OK so this one got me going for a while. Yes, did not read the Developers and Administrator guides. Maybe I should have.

This week I received a new PC with some serious grunt. Boot time takes on Fedora 17 +- 4 seconds including a shitload of daemons.

I also did not want to lose an of my settings and data so I rsync-ed the entire ~ folder from my old PC to this one. Beside the usual packages that are installed I also have some serious modified settings but one of the most annoying things I could not figure out was that many icons in the Gnome grid were reporting these square boxes and I also was missing some other icons I would have expected to be in the grid. On any normal interface you do a right-click and you get presented with a dialogue-box which lets you add/remove/muck-up these icons. Not so in Gnome-shell. It turns out you have to do this my hand by adding so call “xxx.desktop” files in the ~/.local/share/applications folder. Most app packages provide this file and yank it it there but if you have some which don’t then just copy and modify an existing one.

I do seriously hope the Gnome devs will sort this out asap since this looks like going back to the stone age.

Cheers
Erwin