I had some free time the other evening so I decided to give the new development builds of GNOME-Shell a try. This is the new overlay, or navigation system around the GNOME Desktop which we’ll start seeing as the default in Ubuntu 10.10 (yes, a year away!). We’ve begun seeing YouTube videos of early builds, and the installation process has become much simpler. I was able to install all dependencies and compile the latest build in about 20 minutes on my Core2Duo 2.10GHz.
Remember, these are development builds and are still in the early stages. While it appears to be functional (so far) your mileage may vary. Follow these steps at your own risk.
Installing Dependencies
The first major dependency, according to all the instructions I could find, is a package called jhbuild. This package, however, has been removed from the 9.10 repositories for being outdated. I did find that I could use the package from the 9.04 repository and haven’t noticed any problems in doing so. To install jhbuild from the 9.04 repository use the link below.
Select a mirror close to you and download / install the .deb package. I don’t believe it has any dependencies.
After that package is installed you’ll want to download a GNOME-Shell Build Setup script which makes this entire process much, much simpler.
cd ~
wget http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
Next you can run the build-setup script, which will ensure you have all of the proper dependencies required. This suggested that I install some more -dev packages, which I did before moving to the next step. Because your specific dependencies may vary, I’ll leave the dependency suggestion at this point up to the script.
gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
Lastly, you can begin the build process. This process took about 10-15 minutes on my machine. It should be completely automated, but you might want to keep an eye on it for errors. What this next step does is download the latest revisions of the required applications and compiles them within your build environment.
jhbuild build
Ready To Launch
Before you launch GNOME-Shell you must DISABLE Compiz. If you have Compiz running, navigate to System > Preferences > Appearances and disable it under Desktop Effects. Also, save any work that you’re not willing to risk losing. After you have done these two things, you may launch GNOME-Shell with the command:
~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/src/gnome-shell --replace
Launching Applications
One of the initial differences in GNOME-Shell vs your current setup is that the top-panel is not your normal top-panel. Besides a few things being moved around (clock is in the center, System and Places are replaced with Activities, etc) you’ll notice that it doesn’t behave like your traditional panel either. First, navigate to the top-left to “Activities”. On my machine I simply had to mouse-over the corner and it’d launch the side-panel and workspace overview.
From here I am able to view all of my running applications as are organized between four virtual desktops. You’ll notice that any desktop with more than one running application displays them in an “Expose” mode, giving them all an equal amount of space within the workspace.
If I want to launch new applications I have a few options. One option is to use the Find field in the top-left and dynamically search for the application.
Below that I have a list of my “Favourite” applications, or I can click “More” (top-right of the Applications box) and navigate through a menu.
The menu has covered up the two existing workspaces on the left, but they are still there. If you launch an application from the Menu like that it will open in the virtual workspace currently selected. You’ll notice the workspace on the bottom-right has a thin white border around it. This is the selected workspace.
If you want to open an application in a different workspace other than the selected one, you can drag-and-drop the application from the Menu into the virtual desktop and it will launch there. As you might imagine, it is difficult to drag-and-drop into the two workspaces on the left if they are currently covered.
Navigation
Opening recent documents or Places works the same way as applications. I can drag-and-drop an entry from my Places menu or my Recent Documents into a workspace and it will open in the appropriate application.
If you’d like to rearrange your applications you can easily drag-and-drop them between virtual workspaces.
And, lastly, if you need to create new virtual desktop spaces simply click the Plus in the bottom-right and it’ll generate more. If you want to delete existing workspaces simply click the Minus in the center of that workspace.
Sidebar
It is also possible to activate a small sidebar within each virtual workspace. This can be done by ticking the box “Sidebar” from the drop-down menu that will appear if you click your username in the top-right of the screen. This sidebar can be used in its default wide form.
…or a slim form.
The slim form also allows the Recent Documents to expand.
Quirks
GNOME-Shell is definitely in the early development stages, which means it still has some quicks. You noticed one of them in the screenshots above. If I want to drag-and-drop an application from my Applications Menu into an existing window, my choices are limited due to the menu covering the workspaces.
Some other quirks include a current lack of any customizable options. You are not able to customize anything, clear your recent documents cache or add / remove from your Places. I haven’t been able to find any right-clickable options anywhere within GNOME-Shell to allow me to change anything.
I would also like to be able to rearrange my virtual workspaces as a whole. In other words, instead of just being able to move applications between workspaces I would like to move the entire workspace and have it trade places with another.
Also, if you use GNOME Do you’ll be in for a surprise because the default key-binding to launch the shell is the Super key. This clobbers GNOME-Do. I had to re-bind GNOME Do to ctrl-space, which just feels really foreign.
Conclusion
Again, I will give the developers the benefit of the doubt based on this being in the early, early stages of development, but so far I am not sure what to think. To be honest, its like they just added OS X “Spaces” with a sidebar to the normal GNOME, and got rid of the normal Menu. While I am a fan of Spaces and use it constantly on my Mac, I’m not sure that what was removed outweighs the benefits of what was added.
Also, and perhaps this is just me, but it feels kind of… hacker-ish. I’m not really sure how to explain it. Maybe it is all the black. I’m not sure. It feels like a cool, hacker shell that basement-dwellers would use. I definitely don’t see the public mainstream using this. It is simply too foreign to what they are likely used to. While that doesn’t make it “wrong”, I’m sure it doesn’t help promote adoption either. In other words, my Mom is able to use the current GNOME layout without trouble. She gets on Facebook, handles email, etc and doesn’t have any problems finding things. I really imagine this layout to be a bit frightening for non-techies.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m using it and I enjoy the new layout. It’s fun having something new to experiment with, and I like the addition of the Spaces-like navigation, but I just can’t imagine this being the default desktop coming from OEMs like Dell on Ubuntu pre-installed machines.
I’d like to see where they are going with this, and I’ll continue to play with it. Let’s hope for a lot of improvements based on feedback and community testing.
Anyone care to join me?
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5 Comments
I installed gnome-shell through the 9.10 repos, which eliminates all of the hassle of manually installing.
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
I also installed through the repos and it worked pretty well. gnome-shell looks interesting but I think it needs a lot of refinement before I'd try replace normal Gnome. I almost think they should tone it down and leave Gnome more normal for now and work on something like Zeitgeist more. Though I'll admit that it is still pretty alpha-ish so we'll have to give it some more time I suppose.
your instructions appear to be named at audiences who are somewhat inexperienced with linux in general so imho it is better to also add these two instructions:
make the gnome-shell.sh script executable by running sudo chmod +x
run the script ./gnome-shell.sh (else the script will not run because you are in the home directory)
Great article. Very informative if you want to install gnome on Ubuntu without using synaptic. In future releases the software center might replace synaptic entirely.
Post more articles shit nigger!
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