Installing from PPA (11.04 only):
Using GNOME3 currently is only available for 11.04. This is a major release of GNOME so it likely will not be backported to older versions of Ubuntu.
Note: GNOME3 is provided as a tech preview for 11.04, it is not officially supported by the Ubuntu team. Here’s another warning before you try this.
Using GNOME3 on 11.04 will upgrade major parts of the desktop infrastructure, if you are not familiar with how to do package management then we recommend you try this on a virtualized installation or a non-production system, reverting back to vanilla 11.04 is not trivial.
Specifically GNOME3 will migrate your application settings to gsettings, so if you want to try to rollback you’ll get your old settings from before you upgraded.
As with all major desktop upgrades we recommend backing up your important data before getting started.
Graphical Instructions:
Launch the Ubuntu Software Center:
In the menu, select Edit, and choose software sources:
In the Software Sources window, click Add:
In the add window add the following text: ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 and click Add Source:
:
Click close
The Software Center will now automatically update and add the GNOME 3 PPA. Navigate to the GNOME3 section:
Run the Update Manager and update your packages (note, the PPA will upgrade some packages)
In addition you need to select and install the following packages (click on the bag icon):
- gnome-shell
- gnome-tweak-tool - we recommend this tool if you want to tweak some of the power user settings in GNOME 3.
Command line Instructions
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install gnome-session sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
