Renaming a GNOME keyring (for seahorse, the passwords and keyrings application)

The GNOME Keyring is a great tool to unify password management across the desktop. Sadly, Firefox is the one application that doesn’t support this natively. (Chrome actually does!)

Seahorse is a useful tool to browse and manage your keyrings. Each keyring is physically stored in: ~/.gnome2/keyrings/$something.keyring

Usually the “$something“, matches the name of the keyring, however the real name comes from within the file. I had an older ubuntu machine running GNOME, and I wanted to import my keyring. Here’s how I did it:

1. Copy ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring (from the ubuntu machine) to ~/.gnome2/keyrings/ubuntu.keyring (on the new machine)
2. Open up seahorse and change the keyring password of this “login” keyring to the empty string. This stores the passwords in a plain text format, which is briefly necessary.
3. Edit the ubuntu.keyring file. There will be an obvious “display-name” section at the top of the file to edit. I changed it to:

   [keyring]
   display-name=ubuntu

4. After restarting seahorse, I now changed the password back to something secure. If this process worked, you should already see the new keyring name in your keychain list.

Obviously this is a bit of a hack, and a proper rename function would be preferable, but until that exists, hopefully this will fill a niche if you’re stuck and you want to pull in an old keyring into your already populated $HOME.

Happy hacking,

James

more rows and columns on firefox new tab page

Firefox has a “new tab” speed dial type page available. I use it as my homepage (hint, use: about:newtab) and find it very useful for launching my often used favourites.

My one gripe is that it only shows you a default grid of 3 x 3. You can easily change that if you look in the secret preferences. Open a new tab and type in: about:config, accept the warning, and then search for: browser.newtabpage.rows and browser.newtabpage.columns. These values are easily editable by double clicking on the row. (Bold indicates non defaults.)

I chose a rectangular (column) size of 4, and now I’ve got just enough favourites to suit my frequent browsing habits.

Happy hacking,

James

PS: Now if firefox would only integrate natively with gnome-keyring like chrome and epiphany already do!

 

changing *that* keyboard shortcut right there (in gnome)

I love my keyboard shortcuts, and I sometimes I want to change them. If you’re ever in a gnome application and wanted to change *that one right there*, you can now live-edit them!

In a terminal, first enable this feature:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface can-change-accels true

Next, hover over the menu item shortcut that you want to change. Enter the shortcut you want. It should update immediately! I like to disable this live-editing, so that I don’t accidentally change any shortcuts. To do so run:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface can-change-accels false

Too bad firefox doesn’t support this. This is one more reason why native GTK apps make your entire experience blend together (consistent) and more magic!

Happy hacking!

James

PS: If you’re curious, I used this to change the gnome-terminal and gedit cycle tab left/right actions to instead respond to the thinkpad back/forward keys which are conveniently located right above the left and right arrow keys respectively.

Source: http://library.gnome.org/users/evolution/3.3/change-keyboard-shortcuts.html.en

gnome3+others glipper/klipper replacement

So a friend of mine uses kde4 for its klipper feature. Turns out he’s right that it’s an awesome feature! I realized I couldn’t let gnome3 take second place to a clipboard app, so after a bit of searching…

$ sudo yum install gnome-shell-extension-gpaste gpaste xsel

Next hit up: https://extensions.gnome.org/local/ to flip on the extension. I had to first type: ALT-F2, “r” (to restart the gnome shell). Don’t worry your apps won’t die. And then I flipped it on.

Clicking on the new shell icon will let you change your pastes, as well as the gpaste preferences that you use. I like to combine this with xsel, so that I can:

$ echo this will be seen in gpaste | xsel

…and presto!

Happy hacking!

fedora 14 to 17 upgrade

I’ve been reluctantly dreading the switch to gnome 3 + shell until it’s been ironed out a little bit more than gnome 3.0 – finally took the plunge. overall it’s working well. here are some (hopefully) useful notes:

• preupgrade 14->17 in one step doesn’t work. it lets you wait an hour for all the downloads to finish, but once you’ve rebooted, the preupgrade installer tells you it can’t jump this far. fail. reboot into f14, yum clean all, rm -rf /var/cache/yum/preupgrade/* ? and preupgrade to f15. boot into that, and then jumping directly to f17 works great.
• remove default f17 ugly fireworks background. the gnome3 default is pretty.
• gnome-tweak-tool is essential. try all the options until you figure out which ones you want. listing my personal preferences here is far too boring for the internet.
• dash click fix extension was essential for me. also: https://extensions.gnome.org/review/download/1323.shell-extension.zip which does the same thing, but for application launcher entries. this allows gnome-shell to behave properly and launch applications where i want them.
• i also added: “Remove user name” and “Remove a11y” extensions.
• “system-monitor”, is close to what i want, but is not good enough yet. disks access/writes don’t show, and it’s got a super ugly popup window. old gnome-system-monitor applet was PERFECT. Please bring it back or fix this one.
• choose non-ugly background for gdm: # sudo -u gdm dbus-launch gnome-control-center

Hope this helped! Happy hacking,

James

gnome-do trick

I use gnome-do. It’s fairly useful. One quick trick: press SHIFT – <ENTER> instead of plain <ENTER> to launch without closing the launcher box. Therefore, if you want three terminals, type: <SUPER> – <SPACE>, t(erminal), (<SHIFT> – <ENTER> X 2), <ENTER>.

getting gedit to work like magic

i use gnu/linux. it’s probably no secret. what is more of a secret, is that i secretly (well actually not so secretly) love using gedit for editing text. i still use vim, echo (gnu bash) and emacs (but only for org-mode).

vim is really, really great. but for day to day full-screen coding, i love working in gedit. i only have one [1] longstanding gripe, and today i believe that it is solved. here is the magic combination which appeases my troubled spirit:

• gedit smart spaces plugin [2]
• gedit autotab plugin [3]
• gedit modelines plugin [4]

install these, restart gedit, enable them, and happy coding!
while it will be much friendlier to use spaces for indentation, i still recommend using tabs, i mean, that’s what the 0x09 was invented for!

[1] actually i wish that everyone would just use eight-space-tabs for all their coding needs, but i realize there are some problems with this, and so i reluctantly am glad that modelines and the above magic exist.

[2] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gedit-plugins/tree/plugins/smartspaces

[3] http://code.google.com/p/gedit-autotab/

[4] http://library.gnome.org/users/gedit/stable/gedit-modelines-plugin.html.en