Gnome 3 as a work desktop

I recently acquired a new notebook from my new employer and I choose of course to install Mageia 2 with a Gnome 3 desktop.

Beside installing my usual sort of utility applications, such as Nomachine's NX Client or grdesktop (which has rdesktop as a dependencies), I'm showing here some productivity configurations that I like.

• VPN

If you need to installa a 3rd party VPN solution, such as Cisco's  Any Connect, you're going to have troubles if you keep the default network configuration. In Mageia (and back in the days, in Mandriva), I had to modify my /etc/nsswitch.conf in this way, the newer file being the right one.

< hosts:       mdns4_minimal files nis dns myhostname mdns4
---
> hosts:       files nis dns myhostname mdns4

The reason is most enterprise networks have zeroconf o mdns done wrong and the default config will fail badly causing the Cisco client to timeout.

• SSH Key manager

Installa gnome-keyring and gnome-keyring-sharp to manage your SSH keys, this mean that gnome3 will be aware of your ssh agent and prompt you in a graphical way

• Gnome Shell Extensions

I currently have these extension installed:

CpuMemInfo [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/331/cpumeminfo/]

TaskBar [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/368/taskbar-with-desktop-button-to-minimizeunminimize-/]
User Themes  [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/19/user-themes/]

On TaskBar I re-enable the application menu (some Gnome3 applications like Epiphany use this), from CPUMemInfo I usually disable Disk and Net.

As for the theme I usually install DarkShine but the default one is nice enough, I feel the Faenza icon theme is a nice addition.