GNOME Shell Testing

[Merk42]

This thread is for testing support and technical discussion.
Opinions should go to the Community Cafe thread or ideally the GNOME Shell mailing list.

I made this thread again because as before, I figured the sort of people that would install and test pre-release versions of a new UI would be the sort of people that install and test pre-release versions of Ubuntu.

What is GNOME Shell?
GNOME Shell, for those of you that do not know, is a user interface change to GNOME. With it, brings Mutter a combination of Metacity and Clutter, managing the windows. Say goodbye to compiz as it won't be compatible.

GNOME Shell will be released as one part of GNOME 3 in March of 2011 it will not be default in 10.10 though there will be an optional package.

What does it look like?
Here is GNOME Shell.

The active application near "Activities" has a menu upon clicking. Clicking on the date or username provide a calendar and menu respectively


Currently some applications are open but minimized. Where are they?
This is the Activities overview, where you run and manage "Activities"


More applications can be run either by searching for the name in "find", or clicking the bar that says applications


You can easily add or subtract workspaces with the + and - buttons. By default workspaces are organized in wall form. The scrollbar, or smaller boxes let you switch among them


You can also view all workspaces at once in a grid layout


Oh look, an instant message! Unlike the passive notify-OSD, clicking on this will bring up the window


If no action is taken, it resides in the lower right, viewable upon hover.



OMG GNOME SHELL IS AWFUL! I'm moving to xfce/Windows/an abacus
Calm down. Look at the GNOME 3 Myths

MYTH: GNOME won't support the current panel and window manager anymore and I don't want to use GNOME Shell

TRUTH: The GNOME 2.x panel and Metacity (the window manager) will still be available.
Downstream distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu will have the option to include them in their distribution. You will be able to install them just as now you can install sawfish, compiz, etc inside your GNOME session. (There are no plans to support GNOME panel applets in GNOME Shell, TBA. This mailing list post has some information.)

How do I Learn More?

• Read up on the design document. It gives an idea of where they'd like to go and why.
• If that's too much of a read, look at this brief synopsis on GNOME Shell.
• Look at the GNOME Shell cheat sheet for features.

How do I Try it?

Running Jaunty, Karmic, Lucid and Maverick there are three ways to try GNOME Shell

• Install the gnome-shell package (easy but out of date)
• Use the Ricotz PPA (slightly harder, but more up to date)
• Build from source (more difficult, but up to date when something is added, provided you rerun jhbuild build)

As of Virtualbox 3.2.6 GNOME Shell will not run in a virtual machine, even with desktop additions installed

Building from source is a bit more complicated than the GNOME instructions say. So fire up a terminal

1. sudo apt-get install curl libtiff4-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libcroco3-dev xserver-xephyr xulrunner-dev python-dev mesa-utils mesa-common-dev libreadline5-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libwnck-dev librsvg2-dev libgnome-desktop-dev libgnome-menu-dev libffi-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgconf2-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev gtk-doc-tools gnome-common git-core flex bison automake build-essential icon-naming-utils
2. curl -O http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-sh...build-setup.sh
3. /bin/bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
4. Get jhbuild (not a command line entry)
   
   • For Lucid via repository, package name "jhbuild".
   • From Jaunty
   • From Debian
   
   
5. jhbuild build

IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE BUILDING
Hey it keeps "hanging up unexpectedly"
Quit building and run

 pushd ~/gnome-shell/source/ && git clone git://git.gnome.org/gtk+ gtk3 && popd

then re run jhbuild build
I'm getting a lot of "undefined reference" errors
try

rm ~/gnome-shell/install/*.la /usr/lib/*.la

Then jhbuild build
If it still doesn't work, delete the ~/gnome-shell folder and try again

Yay! It's finally done building! Now what?
To run

1. cd ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/src
2. ./gnome-shell --replace

To quit GNOME Shell and return to the panels

1. Go to the terminal
2. hit CTRL-C

To update (check the commit log for anything new)

• jhbuild build (rebuilds updated files)
• jhbuild build -f -a -c (builds all gnome shell files)

To remove (if you want to do a clean install, or just remove it because you don't like it)

• Delete the folder gnome-shell in your home directory (assumes build from source)

If you want to make it your default, put "gnome-shell --replace" in your Startup Items

Love it? Hate it? Have a suggestion? Make your voice heard in the GNOME Shell mailing list

[cariboo907]

I find I use the search bar more often then the menu to find an application that I don't have in Docky. I usually only have to type one or two letters to find the app I want.

[JCoster]

I'd test GS more but at the moment it's unusable due to corrupt font rendering.. Any ideas?

Using the 'radeon' graphics driver. Even if I try using it (despite fonts being unreadable) it crashes and restarts GDM.

Cheers,
JC

[Madspyman]

Doesn't work using the flgrx drivers in Lucid. It flickers every time I open something and skew the menus on back clicks. Using the open drivers it works better, with the exception of a white broken line that appears occasionally in the window upon resizing, and sometimes the colors for the icons change. Still works flawlessly in my Karmic partition under the same conditions.

[Peter09]

Doesn't work using the flgrx drivers in Lucid. It flickers every time I open something and skew the menus on back clicks. Using the open drivers it works better, with the exception of a white broken line that appears occasionally in the window upon resizing, and sometimes the colors for the icons change. Still works flawlessly in my Karmic partition under the same conditions.

Same here, unusable at the moment.

[descendent87]

Also uninstallable in maverick currently due to librsvg2-dev dependencies. Anyone who want's to try it either install from repo's (very old version) or try the PPA

[KdotJ]

I'll be honest, I like gnome shell, but I do love Compiz. I know that that gnome3 will have effects in it, but will we have stuff similar to the cube? the open/close animations? 3D windows?

I'll be sad to move away from Compiz and the way gnome is now. I know that I don't have to move up, but I like to keep up.

[hikaricore]

KDE4 has these things so I'm sure Gnome will implement them in to their terrible shell as well.

[dyltman]

Has anyone tried the replacement for nautilus; GNOME Activity Journal?

[descendent87]

Has anyone tried the replacement for nautilus; GNOME Activity Journal?

Not too up on Gnome 3 as I'm a KDE user but I'm pretty sure activity journal isn't replacing nautilus