Ubuntu

Gnome 3 is out. Lets try it out!!

At last the Gnome Foundation has released their much awaited Gnome 3.0 showcasing the Gnome Shell. I always liked their marketing efforts and with this new release they have enchanced it with a website dedicated for Gnome 3. It looks simply gorgeous and the short videos embedded in the home page will attract people into Gnome 3 for sure!

Gnome 3 is being developed and has reached the current stage because of the continued interest and contribution of hundreds of it’s developers. As a website supporting this whole FOSS movement, we congratulate every one of them for this great masterpiece. Now, you might think that, we are here for Ubuntu news and Ubuntu has already gotten rid of the conventional Gnome and introduced their own Unity interface. There is some discussion in the community about this and Canonical’s contribution to upstream projects. Anyway controversies aside, we are all a community and we stand for the same cause. Yes, that means we(UM) has feelings for both Gnome, Unity, KDE or whatever!

Now lets look into the main changes in this new incarnation compared to Gnome 2.x. The Gnome 3 website says it ‘Simply Beautiful’. Yes it truly is! The whole look of Gnome has changed and now File Navigation, Window Navigation etc are more inituitve than before. The File Browser(Nautilus) has received a more polished look, a redesigned panel and much more!

With all the hype around the thing I am pretty sure that you want to get your hands dirty with it. So follow the steps below to get your hands on Gnome 3:

  1. Grab the ISO image based on Open SUSE or Fedora:
    1. Pros: No need to replace your Gnome 2.x in Ubuntu 10.10
    2. Cons: Need to install another distro that stays away from your Ubuntu 10.10 installation.
    3. You can get the ISO image from here. Then place it on a CD or your USB stick and enjoy the Gnome flavour!
  2. PPA for Ubuntu 11.04
    1. Pros: Enables to try Gnome 3 from your own installed Ubuntu or in top of your Gnome 2.x
    2. Cons: Your current Gnome 2.x might get bloated and you will feel why I’m using this as my default one since Ubuntu is shipping Unity from 11.04!

Unfortunately there is no Gnome 3 PPA avilable for Ubuntu 10.10. For that you have to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1 and follow these steps:

  1. Go to Terminal and type ‘sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3’
  2. Then ‘sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade’
  3. ‘sudo apt-get install gnome-shell’
  4. After than relogin to get the Gnome 3 with Gnome shell

So install Gnome 3 and let us know your experiences with it. We are churning out a detailed review for it soon. In the meanwhile, you can organize a Gnome 3 Release Party or join one.

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