Ubuntu – How to add the ‘shutdown’ and ‘restart’ buttons in favorites in Gnome Shell

11.10gnomerestartshutdown

I recently switched from Unity (Ubuntu 11.10) to the Gnome Shell. It took some tweaking to have it all to my liking, but one thing keeps bothering me: I cannot find the 'shutdown' and 'restart' buttons in applications anymore, let alone place them in favorites!

In unity this was a piece of cake. i just opened the Dash home and searched for 'shutdown' or 'restart', and I could easily drag the buttons to the unity favorites on the left of the desktop.

Any thoughts on why Gnome doesn't even list these applications anymore? And how to fix it?

Best Answer

Shutdown or Restart are not listed in applications because they're not. If you want to shutdown/Restart, click on the user menu and hold ALT, you will see the shutdown button appear, from where you will be able to either restart or shutdown. Another option would be to use a GNOME extension that puts the shutdown and restart buttons directly in the user menu without having to press ALT.

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Ubuntu – How to add a folder to the favorites bar in Gnome Shell

To add a Downloads folder to the favorites bar in Gnome Shell:

cp /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/downloads.desktop
nano downloads.desktop

I set the first 4 lines to:

Name=Downloads
Comment=Access and organize your downloads
Exec=nautilus Downloads
Icon=folder-download

Now do one of the following:

Log out and back in. Or,
Run this in a Terminal window:
```
nautilus -q
```
Then open the Application Launcher with Alt+F2 and run:
```
nautilus
```

Search for Downloads in the Dash and then drag the Applications shortcut (as you saw, the Places shortcut won't work) to the favourites bar.

You can browse for other icon names by looking in /usr/share/icons/Humanity/places/24/ for instance.

By default, Nautilus will attempt to open pathnames in your home directory. If you want to access a folder not in your home directory, just put the full path (like /etc/apt )

By the way, the favorites are stored in org.gnome.shell favorite-apps. I prefer to use dconf-editor to browse around and tweak stuff, but you can also use gsettings directly from the command line.

Thanks @fossfreedom for the assist!

Ubuntu – Unity not searching applications

I was having issues with Dash too after a failed upgrade from 11.04 -> 11.10. To finally fix it I had to do:

sudo apt-get install unity-lens-files unity-lens-music unity-lens-applications

Afterwards, dash started behaving correctly again. I guess the install missed those at some point.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – How to add a folder to the favorites bar in Gnome Shell

Ubuntu – Unity not searching applications

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