Below are two quick methods of installation Gnome-Shell in Ubuntu. Please be aware that Gnome-Shell is still very much in development and should be treated as such.
Karmic Koala
If you want to try out gnome 3’s “gnome-shell” interface in Karmic, you can find it in the repo’s.
Fist of all install build-dep (sudo apt-get install build-dep). This will install any necessary dependencies needed to successfully compile and run gnome-shell.
- sudo apt-get build-dep gnome-shell
Once you have installed all of the required packages and libraries, open a terminal and type: –
- sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
This will install Gnome-Shell.
Once installed, you can start Gnome-Shell by typing the following command in a terminal: –
- gnome-shell –replace
I suggest running it from a guest session, as it will ‘kill’ compiz, requiring you to manually restart it. [compiz.real –replace]
Updating
Gnome-shell will, once installed, automatically notify you of updates, which are installed alongside the rest of your updates in Update Manager.
Jaunty Jackalope & Intrepid Ibex
Props to MadsRH for highlighting this excellent tutorial by RainCT.
Installation
1. Download gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
Run it with: –
- bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
This will download jhbuild into ~/Source and build it (the executables will end up in ~/bin).
2. Install the necessary build dependencies for gnome-shell (and its bundled dependencies):
- sudo apt-get install build-essential automake gnome-common flex bison curl git-core subversion gtk-doc-tools mesa-common-dev xulrunner-1.9-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libffi-dev libgconf2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev python2.5-dev
3. Download and build gnome-shell (and its bundled dependencies) by running
- ~/bin/jhbuild build
All files are placed into ~/gnome-shell.
Running it
1. Run
- ~/bin/jhbuild shell
to enter a subshell. Then follow the remaining steps inside this.
2. Navigate to teh correct directory using:
- cd ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/scripts.
3. You can now either start Gnome-Shell in a window using Xephyr: –
- ./start-in-Xephyr
You’ll need to have xserver-xephyr installed for this to work.
- sudo apt-get install xserver-xephyr
Alternatively if you want to try it out “fully” as a desktop, open a terminal and type:-
- gnome-shell –replace
Updating It
If you want to keep up-to-date with the latest improvements in Gnome-Shell in Jaunty or Intrepid, you need only run one command.
~/bin/jhbuild build –force –clean