The Fedora Gnome Desktop

The Fedora Gnome 3 Graphical User Interface (GUI)

The current version of Fedora (15), uses Gnome 3 as it's default desktop. This is not dissimilar to the Ubuntu Unity desktop in look and operation.

In this section, we'll take a tour of the Gnome 3 desktop as supplied out of the box by Fedora. When you first bootFedora 15, the desktop will look something like the screenshot below:

The default desktop consists of three main areas:

1. The Activities area (-the link in the top left corner of the screen)

2. The Menu bar (-the drop-down menus in the centre and right of the top line of the screen)

3. The desktop (-the blue bit below these)

Note: you can view video tours of the Fedora Desktop in our Video Section

The Menu Bar

The Fedora menu bar consists of five different drop downs:

1. Calendar and Appointments: clicking on this gives you access to the calendar, allows you to browse or change date and time settings and to view or change your appointments

   

2. Accessibility: clicking this allows you to to configure the look and feel, how fonts are displayed and how you interact with Fedora

   

3. Sound clicking this allows you to check or configure the volume and sound output

   

4. Network clicking this allows you to check or configure your network/internet access

   

5. User clicking this allows you to set your chat status, change your account setup, run various system functions or log off / lock your screen / suspend the computer temporarily, etc:

   

   Note: there is normally no shutdown/restart link displayed unless you hold down the "ALT" key: the "Suspend" option will then change to "Power Off", allowing you to shutdown or restart the PC without having to logout of Fedora first. Note that from Fedora 18 onwards, these values are reversed - "Power Off" is shown by default and this changes to "Suspend" when you hold down the "ALT" key:

   

   From here you can select whether you wish to reboot or power off:

   

The Activities Area

There are two main ways of invoking the Activities Area:

• Clicking on the "Activities" link in the top left of the desktop
• Clicking on the "Option" key (-aka the Windows key) on your keyboard

Once invoked, there are two main functions to choose from:

1. Favourites List: this is a quick launch bar listing icons of your favourite applications down the side. Left-click on any of these to start that application - or to switch to it's window, if it is already running:

   

2. Show Windows: this is the default view and shows all the currently open windows and workspaces, allowing you to switch between them by clicking on the desired window (-or to close windows by clicking on the "x" icon in the top right corner of that window):

   

3. Show Applications: this shows all the available applications installed on the computer and allows you to run them by double-clicking on their icon

   

The Desktop

In Fedora, the desktop is normally blank: it is merely an area within which your open windows and dialogues display. Unlike the Gnome 2.x desktop, you cannot add shortcuts - and mounted removable filesystems, such as CDs or USB memory sticks, do not create icons here (-they simply show up in the File Manager). About the only thing you can alter on the Desktop is the background (aka wallpaper in Ubuntu).

Alerts and Messages

In Fedora, any system-generated alerts, messages or job completions are displayed in pop-up dialogues at the bottom of the screen:

For a general alert, click inside the dialogue to acknowledge it - and the pop-up will close.

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