Do you hate the new desktop on Gnome 3 and want the old Gnome 2 desktop back. Here are some old Gnome 2 components ported to work on Gnome 3 systems.

Details

I was a bit frustrated when my new computer required me to install Fedora 15 (a Intel Sandy Bridge machine and the network and graphics don't have any support in older Fedora releases) and discovered that Fedora 15 comes with the totally useless Gnome 3 desktop. I endured the new desktop for a few days before utterly starting to hate it.

This project is an attempt to port parts of the Gnome 2 from Fedora 14 to newer Fedora releases so that I can have a usable desktop on my new machine. My goal is to have something that is as easy as possible to install and which needs minimal maintenance in the future. Since I'm quite happy with the Gnome 2 functionality, I'm not planning on adding any features, so hopefully there won't be to much work involved. Unless Gnome 3 starts breaking more stuff in the future of course.

Note, there is a similar and more ambitious project called BlueBubble.

Installation

Metacity, the old window manager from Fedora 14, is still available on Fedora 15 and 16. It is used in the fallback mode that Gnome 3 switches to if the graphics card does not support the graphics compositing functions that the new desktop depends on.

To force Gnome 3 into fallback mode, go to "System Settings" (from the menu in the upper right hand corner), choose the "System Info" category and in the table on the left, select "Graphics". Switch on "Forced Fallback Mode". Log out and then log in again.

You will no longer be running the new flashy desktop, instead you are running Metacity so most things will work as before, except that the panel is locked to the top of the screen and can no longer be customized, all that code has been ripped out of the version of gnome-panel that comes with Gnome 3.

So, to get the old panel back, start by uninstalling the Gnome 3 panel:

rpm -e gnome-panel

Install some dependencies that are needed:

yum install gnome-desktop

Download the Gnome 2 panel from the Downloads page, the files you need are the rpms of gnome2-panel-libs, gnome2-panel and libgweather2 for your architecture. Currenly only the x86_64 binary rpms are up on the Download page, if you are on an i686 platform you will have to download the srpms and rebuild the binary rpms yourself.

Install the rpms with:

rpm -i libgweather2-2.30.3-1.fc15.x86_64.rpm \ gnome2-panel-libs-2.32.0.2-2.fc15.x86_64.rpm \ gnome2-panel-2.32.0.2-2.fc15.x86_64.rpm

Log out and then log in again. The black Gnome 3 panel at the top should now be replaced by the trusty old Gnome 2 panel which you can customize to your hearts content.

This still isn't perfect, the font is locked to be the new Gnome 3 Cantarell font, there are no control panels to change the font or theming, and a lot of other stuff is probably also missing. But for me this small change changed Gnome 3 from being utterly useless to just being ugly, and I can live without such goodies as the CPU meter applet.

A note on themes, if you copy your old Gnome 2 configuration files (make a backup of ~/.gnome*, ~/.gconf* and ~/.config and restore it after installing Fedora 15) it seems that most of the theme settings you have made on Gnome 2 will carry over properly to Gnome 3, including stuff such as sloppy focus.

Fedora 16

I've updated the RPMS for Fedora 16. I had to add a new RPM for gnome-menus since gnome-menus in Fedora 16 seem to be incompatible with the gnome 2 panel. It's now possible to modify the themes and other thing such as sloppy focus using gnome-tweak-tool which can be installed using yum.

Future

So, it seems that inside Gnome 3 there is actually a perfectly usable Gnome 2 desktop hidden, it's just that the Gnome developers have tried very hard to hide it.

I'm also afraid that this hack will break sooner rather than later, for example, fallback mode is probably living on borrowed time and will disappear as soon as the Gnome developers realise that it's actually useful for people.

TODO

Port more Gnome 2 pieces to Gnome 3, such as the Control Center. It may actually be possible to use some of the rpms from BlueBubble.