My favorite gnome-shell extensions

When I first started using gnome shell I was pretty disappointed. It lacked customization and several design decisions were not my cup of tea. Idea of extensions was pretty straightforward. Extensions are actually pretty common nowadays (browsers, compilers, editors, etc.). Since I installed Fedora 18 (with gnome shell 3.6) I had to find replacements for several extensions. Sadly.

Over time I have discovered several that I cannot live without. Without these:

System Monitor

Display graphs related to usage of system resources like cpu, memory, swap, network, etc. Handy. You know what is your computer up to without touching htop, ps or system monitor application.

Task Bar

Convert left part of top bar to little dock, or better said, to list currently launch applications.

CPU Temperature Indicator

Closely related to System Monitor. This one displays temperature of your CPU.

Message Notifier

This is a must have. Since gnome shell does not display notifications permanently (which is a huge design flaw IMO) you have no way out to find out number of new messages if you access computer after a break.

Advanced Volume Mixer

Control volume level of each application separately. Really nice.

Installing nvidia's proprietary drivers on Fedora 18 (with bumblebee)

I've recently updated my Fedora to release 18. (I'm not gonna say how awesome it is -- it is, but I rather stick to the guide)

The first thing after install I wanted to make my Optimus nvidia card useful -- bumblebee & nvidia's proprietary drivers. Internet is full guides for this task, but unfortunately I couldn't find "the one".

At first I wanted to download latest driver from nvidia's site -- huge mistake. I found nice install script on this site. Everything went well except for the fact that after reboot GUI didn't show up. So I tried to uninstall the driver: it segfaulted. Bummer! Thing to learn from this is if installer tries to create file /etc/X11/xorg.conf you have to delete it (rename is fine also). Fedora does not use xorg.conf to set up X, this just mess up everything. You'll most likely get message in /var/log/Xorg.<\d>.log:

[ 26.891] (EE) No devices detected.
[ 26.891] Fatal server error:
[ 26.891] no screens found

My next option was package kmod-nvidia from RPMFusion. This didn't go well also. X launched, but optirun didn't work (it expected nouveau). Thing to note here is that you should use package for your version of kernel. Otherwise X will complain about fact that it can't find nvidia kernel module.

So what did I do to make it work?

First thing to do is blacklist nouveau and create new initramfs (save old one if something goes wrong):

echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
cd /boot
mv initramfs-$(uname -r).img initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r) --omit-drivers nouveau

Use this awesome repository, which contains bumblebee related packages:

yum install -y http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/bumblebee-nonfree/fedora18/noarch/bumblebee-nonfree-release-1.0-1.noarch.rpm --nogpgcheck
yum install -y VirtualGL bbswitch bumblebee --nogpgcheck

Now is time to install package which contains nvidia's proprietary driver:

yum install -y --nogpgcheck bumblebee-nvidia

Reboot and everything should be fine.

Troubleshooting

If you are stuck in command line after reboot you may try to launch X (and see result & logs):

service gdm start

X-server complains about "no screen found"? Check this command:

xrandr -q

Reference

I didn't make this up just like that. I used these links:

[1] -- awesome tutorial that explains how to install bumblebee on Fedora and how to use it
[2] -- official Fedora guide
[2] -- install bumblebee from sources and configure it
[2] -- information about bumblebee-nvidia package