With the new release of Fedora now out I upgraded my laptop from version 14 to 15. One of the new features of Fedora 15 is Gnome 3 and Gnome-Shell. According to the FAQ my (nearly) 5 year old laptop should work with the new interface. The laptop, Dell Latitude D620, came with an embedded Intel 945GM graphics card which was capable of running Compiz under Fedora 14. However when firing up Fedora 15 for the first time I’m presented with a dialogue box telling me my system is not capable of running the shell in it’s full glory giving me the “Fallback” experience :(.

In order to rectify this you can run through the following, starting with executing this command:

gconftool-2  -s --type bool /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true

This (re)activates the compositing in Gnome allowing for wobbly windows and transparency. The change takes immediate effect and after a brief screen flicker you can press Alt-F2 and enter the following command:

gnome-shell --replace

Giving the you the full gnome-shell experience:

Whilst the change made by the first command is permanent, at least until it gets reverted by another program, the second command needs to be executed each time you log in (until I can work out a way to make the change permanent).

To have gnome-shell start up automatically with each new session add the following to ~/.config/autostart/gnome-shell.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=GNOME Shell
Type=Application
Exec=gnome-shell --replace
Terminal=false
Icon=gnome-shell
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;
Comment=Gnome-shell
Categories=Utility;
Hidden=false