GNOME 3.10 in Ubuntu 13.10

Hola amigos!
I am very greatful to all my readers, I have just hit 2,000 views.

I was working on Android App Development Competition (UMC, University Mobile Challenge) organized by Applied Innovations Institute for few months. We didn’t get selected (Only 14 teams of 2000+ teams worldwide got selected), but still it was a great learning experience and hope to make our idea a reality and release into market soon. Later on, I continued my Open Source contributions and also GSoC (Google Summer of Code) was just near the corner and project submissions had already started. I started reading the ideas on the organization’s wiki page and reading the source code on git, finding out possible modules that can be implemented and prepared the GSoC application. It was an intense job as the application should be legit and better than the others. Will post about these in coming days 🙂

Anyways, back to the topic 🙂

Here I am going to post about how to install the latest GNOME desktop manager (GDM, in short) on Ubuntu (13.10 to be specific). This will work on few earlier and the latest versions too, so no need to worry about the release version :).

Why the latest GNOME 3.10 ?
GNOME 3.10 has lots of UI improvements and many new applications are added to GNOME like Photos, Maps, Music, etc. Around 34,786 commits have been contributed by over 985 contributors. IMHO, this is the best Desktop manager till now. You will find bugs, and some things missing but it is upto us to figure things out and it makes it fun to test these softwares and fix them and find workarounds for the issues. Anyways Open Source projects are meant to be made better by our contributions like reporting bugs, fixing bugs, etc. and this indeed improves our knowledge too.

To enjoy GNOME to the fullest extent you might want to have a Physical machine with good graphics and memory configured rather than virtualization like VBox.

Getting the sources ready.
First you need to add the PPA to your sources.list, this can be achieved by running the following command in your terminal.

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

gnome3-next is enough if you just wanna try out the feel of GNOME. Developers and adventurous people might wanna try out gnome3-staging, but do backup before proceeding.

NOTE: Adding gnome-staging PPA might break your system or make it unstable. So proceed on your own risk. Remember to backup your DATA regularly.

Now to update the sources and upgrade the packages run the following command in the terminal:


sudo apt-get udpate

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

You can skip dist-upgrade if you already have GNOME desktop manager pre-built with the installation. It might even crash the system if some packages are in transition.

To install GNOME-Music and other applications:

To install specific applications like GNOME-Music and other new applications you might want to take a look at the package list here and run apt-get for appropriate packages.

Example:


sudo apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-music

This will install gnome-shell and gnome-music from GNOME 3.10 repository.

Hope this gives a clear idea about adding PPA to your sources and installing packages under development and testing. Feel free to comment in your queries or mail me 🙂 I’ll be happy to help you with your doubts and questions.

P.S: Some packages might be unstable so be careful before executing any command.