NW Linux : blog

Yesterday, I read about a new Gnome window manager called Gnome tools. When KDE4.2 arrived, many of us in the Linux community were amazed at the beauty of this new product. It had a feel somewhere between Aero and openSuse. Even with that said, I still prefer Gnome because of its simplicity and functionality. Back on topic…

GnomeTools is the new alpha alpha version of Gnome panel and window manager. Test installation requires Gnome 2.26 or higher, which means that Ubuntu 8.04 will not function – I tried… I’ll get to it, here is a screenshot (photo credit).

Installation

You can try out GnomeTools with the following terminal commands.

<ul>
  <li>curl -O http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh</li>
  <li>/bin/bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh</li>
  <li>jhbuild build</li>
  <li>jhbuild build -f -a -c</li>
  <li>cd ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/src</li>
  <li>./gnome-shell --replace</li>
</ul>

The commands above will replace the current Gnome panel. If you would like to run a nested shell, follow the directions posted here.

Results

Initially, I tried out the procedure using a VMware image of Ubuntu 9.04. My build process was still going after 4 hours, so I aborted and moved on to try it on a real 9.04 installation. After 2 hours of waiting for the build process, I aborted again. Hopefully, you will read this, try it on your machine, and get back to me with the results! Also, if anyone is successful in creating a VMware Image (.vmx), I would be happy to host the download. Good luck!

Resources

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell

http://maketecheasier.com/gnome-shell-your-next-desktop-environment/2009/09/09