No Gnome-applets In C7.2

Home » CentOS » No Gnome-applets In C7.2
CentOS 5 Comments

Weird. There seems to be quite a bit of software missing from C7.2, gnome-applets being one of them. Or has it been moved or renamed or otherwise obscured?

tia

5 thoughts on - No Gnome-applets In C7.2

  • Since gnome-panel and ‘flashback’ mode have been removed from GNOME 3, gnome-applets is no longer required or available. Much of the functionality of traditional applets is available by means of extensions to gnome-shell. See the various gnome-shell-extension-* packages.

  • Thanks, Liam. I checked those out, downloaded a handful of them, and tried some out. But couldn’t get any of the functionality out of them that I was looking for. E.g., previously (C5.9) there were nice, little applets to:

    – show the current weather; click on for forecasts and weather maps;

    – selecting to paste buffer from several sets of odd characters and characters and characters from foreign languages;

    – icons, clicking on which could fire virtually any executable on the system;

    – “drawers”, clicking on which popped an entire column of any of the above;

    – and probably some other things I’m not remembering.

    I’m still not finding any of that in C7.2… it’s like this “upgrade” is several steps backwards from the functionality in earlier CentOS
    version. Or am I missing something?

  • No, many before you have similarly bemoaned the changes made during the transition from GNOME 2 to 3. I suggest you take a look around the extensions website[1] for extensions which restore the missing functionality. Use gnome-tweak-tool to install and remove extensions. They can be a bit hit-and-miss when it comes to compatibility with the particular version of gnome-shell you are running.

    1: https://extensions.gnome.org/

  • Have you looked at Mate, available from epel? It will bring back
    (much of) the feel of gnome-2. You’ll be able to select between the two at login.

  • You can also look at Mate, which is basically Gnome 2 (what you have on CentOS 6 and earlier) but updated to work on CentOS 7.

    It’s easy to install on CentOS 7, too:

    yum install epel-release yum groupinstall “MATE Desktop”

    Then log out and select MATE by clicking on the little gear when you log back in from gdm (the “enter your password” screen).

    You will then see something that looks, works and acts exactly like Gnome 2, since it really is Gnome 2 slightly updated and under a different name.

    You can also get rid of gdm if you want by entering these commands at a root terminal prompt:

    systemctl disable gdm systemctl enable lightdm systemctl isolate graphical.target

    Then you will have lightdm for a login screen instead, which is a lot more configurable than the newer gdm, and also appears to load faster on my little laptop than gdm did.

    I use Mate exclusively on all of my CentOS 7 computers and I’m very happy with it. The first thing that I do when I set up a new CentOS 7 desktop system is shoot Gnome 3 and install Mate instead.