I installed pantheon on Ubuntu 13.10 and a ton of settings are missing. I only have these settings: defaults, desktop, tweaks (I installed tweaks), keyboard, power, and about. What do I do?

2 Answers

This is likely caused by the setting of XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP.

What does echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP say in a terminal?

The .desktop files used for gnome-control-center components contain a line like OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity; and are therefore not displayed with another XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP setting.

Try XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME gnome-control-center from a terminal.

I am not sure, where and if it makes sense to override this variable, but I have just done so in my custom startup script for AwesomeWM.

The problem isn't Pantheon-specific. This happens with every desktop that isn't GNOME or Unity: i3, xfce, and awesome, to name a few for Googlebot's benefit.

Blueeyed gave the correct answer, but is also right that it's not obvious where to override that variable. Here's my solution: create a wrapper for gnome-control-center so that it is the only program affected.

Steps

1. Create a new shell script in ~/bin/gnome-control-center by cutting and pasting the following commands in the terminal:

   mkdir -p ~/bin
   cd ~/bin
   echo 'XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME exec /usr/bin/gnome-control-center "$@"' >gnome-control-center
   chmod 755 gnome-control-center

2. Test it by running the program:

   ./gnome-control-center

3. If it worked, then logout and log back in to add ~/bin to your PATH.

Gnome-control-center should now work for you.

Optional

A logical follow-up question might be, "How do I get GNOME control center to show up in my menus?" One answer is to copy /usr/share/applications/gnome-control-center.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications/ and remove the line that says OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;. I'd recommend also changing Name=Settings to Name=GNOME Settings, just so it's more obvious in your menu which program it is.

Here's my ~/.local/share/applications/gnome-control-center.desktop file, which you can copy directly:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=GNOME Settings
Icon=preferences-system
Exec=gnome-control-center --overview
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=GNOME;GTK;Settings;System;
Keywords=Preferences;Settings;