GNOME/Guide

A frequently used environment is GNOME. This HOWTO tries to describe all aspects of GNOME, including installation, configuration, usage, and more!

The Project
The GNOME project is a free software project dedicated to the development of GNOME, a Unix/Linux desktop suite and development platform. The GNOME Foundation coordinates the development and other aspects of the GNOME Project.

The Software
GNOME is a desktop environment and a development platform. This piece of free software is the desktop of choice for several industry leaders. It is interesting both for business users, home users, and developers.

The Community
Like with any big free software project, GNOME has an extensive user and development base. GnomePlanet is a popular blog aggregator for GNOME hackers and contributors whereas Developer.Gnome.Org is for the GNOME developers. GNOME Library contains a huge list of GNOME resources for end users. The World of GNOME is also a popular aggregator for GNOME-related news.

What do you need?
Before installing GNOME, editing the system's USE variables is a good idea. Make sure that ,   , and   are in the USE variable located in. If support for  add it to the USE flags (dbus is a system message bus Gnome uses extensively). If no KDE support is required, remove  and   from USE. USE variables can be removed by adding a minus sign in front of them. See the example below for the minus sign used properly.

Adding the  USE flag provides a lovely Gentoo-branded splash screen instead of the default GNOME splash screen:

Once done, begin the GNOME installation by emerging GNOME:

For a minimal GNOME installation, emerge gnome-light. This option provides a lightweight GNOME installation without the additional tools that a full GNOME installation provides so you might need to install additional packages afterwards.

This will take a while, so you might want to start reading all those books your mother bought you but you never opened. Done? Great, now update environment variables:

Next the remaining services and user groups will be cleaned.

Verify the plugdev group exists. If it does, it is advisable to make each GNOME user member of that group, but step this is optional (the group is not common anymore).

Substitute in the next command with each GNOME user's user name.

First Impressions
It is time to take a look at what was just built. Exit the root shell and log in as a regular user. The next step is to configure the session manager to run GNOME when the the startx command is invoked (see ssing startx in the X Server Configuration Howto) for more information.

Starting with gnome-base/gnome-session-2.26.2, users will need to prepend the XDG_MENU_PREFIX variable to get the GNOME menus when using the method to start the desktop. If is not being used it will be handled automatically; no additional configuration is needed.

Now start the graphical environment by issuing startx:

If all goes well GNOME should happily provide a greeting. Congratulations on setting up GNOME!

It is possible to configure GNOME further. Take a look at the articles listed in GNOME/Guide for additional customization information.

External resources

 * The official GNOME website


 * Gnome's Wikipedia page


 * The World of GNOME blog