname to update. Once ddclient is installed, it should be set up and working.

You can check that ddclient successfully updated your IP by opening Log Viewer, selecting syslog, and looking for a line like ddclient[549]: SUCCESS.

If you want to rerun the install configuration you can do so by running this command:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure ddclient

To change the update period you need to edit /etc/default/ddclient, and change the daemon_interval line for the number of seconds you want between updates:
gksu gedit /etc/default/ddclient

Restart ddclient to make the change take effect:
sudo service ddclient restart

I changed the update period from 300 seconds (5 minutes) to 3600 seconds (1 hour) since my IP address rarely changes. However, there shouldn’t be any problem with frequent updates because ddclient will not make an unnecessary update request when your IP address has not changed.

The main ddclient configuration file is located at /etc/ddclient.conf:
gksu gedit /etc/ddclient.conf

See the ddclient site for more configuration options. The Ubuntu wiki has an extensive page on dynamic DNS.

It turns out that GNOME 3 will overwrite some touchpad options with it’s own hardcoded defaults. Whenever GNOME re-detects your touchpad, even after a suspend, it will wipe out your options with its own that cannot be changed.

Fortunately GNOME provides a hook so that after your changes are erased, you can set them again. Using a dconf value, you choose to run your own script.

Here’s how to make your custom touchpad configuration persistent through reboots and even suspends. Start by creating a file to hold your script. Run this command to create a touchpad_settings.sh file in your home directory and open it:
gedit ~/touchpad_settings.sh

Add your synclient commands to this file and save it. Mine looks like this:
synclient SingleTapTimeout=360 FastTaps=1
synclient TapButton2=2 TapButton3=3

Make the file executable:
chmod +x ~/touchpad_settings.sh

Finally, set the dconf setting so GNOME knows where to find your script. Run the following command, but replace tom with your own username:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.input-devices hotplug-command "/home/tom/touchpad_settings.sh"

You don’t need to set your touchpad options any other way now. GNOME should run your script whenever you log in or wake the system from suspend.

Run this command to make two-finger tap the middle click, and three-finger tap the right click:
synclient TapButton2=2 && synclient TapButton3=3

Changes made by synclient are not persistent across reboots. You can add the command to Startup Applications to run it automatically when you log in.

[Update: Waking the system from suspend overwrites these options. See my post on how to make touchpad configuration persistent for a fix. ]

Before trying to fix this, I wasn’t even aware of the three-finger tap gesture. It turns out that on my Eee PC 901 this gesture is broken in Ubuntu. Fortunately there are physical right/left mouse buttons, so I can still swap the two and three finger touchpad gestures without losing right click entirely.