Hi, fellas....

I hoped that you enjoyed my previous articles. Sorry because I published this article very lately. I was busy with studies, placements, Linux Campus Club work. This article is an tutorial on installing GNOME 3.6 in ubuntu 12.04 and ubuntu 12.10.


                           There are many desktop environments available for UNIX and GNU/LINUX operating systems. Some of them are XFCE, GNOME, KDE and many more. Official support for new version of GNOME(GNOME 3.0) was announced along with the release of ubuntu 11.04. However it was buggier and I couldn't use GNOME 3.0 comfortably without resolving some bugs myself. So I preferred to use unity interface.



                            GNOME 3.2 was released along with ubuntu 11.10, and it had fewer bugs than its predecessor. However I preferred to use unity interface. And GNOME 3.4 was launched along with ubuntu 12.04. I checked it it and it was almost perfect with negotiable bugs. This article is a tutorial about installing the updated version of GNOME 3.4(i.e., GNOME 3.6).


Thinking about a simple command to install GNOME 3.6 on your ubuntu??

Here is a simple command:

sudo apt-get install full-gnome3-experience

Do you think that above command will work?
Ans: Never!! Because it installs only basic files and you won't be able to get a full experience of GNOME 3.6.

Let us do it step by step:

Step 1: 

           You can just install 'gnome-shell' if you want. Here is the command for that.

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

The above command will just install gnome shell on your desktop.

If you want whole GNOME desktop on your old desktop, then follow this command.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop ubuntu-gnome-default-settings

I prefer second command.

Step 2: 

           If you are prompted to select between Light DM and gdm login manager, choose gdm.
If you already had GDM installed and the package manager didn't prompt you to choose between LightDM and GDM or you've selected LightDM by mistake, you can run the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm

I'm recommending gdm over light DM because you'll get full gnome 3 experience if you use gdm.

Step 3:

           To avoid conflicts with other system packages, it is better to remove ubuntu-settings package. Don't worry, you'll get it back after you complete this tutorial.

sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-settings  

Note: If you remove ubuntu-settings package, then ubuntu-desktop package will also be removed. But you'll have to trust me.

Step 4:

           By executing the above commands, GNOME 3.6 will be installed in your system. CHEERS!! :)
Oh... wait.... I found out that some GNOME packages were missing. Install those packages.

sudo apt-get install gnome-documents gnome-boxes

Note: gnome-boxes is available only in 64-bit systems because of a bug :D :D


 Step 5: 

            Some packages in the Ubuntu 12.10 repositories aren't updated to the latest 3.6.x version. So you can add a repository to update the packages.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

After executing that command update the software sources by this command.

sudo apt-get update

Step 6: If you want to remove traditional GNOME's overlay scroll bar and use GNOME 3's scroll bar, then use this command. 

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar*

Note: Please don't omit the asterisk which is at the end of the above command. It has its own role and regular users of GNU/LINUX operating systems can understand it.

After executing the above commands, restart your system. Choose gnome in gdm login manager and log in. Ubuntu may work a bit slower during first time usage of GNOME 3,6, but don't worry, after few restarts, everything should be perfect. If ant doubts, then comment for this post.   

Some Screen Shots: