Fedora 15 Gnome 3 power user tips

I know you can find all of these out there on the Internet, but I don't want to have to search for all of them again so my collection of power user tips are collected here. Note that these are not 'extensions' but just basic tooling or configuration adjustments that are pretty well hidden from you by default:

# I want to see the date on my desktop clock.
#
$ gsettings set org.gnome.shell.clock show-date true


# If you want to modify your menu and create launchers
# just install Alacare. For example, you can use this
# to create Power Off and Reboot buttons in your menu.
#
$ sudo yum install alacarte


# I want the right-hand top of app buttons back. Install
# the 'gnome-tweak-tool' and you'll find the app under 
# 'Accessories > Tweak Advanced Settings.'
#
$ sudo yum install gnome-tweak-tool


# Click on Shell, then select "Arrangement of buttons on 
# title bar" - All. Log out and on login your buttons are
# back.
#

# Use the gnome-tweak-tool to get your Desktop icons back.
# Click on 'File Manager' and turn on "have file manager 
# handle the desktop". Now the usual icons are back, plus 
# anything you want to add to Desktop.
#

# Alternative to the Power off button.
#
$ sudo yum install gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu


# An alternative window manager Avant. Once installed try 
# opening a terminal and launch it: "avant-window-navigator"
# Get it into the start-up: Click on the avant-window-navigator
# icon and play with the many options. Down at the bottom, 
# under General, there's "start Awn automatically". Reboot
# and test.
#
$ yum install avant-window-navigator awn-extras-applets


# Add theme functionality to your Gnome Shell.
#
$ sudo yum install gnome-shell-extensions-user-theme

EMEA Partner Summit 2011 - impressions of Dublin

Got the call at the last minute to help a colleague who went down sick by giving two sessions, one on jBPM5 and the other on JBoss tooling for SOA.

Below you will find my short impression of a few days there (I did not join most of the evening events due to having what turned out to be a sinus infection), I really enjoyed seeing lots of new faces and some old friends of mine from all our partners!

EMEA Partner Summit 2011 Dublin

EMEA Partner Summit 2011 - Designing SOA with JBoss tools

Today in Dublin I gave the session on Jboss SOA designing based on our products and tools which was to focus on bringing as much information over to the partner ecosystem (developers and architects mostly) as was possible in 40 minutes. I spent a large amount of time on the demoing our SOA-P ESB + service orchestration with jBPM, then demoed the BPEL tooling that is provided as a tech preview. Finally I showed off the latest jBPM5 released tooling that will be coming out real in Red Hat products. We ended up with around 30 people in the room.

Designing SOA with JBoss tools

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell

EMEA Partner Summit 2011 - jBPM5: Bringing More Power to BPM

Today in Dublin I gave the session on jBPM which was to focus on bringing as much information over to the partner ecosystem (developers and architects mostly) as was possible in 40 minutes. I had a real hard time brining the content down to allow time for demo, so choose not to demo in the session but to invite anyone interested to meet me afterwards. I was able to sneak a bit of the jBPM Migration story at the end of the session which raised some interest.

We ended up with around 40 people in the room, very interested and I ended up talking for an hour after the session with two different interested parties (questions and more). All in all a success I think.

EMEA Partner Summit: jBPM 5 - Bringing More Power to BPM

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell.

Tomorrow I have a second session on SOA designing with JBoss tooling, which will include some more demo work with jBPM, both v3 and v5. So if you are in Dublin, be sure to drop!

Fedora 15 screen casting with Gnome 3

GNOME 3 has embedded software that allows you to record your desktop. This makes it very easy to create a screencast in GNOME 3.

Start/stop recording your GNOME 3 Desktop by pressing the Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R key combination.

The first time when you press this key combination, GNOME 3 will start recording your Desktop. A red circle is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen when the recording is in progress. Pressing the same key combination a second time will stop the recording.

After the recording is finished, a file named 'shell-%d%u-%c.webm' is saved in the home directory. In the filename, %d is the date, %u is a string that makes the filename unique, and %c is a counter that is incremented each time a recording is made within a single gnome-shell session. The recording is saved in the WebM format.

Now we can do our Red Hat JBoss screencasts without much trouble, but next step is to get audio track included. ;-)

Upgrade Fedora 14 to Fedora 15 howto

This upgrade when smoother than any so far, did not lose any Network settings for example! This is all you need to do:

# As root you would like to have a clean start to the
# upgrade, so get an update out of the way.
#
$ yum update rpm

$ yum -y update

$ yum clean all

# Should a new kernel install/update require it,
# reboot before continuing with the rest.
#
# Then install the preupgrade package.
#
$ yum install preupgrade

# For console upgrade, use:
#
$ preupgrade-cli "Fedora 15 (Lovelock)"

# If you like gui's to upgrade, use this.
#
$ preupgrade

That was it, just watch the action, drink some coffee/beer and reboot when asked to. Presto change-o you now have a Fedora 15 installation!

JBoss jBPM - add domain specific BPMN2 nodes to your Orxy web designer (video)

This is a cross post from tsurdilovic but the video is too good not to spread as much as possible. Note this is analog to the way we do this in our jBPM Migration Tool project for the jBPM/Drools designer.

Using jBPM domain-specific service nodes in Oryx designer from tsurdilo on Vimeo.

JBoss World 2011 impression from Boston

This year I was off to JBoss World and JUDCon to present sessions on jBPM. It was an amazing experience and I was lucky enough to share it with a friend and customer from SNS Bank, Michel de Blok. As they were JBoss Innovation Award winners there was a VIP event that got us into Fenway Park for a Red Sox game. We also saw lots of Boston, took part in sessions from JUDCon, enjoyed presenting our session and talked to some Japanese customers on the side.

JBoss World 2011