Quick Peek at GNOME 3.4

  Since I was pretty excited at the release of GNOME 3.4 ,I wanted to take a peek at it before openSUSE 12.2 comes out with GNOME 3.4 sometime around JULY 2012.I downloaded the GNOME 3.4 live ISO which is available through Getting GNOME page and wrote it onto a flash drive using SUSE Studio Image writer . I verified the hash code for the GNOME-3.4.iso using the hash tool built into FatRat download manager against GNOME-3.4.iso.md5sum.I then had to tweak with my bios which is pretty old. I wouldn't let me boot  boot from the flash drive unless it is the first boot device.
 The boot up was pretty snappy and the default wallpaper was pretty bland and bluish though many good wallpapers were available in gnome-control-center on the live cd.

Here is a screenshot of gnome-system-monitor of the live ISO cd.

 There was a working version of the Accessibility switcher (ctrl+Alt+Tab) and it was awesome on can navigate the activities menu pretty easier using activities switcher.

No improvements seen in Alt+Tab switcher. I wished that they would put in something like coverflow switcher. Guess we can always enhance it through extensions.

Similarly no significant improvements seen in Activities  window switcher

I usually use left handed mouse setting,thankfully the functionality worked and I could switch the default settings

Many default applications (libreoffice,package mangers,gnome-tweak-tool)on distributions like openSUSE is conspicuous by their absence. Also the live cd doesn't offer way to  install GNOME 3.4 onto you system unlike openSUSE live cds.

Many default games were available on the live cd

The Nautilus preview works well on GNOME 3.4.The below screenshot is a nautilus preview of pdf. It is amazing.

Here is a nautilus preview of a random text file

One could use the default browser epiphany on the live cd to view html 5 videos over the net.You need to first enable the html5 mode in youtube using this url . Amazingly without any codec installation it shows inbuilt support for h.264  and WebM video formats.

Once HTML 5 trial is activated on youtube one can enjoy videos which are available.

Epiphany menu on the right hand top is kind of cool. Also in maximize mode / full screen mode,the top bar of the browser disappears /gets integrated into the  Top Bar of the GNOME SHELL desktop.

The File and other menu items like preferences are accessible through the TOP BAR of GNOME SHELL.

The boxes virtual Machine is a promising tool.

The live cd has Rythmbox and totem to play songs and videos ,of course those which are encoded in flac and other OSS formats.

Now all that is left to do is upgrade to GNOME 3.4 from GNOME 3.2 as soon as openSUSE 12.2 comes out.