gnome


Fedora 25 with GNOME 3: Making a Wi-Fi hotspot 7

Recently we tried to create a Wi-Fi hotspot on Fedora 25 running GNOME 3.

When we clicked on the Use as Hotspot... button  on the network manager it did not activate the hotspot.
Actually, nothing changed after we clicked on the button.
We tried this several times, some while being disconnected from all networks, others with having the Wi-Fi device disabled etc. None of the tests payed out.

To mitigate the problem, we used nm-connection-editor to create the hotspot configuration and then activate it from the network manager.

After we starter nm-connection-editor, we pressed the Add button to create a new configuration:

From the prompt, we selected the option Wi-Fi and then clicked on the Create... button.

In the newly appeared window, we filled in

  • the Connection name (which is not used by the system, it is only for us to identify which configuration this is),
  • then the SSID (which is the name of the network you will create and connect to),
  • we set Mode to Hotspot

Then we switched to the Wi-Fi Security tab where we filled in the type of protection we want the hotspot to have and the password for it.

We clicked Save and then we closed the Network Connections window as well.

From the network manager, we clicked on Use as Hotspot... button and then the Turn On button on the confirmation popup to finish the activation.

After this, the network manager changed its screen and showed a page which had all the necessary information that are needed to connect to our newly created hotspot.

Note:

In case you cannot connect because the password verification fails even though you are providing the correct password, you can always do the ugly hack of setting up a hotspot with no security to get your job done…


A couple of notes on moving a VirtualBox ‘.vdi’ disk image to a GNOME Boxes virtual machine

Recently we had a CentOS virtual machine on VirtualBox which we wanted to use in GNOME Boxes.
We copied the .vdi disk image and we used it to create a new virtual machine in Boxes.

Note A:

By doing this we realized that the system did not reuse the .vdi image.
It merely created a copy at ~/.local/share/gnome-boxes/images/ that was suitable for GNOME Boxes.
So, be sure to have enough space when doing an import like this.
You will need at least twice the space of the .vdi image to complete the migration.

Note B:

When the guest OS started the window manager crashed and it did not allow us to login.
We assumed that this issue occurred due to the VirtualBox Guest Additions that were installed on the guest OS.
As we could not login with the graphical interface, we could not verify this claim.

Fortunately, CentOS (and many other Linux distributions) allow you to switch to a console login using the key combination alt + ctrl + F3.
(There are more than one valid key combinations to do this. In some systems alt + ctrl + F4 is also valid or alt + ctrl + F1 etc).
We hoped that by trying to login via a console login, the Guest Additions would not start and the system would not crash, which luckily this was the case, and we managed to login through the console!

After we logged in, we had to remove the Guest additions. To do so we had to execute the uninstall script that was located at /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-X.Y.Z/uninstall.sh
(X.Y.Z is the version number of the installed VirtualBox Guest Additions).

When the removal was complete, we executed sudo reboot to restart the system and unload any VirtualBox services that could be executing at the time.
Once the system completed the restart we were able to login properly from the GUI of GNOME and use our virtual machine properly.


Gnome3: How to scale background image 3

Issue in your terminal the following to change the mode of how the background is displayed

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options "scaled"

We used “scaled” which will center the image to and will resize it to fit the screen if needed.
You could use another option if you like. To get the full list of available options issue the following in your terminal.

gsettings range org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options

It will produce a list similar to this

enum

  • ‘none’
  • ‘wallpaper’
  • ‘centered’
  • ‘scaled’
  • ‘stretched’
  • ‘zoom’
  • ‘spanned’

To reset to the default option use the following

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options