Enable dual screen workspaces in GNOME 3

I’m really liking GNOME 3 with the default GNOME Shell. I first tried it with Fedora 16, but that wasn’t a huge success. Now I’m running it under Ubuntu 11.10 and so far it’s been very pleasant. What did bug me though was that workspaces seem to only affect my primary screen. I use a dual screen setup and especially when doing work related stuff I’d like to have 1 workspace with all work related applications in it, and another one with my own non-work related stuff. But by default the workspaces are only applied to the primary screen.

Turns out that this is easy to change though. Easiest way to do it is to install gconf-editor. Run it and then navigate towards /desktop/gnome/shell/windows. Find the option workspaces_only_on_primary and uncheck the box to disable it. Now close gconf-editor and the next time you’ll login again the changes will be applied.

One thing that doesn’t seem to change is when clicking on a workspace the secondary screen will not show the applications located at it. However, as soon as you put focus on an application the screen does get updated.

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