Fedora 7 and Pesky Directories

After installing Fedora 7, you will notice the following new directories in your home directory: Desktop, Download, Templates, Public, Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. These are the locations of logical directories managed by xdg-user-dirs. Some applications use the logical directories as default locations.

Recovering from this violation of your home directory structure is easy. To get rid of the directories, simply remove them and run xdg-user-dirs-update. The logical directory locations will be set to your home directory. The locations can also be changed by editing ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.

Setting Desktop to your home directory may result in undesirable behavior. Directories and files in your home directory will turn up as icons on your desktop. I recommend setting Desktop to ~/.desktop. After changing Desktop, logout and back in for the new setting to take effect.

Tweaking Gnome

Gnome is my favorite desktop environment. Gnome tries to strike a balance between flexibility and ease of configuration. I think Gnome makes the right trade-offs, but I always find myself tweaking a few parameters which are not available through the preferences menu.

The Gnome tweaker of choice is gconf-editor. Install gconf-editor and run it. (In Fedora 7 gconf-editor is available through the package manager.) You will be presented with various parameters arranged in a hierarchy.

Now we can have some fun! Most changes made will take effect immediately.

Emacs key bindings are a must. I cannot stand the default key bindings. If you too are an Emacs fan, go to /desktop/gnome/interface and change gtk_key_theme to Emacs. I dislike my desktop being cluttered up by icons. Go to /apps/nautilus/desktop. I turn off trash_icon_visible, home_icon_visible, and computer_icon_visible.

Play around, but be careful. There is a distinct possibility of shooting yourself in the foot.