openSUSE 12.1 GNOME Clean-Up

Even though there technically is no connection between the releases in the 11.x series, I'm still very happy to see 12.x out now. (11.0-11.4 all had been under Novell, used KDE4 by default and used GNOME 2)

Something I've learned about openSUSE 12.1:

1. To imitate GNOME 3 as much as possible
Unlike previous changes to the GNOME default look, it is impossible to bring GNOME 100% back to the way to was before. However, you can make it look much more similar.

Steps:
1. Go to System Settings > System > Forced Fall Mode and drag the thing where it says OFF to ON.
2. Log out and log back in
3. Go to YaST or zypper, and install gnome-tweak tool.
4. Open the GNOME tweak tool and go to Desktop and drag the thing for Have Nautilus manage Desktop from Off to On.
5. Go to Theme and select the Sonar theme for as much as you can
6. Go the the top panel, hold down Alt and right click and hit Delete panel.
7. Go to the bottom panel and add the applets to the areas where they used to be. You will have to use the really old GNOME traditional menu (just the icon with a menu like the KDE Classic menu) to come the closest you can to the GNOME 2 menu.

You should now have a 1 panel GNOME with the window title bar theme and icon theme similar to that of openSUSE 12.1 with a one-button menu and a icon filled desktop like what you had from 10.2 to 11.4.

Have a lot of fun!