Fresh ubuntu 18.04 and awesome-wm gnome-control-center is dead

Question

Fresh install of ubuntu 18.04 then standard apt-install of awesome with awesome-extra.

Awesome --version returns

awesome v4.2 (Human after all)
 • Compiled against Lua 5.3.3 (running with Lua 5.3)
 • D-Bus support: ✔
 • execinfo support: ✔
 • xcb-randr version: 1.5
 • LGI version: 0.9.2

gnome-control-center sound -v

** (gnome-control-center:14812): DEBUG: 14:27:19.737: Enabling debugging
** (gnome-control-center:14812): DEBUG: 14:27:19.850: No extra argument
** (gnome-control-center:14812): WARNING **: 14:27:19.850: Could not find settings panel "sound"

Basically there is no settings whatsoever.

Anyone can suggest what went wrong?

Everything else works just fine, I have sound, keyboard, multiple displays. I just lost control over settings, cannot mute sound, cannot dim a screen, cannot lock my laptop.

PS Previous ubuntu (16.04) had unity-control-center and it was working just fine (but with older version of awesome I think )

Answer 1

I reached to Awesome irc channel to figure out what might be wrong. Explanation I was given (I am not quoting, I am answering as I understand the problem) is that nowadays gnome is more and more strict over it's architecture. So in the past you could replace window manager on gnome with another tool and retain whatever underlying solution was (mentioned control panel, sound widgets and etc). But nowadays gnome has approach all or nothing.

So real solution to my problem is, because sound and screen is working and I am only missing settings-control over them, is to install widgets and/or tools. For example pavucontrol was mentioned as good tool for a sound and bind key shortcuts to control brightness.

Previous iteration of Ubuntu worked, because exactly it was running unity, not gnome.

Answer 2

gnome-control center can be run by tricking it into thinking it is in a gnome desktop

env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME gnome-control-center

or by editing the .desktop files for each control app. for example /usr/share/applications/gnome-display-panel.desktop find the line OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity; add awesomewm