Archive for the ‘Fedora’ Category

Using GNOME 3 (GNOME shell) with a VNC client

Monday, April 13th, 2015

Sometimes I have a need to access a running GNOME 3 desktop from another client running GNOME 3, using VNC. This can be tricky since GNOME 3 is heavily dependent on the use of the “Super” (Windows) key and even when you are using the remote machine’s desktop, pressing the Super key results in the local GNOME overview being brought up. Similarly for Alt-Tab, you end up switching local applications rather than applications on the remote desktop.

After a bit of searching I found a question about remapping the Super key on ask.fedoraproject.org. The question is what to remap it to (I didn’t want to disable it altogether).

Sharing the best solution I found, I found the following sufficient to get a usable remote desktop:

  • Remap the “Super” key on the remote desktop to the “Menu” key (if the local client has that key) – gsettings set org.gnome.mutter overlay-key “Menu”
  • Using the GNOME 3 keyboard settings, in Shortcuts -> Mapping -> Navigation, change “Switch Windows” from Alt+Tab to Ctrl+Tab.

This doesn’t solve everything, perhaps due to the way keyboard combinations are handled with VNC e.g. the menu bar can’t be brought up by <Menu>+M, but it’s good enough.

In this case the local machine was running Fedora 20 and the remote machine RHEL7.

PHP 5.2.x on Fedora 13

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Not all of us are using PHP apps that are ready for PHP 5.3, so we need to rebuild PHP 5.2.x for some newer OS’s. Unfortunately, trying to rebuild the PHP 5.2.13 SRPM for Fedora 11 (the last Fedora to use PHP 5.2.x), on Fedora 13 doesn’t work as-is. The “configure” file ends up broken, and running it produces an endless stream of errors, starting with:

cat: confdefs.h: No such file or directory
./configure: line 387: ac_fn_c_try_run: command not found
...

It took me a while of looking around, but the solution was found on the Ubuntu bug tracker, specifically in the comment #17 by Arkadiusz Miƛkiewicz, which pointed to a PLD patch for the same issue. Patching the Fedora 11 SRPM with that patch (needs some fuzz) makes it build properly.