Thanks icarolongo!
I followed your excellent instructions and installed Gnome3. It works great
overall. I generally use Fluxbox, but Gnome3 is great for those situations
where you need to use more mouse than keyboard, like the computer I mounted
in front of my treadmill.
Some issues I have had and others might:
GPG: Before adding your repositories, I found that I needed to add the GPG
key for the Ubuntu Gnome3 team.
To fix that, add the following lines into the terminal (replace XXXXXXXX with
the last 8 digits of the public key that the APT GPG error message gives
you):
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv XXXXXXXX
gpg --export --armor XXXXXXXX | sudo apt-key add -
------------------------------------------------------------------
UGLY ISSUE: Gnome3 has ugly default themes. I don't know why. They should be
beautiful by default. Fail!
You can adjust these with the tweak tool (GPLV3 licensed):
sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool
This is a pretty easy gui to control a few aspects of Gnome3. I only used it
to change the icon theme/sliders&buttons. Your mileage may vary. (gui bug?:
Some of the buttons under the "Shell" portion were off screen with no ability
to maximize the window. Could just be the fact that I was trying it on a
small screen.)
Some people who post to this forum may play around with the themes more than
I did and it would be cool if they would please post their experiences on the
forum. There seems to be a lot of disagreement as to which theme packages to
remove and which to install.
One says definitely remove the gnome-themes-standard and some say it's
essential. Do or do not use the accessibility themes package, etc. etc. ad
infinitum
Also, I think the tweak-tool will allow you to add the maximize and minimize
buttons to your window borders. Only the close button is there by default. I
don't know why.
------------------------------------------------------------------
UNITY WM THING: When I finished installing, I logged out and then back in.
Not only does GDM feature the Ubuntu logo instead of the prettier Triquel
logo, but when I logged in I found that it had installed the Unity desktop
and selected it as default. WTH? I recognized it immediately. I did not tell
it to install Unity, I just followed the instructions given by icarolongo
above.
I logged back out and had to click on "Other" user name to get to the part
where GDM asks you what desktop to load. I unselected Unity and selected
Gnome. Then I had to manually log into my user name and all was well. Weird.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Gnome-Settings-Daemon: I found also that 100% of my both CPU cores were
taken up by some process. It scared me at first that Gnome3 might be a memory
hog. It didn't show this process in "System Monitor", so I knew something was
up. I closed System Monitor and ran the command top in the terminal. I found
that I had 3 instances of Gnome-Settings-Daemon running. I shut off and
restarted the system and did not see that again. The next day, I logged back
in and saw that there was only one instance, but that it still was absorbing
almost all the processing power of both CPUs. It seems to be a known issue.
For now, just restart and it will probably be gone. (I could not kill the
process by any means. I had to shut down. It didn't even have status "D". It
was "R". Frustrating.)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Also the first time you use the Activities/Programs menus it might go slow.
This could just be the Zeitgeist process running for the first time. (I'm
thinking that when it initially runs it must accumulate all of the data it
needs. It speeds up considerably, believe me.)
------------------------------------------------------------------
I'll add any other issues I have to the forum.
I'm not trying to turn people off from Gnome3 with all of this. It runs very
well and it's fun to use. I didn't know how I would take to it because it
looked so different, but it's a very smart design and a worthy addition to
GNU/Linux. Give it a try.
I hope you found this helpful. I'm sorry I could only post this in English.
