Gnome Shell, a new way to use the desktop

Questa guida è disponibile anche in Italiano.

In many blogs it has been talked about Gnome 3, probably coming with Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx.

A bit less it has been talked about Gnome Shell, the one you see in the screenshot.
What to say.. it's beatiful, and kinda useful. It doesn't work with Compiz and it hasn't got many effects but it's very good-loking xD I'm testing it right now on Ubuntu 10.04, and i can't do more then suggest it. As I read, it is compatible with Ubuntu 9.10 too, for who wants to try it without installing the Alpha.

So, let's start.
At first, let's install the program that will compile the source


sudo apt-get install jhbuild

And then

wget http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh

And at last...

sudo jhbuild build

To compile all. It'll take 10 minutes or more. I did it on a Intel Core 2 Duo, so 64bit, and it took around 10 minutes.

When it has finished, if you want, you can disable Compiz cause it'll be unuseful, save all and close all the application that you don't want them to crash (yeah, there's the possibility it crashes, it's still beta).

When it finishes to compile, do

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

And you'll have your Gnome Shell.

Gnome Shell won't start with Ubuntu, so you have to do that command every time (or just to add it to the start scripts)

If it crashes while using, to exit and reboot, do Ctrl + Alt + F1, log in and then do sudo reboot

If I helped you, or you like the article, click on a Google Ad here down the page: It's free!