I am running Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3.4. I use Alt-F2 a lot to run some programs, things like gnome-terminal and gnome-dictionary. Those are annoying to type out in full, so currently I have created symbolic links from /usr/local/bin/gt to /usr/bin/gnome-terminal, and /usr/local/bin/gdic to /usr/bin/gnome-dictionary. This is a Bad Way to do it, and is amost certainly the least elegant or correct way to solve this problem. I shouldn't need root privileges to make shortcut names like this!
The reason this is a problem at all is because the Alt-F2 run dialog
does not respect bash settings. Usually I would put "alias
gt=gnome-terminal" in my .bashrc, but that isn't read by whatever
mechanism Alt-F2 uses to execute things. I have a few ideas:
1. Change my $PATH to include something like ~/bin and put all of my
symlinks there instead.
I was told that my .profile does this automatically, which it should,
but does that affect the X session or only shells? Ideally, though,
this would be ~/.bin (I hate clutter), but ONLY be for my user. So,
putting it in /etc/gdm3/PreSession/Default wouldn't be right, since
that would apply to all users of gdm3 whereas I want it to point to
/home/aubrey/.bin only. Perhaps I could take a tip from
/etc/skel/profile and put this in gdm3's PreSession script:
if [ -d "$HOME/.bin" ] ; then
PATH="$HOME/.bin:$PATH"
fi
...but is that even the right place to put this?
2. It seems weird to have to use symlinks to do this, but I don't know
where Alt-F2 gets its information. Is there some place I can put
aliases that will be recognized by the Run dialog? I know it has
some link where "r" restarts the gnome-shell, but knowing where
GNOME development has gone I wouldn't be surprised if that's not a
link or wrapper but hard-coded into the program.
3. What about ~/.xsession and the like? Are those even read by gdm3? I
think that's more for startx and xdm than it is for gdm as far as I
can tell from the man pages.
ANY tips or advice on having "gt" run gnome-terminal and "gdic" run
gnome-dictionary while being sane and reasonable and un-cluttery would
be most appreciated!! It would be better to make it a local
user-solution rather than something I have to become root to change
(like having the links in /usr/local/bin). Grr!
--
Aubrey
"There are two types of people in the world: those who
can extrapolate from incomplete data."
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