Gnome-shell arrives on Gnome Developer Kit!

After several days of packaging, here you go the Gnome-Shell, along with metacity-clutter and several others (clutter, gir-repository, gobjecct-introspection).


To try it out, grab and install a Gnome Developer Kit. You can choose either installable iso (DVD) or VMWare/VirtualBox disk image. Using a normal Foresight is also OK if you can figure out the dependencies :) since they are built against different packages. (In particular don't use a x86_64 system; the dev kit is only available in x86).

To install Gnome-shell,

(April 30th, Update: now they are using mutter from git.gnome.org, not metaciy-clutter from fishsoup.)

1. $ sudo conary update -metacity mutter gir-repository clutter:devellib gnome-shell

If you are not installing on Dev kit, then append this to the above command, " --install-label=gnome.rpath.org@gnome:trunk" (without quotes).

(clutter:devellib is needed because gnome-shell references a lib from it.)

2. To get it running, a little tweak is needed. Comment out the lines as in this patch:

--- /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/overlay.js 2009-04-18 17:22:46.000000000 +0800
+++ overlay.js 2009-04-18 17:22:08.000000000 +0800
@@ -105,9 +105,9 @@

let icontheme = Gtk.IconTheme.get_default();
let searchIconTexture = new Clutter.Texture({});
- let searchIconPath = icontheme.lookup_icon('gtk-find', 16, 0).get_filename();
- searchIconTexture.set_from_file(searchIconPath);
- this.actor.append(searchIconTexture, 0);
+ //let searchIconPath = icontheme.lookup_icon('gtk-find', 16, 0).get_filename();
+ //searchIconTexture.set_from_file(searchIconPath);
+ //this.actor.append(searchIconTexture, 0);

Seems the icon can't be found but I haven't figured out which package it is from :(

3. Run $ gnome-shell. That's it.

4. Now I don't have a powerful machine at hand, on which $ gnome-shell --replace fails to work. And on restarting X, I receive a white screen. I will try to see if it's ok on a better machine.

So a little warning: before you restart X or issue '$gnome-shell --replace', login to this machine from another, thus you can always do 'conary rollback' in case of problems. (Or any other way you like, e.g. booting to runlevel 3. Anyway you need a terminal).