Shell – use Gnome 3 Shell “Activities” hot corner in VMWare Player VM

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I have Fedora 19 running Gnome 3 Shell installed on my laptop, and in a virtual machine running inside VMWare Player on my desktop. The VM has the proprietary VMWare tools and is up to date as of today.

On the laptop I am used to opening the menu by "poking" the corner with the mouse. However I am unable to be able to get it to work in the VM.

I have tried putting the VM to fullscreen and also installing an extension to Gnome that allowed me to configure things like the hot corner threshold. However they did not seem to have any kind of effect.

Is there something in the fact that I run it inside a VM that keeps me from being able to use the hot corner?

Best Answer

Partial answer:

I have VirtualBox (not VMWare), but I have the same issue. And moreover, the exact same things happens in remote sessions through VNC.

Probably the problem is that you can't do "pressure" on the hot corner with mouse integration active --- when you try simply you exit from the client windows and go to the host system.

In Virtualbox at least you can disable the mouse integration for the VM; it's a bit of a nuisance because you then have to press the "release" key to leave the windows, but the hot corner will work again.

I hope this can helps with VMware, too. Feel free to edit the answer if it is the case.

Related Solutions

Remove/Disable hot corner

Install the extension No Topleft Hot Corner.

You can do this from your browser, visiting https://extensions.gnome.org/ . You'll need to allow the appropriate plugin to run (on Firefox, it's the plugin Gnome Shell Integration).

Is it possible to configure a ‘scaled’ desktop in xorg.conf similar to using xrandr’s scale-from option

I just finished setting up a ~150% zoom under Cinnamon, hope this will help you too because GNOME is similar to Cinnamon.

I started with xrandr commands from this HiDPI ArchWiki article:

xrandr --output HDMI1 --scale 1.2x1.2 # try 1.3 also
xrandr --output HDMI1 --panning 2304x1296 # this is for 1920x1080 at 1.2

Then i wanted to set it permanent, tried xorg.conf but it does not want to catch Monitor sections of config whatever i try. I asked on ArchLinux forums and got an advice to accept it and throw away xorg.conf. Anyway, i think my config is correct and you can try and use it with changing Monitor Identifier. Most interesting part is transformation matrix. Xorg has no option for scaling, but i figured out that xrandr --scale is a shorthand for --xrandr --transform which corresponds to TransformationMatrix.

Here is my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "TEST" # try changing this!
    Option "Panning" "2304x1296"
    Option "TransformationMatrix" "1.2 0 0 0 1.2 0 0 0 1"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Intel Graphics" # change these lines according to your graphics card
    Driver  "intel"
    Option  "AccelMethod"   "sna"
    Option  "TearFree"  "true"
    Option  "Monitor-HDMI1" "TEST" # try changing this!
EndSection

This does not work for me, so i continued digging. My system has lightdm which starts first, and it needs xrandr commands to look HiDPIish. Then it starts cinnamon-session which overrides display settings and i need to run xrandr again. Lightdm is configured by etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and by default it runs something specified in session-wrapper option. You need to create a script with desired xrandr tweaks and place it somewhere to be launched by session-wrapper. By the way, options session-setup-script and display-setup-script didn't work for me.

Then, in Cinnamon (or GNOME in your case) the best thing i could do is to use autostart feature and add xrandr script with zero timeout.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Remove/Disable hot corner

Is it possible to configure a ‘scaled’ desktop in xorg.conf similar to using xrandr’s scale-from option

Related Question