Gnome-Shell Multimonitor support oddity

If anyone has used Gnome-shell with a second monitor you may have run into an unexpected behavior. The secondary monitor, with a laptop the likely more expensive much better monitor, is statically stuck to the first workspace. It does not follow workspace switching rules like we are all used to in prior gnome releases, and KDE and LXDE and XFCE and all other Desktop Environments I have used. Instead it seems one developer feels that the normal use case for a secondary monitor is to display something static and that it should not follow the rest of the users activity.

http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/22/multimonitor-support-in-gnome-shell/

In most typical cases the external monitor is used to show something static, like always visible information, a presentation on a projector, or a movie on a TV.

I very much disagree with this assessment. The only way I can work effectively in my job is to have the extra space and be able to segment tasks and applications on different workspaces and be able to know that when a switch to a workspace that the entire desktop is how I last left it on that workspace.

Anyways, thanks to a comment in the discussion for this post we have a fix.
http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/22/multimonitor-support-in-gnome-shell/comment-page-1/#comment-1374

Ok guys, here a hint to deactivate the stickyness of the secondary monitor (works for me on natty):

* start gconf-editor
* open /desktop/gnome/shell/windows
* deactivate workspaces_only_on_primary

Unfortunately gnome-shell is still rather unusable for getting work done. I use XFCE as my primary Desktop Environment now...but still install gedit and nautilus because they are better tools than the XFCE alternatives.

Install Java 6 on Ubuntu 11.10

As most people have noticed Canonical is no longer providing the Sun Java Plugin via the Partner repository. It is said this is due to a licensing issue. Anyways, if you want to install and replace OpenJDK on Ubuntu 11.10 please follow the method here (http://www.duinsoft.nl/packages.php)

I find it to be the best way to be up-to-date with Sun Java6.

Previously posted method redacted, but kept for historical purposes.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

You probably also want to remove the existing openJDK and icedtea as well. You can do that with the following command

sudo apt-get remove icedtea-* openjdk-*

-Thanks for the heads-up Derek
I don't remember the exact ones which were installed, however, the above will certainly remove all of them.


EDIT: Note, a newer and better way is available see top of post.