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Gnome Shell, the default environment for the ultra modern Gnome 3.0 release, is the new face of the Linux desktop, but it’s not really a desktop at all. After years of Gnome using your screen as a metaphor for the desk you’re sitting at, complete with file and application icons and quick access to menus, Gnome 3.0 has changed everything.

The desktop has been replaced by something called a ‘shell’, which provides access to the various graphical applications on your system.

It’s a similar idea to the way the Linux command line is sometimes referred to as a shell because it provides access to the inner workings of your system. Like the command line, Gnome Shell replaces the desktop with an uncomplicated and less distracting interface, providing quick access to all the same features as the old version, but hopefully requiring less effort on your part. It’s also just as powerful. The trick is knowing how to get the most out of it.

Gnome Shell has a brand new look that will inject your Linux desktop with an element of refined class. The latest Fedora presents it best of all.

1 Getting Gnome Shell

Despite this being a major release, getting hold of the latest version of Gnome Shell isn’t straightforward. At the time of writing, there hasn’t been a major distro release that installs Gnome Shell by default. Fedora 15 will be the first distribution to offer a genuine Gnome Shell experience.

We usually recommend installing packages from the latest version of Ubuntu, but this isn’t the best solution for Gnome Shell. This is because Canonical has developed its own technology called Unity, which is similar to Gnome Shell but totally independent, and this is the default user interface for the latest release. We recommend grabbing the latest beta or the final release of Fedora 15. It’s available as a live CD or an installable distribution, and both will default to Gnome Shell when first booted. We’ve also had a good experience with an OpenSUSE re-spin with Gnome Shell. If you want to stay on the cutting edge, try installing it from Arch Linux.

Before you scupper your entire installation with a non-working flavour of Gnome Shell, try it in a virtual machine to ensure your hardware supports it.

2 Hardware acceleration

The other problem you’re likely to face is a hardware one. Gnome Shell relies on something called Clutter, which is a graphics library that requires a very basic level of hardware acceleration. Gnome Shell uses Clutter, along with the old Gnome window decorator Metacity, to create something it calls Mutter to draw the new environment.

For this to work on most systems, you will need a supported graphics chipset and the optimum drivers. Any machine from the last four or five years will be fine – basic graphics chipsets from the likes of ATI/AMD, Intel and Nvidia are more than capable if you have the correct drivers installed.

Distributions will install and configure most devices without any user input, but you’ll get an error complaining that Clutter can’t be started if your hardware isn’t up to the task or if the drivers haven’t loaded. Virtual machine environments like VMware and VirtualBox will also get stuck due to lack of accelerated graphics, which is a problem if you just want to test Gnome Shell on your current system. Recent beta releases of Virtual Box are getting close though – the developers have added working 3D and Compiz acceleration, and are on the verge of adding Gnome Shell support.

Take some time to check out Gnome’s new interface. The important bits are on the left.

3 User overview

Gnome Shell will look very different to what you’re used to. Instead of two panels, there’s now just a single one at the top of the screen, which includes a clock, a sound volume applet and the communications icon. This can be used to access instant messaging and social networks, and for logging out. There’s also an ‘Activities’ button on the top left, which is the portal to the meat of the new interface.

Clicking on this button, or pulling the mouse over to the top left corner of the screen, transforms the display into the Activities Overview. Pressing the Windows button does the same thing. If any applications are running, their windows will be scaled down and displayed next to each other in a transformation similar to that used by Apple’s Exposé mode.

You can move these windows around, or drag them onto the right-hand border of the screen to display two virtual desktops, or Workspaces. You can move the application onto another Workspace, or drag it down to create a new one.

You’ll find the new launch bar on the left border of the screen. This is a little more like the dock on OS X than the old Gnome dock or KDE’s equivalent. You still click an application to launch it, but the icon for a running application will have a small glow on the lower border around it, and you can right-click on an application to get a context menu if it supports the function.

This lets you create a new window in Firefox, for example, without touching the application itself. As with any dock, you can add and remove icons to suit your preferences. Getting to the application list is the next major function in Gnome Shell, and you’ll find they all appear when you click on the ‘Applications’ title in the Activities view. Everything you’ve got installed will be listed, and you can fi lter what you see by typing the fi rst letters of the applications or files you’re interested in. You can use the same trick at any point within the Activities view.

Finally, make sure you use [Alt]+[Tab] to switch between all running applications and use the cursor-down arrow to see a preview of each window.

There’s no GUI for customising Gnome Shell’s look yet, but the themes are out there and it’s easy enough to switch them manually.

4 Installing themes

As powerful as all these options are, you might have noticed that there’s a lack of user configurable options for Gnome shell, especially if you want to change how it looks.

This is partly because its developers don’t want you to be distracted by something as frivolous as changing your windows’ colour, and partly because they just haven’t got around to making the editor yet.

But the framework for changing appearances is there, even if the software isn’t, and plenty of users have taken on the challenge of creating themes for Gnome’s new environment. It’s just that installing them is a bit of a hack.

First, you need to find a theme you want to install. You can find some of our favourites on http://half-left.deviantart.com, but you can find many more with a simple search. The majority will bundle all the required files into either a ZIP or TAR file, and you’ll need to uncompress these by clicking on them, or by using the ‘unzip’ or ‘tar xvf’ command from the terminal.

Our favourite theme is called Smooth Inset, and is provided as a ZIP file. When downloaded and unarchived, this file contains two folders. One of contains all the data files required for the theme. Most of these are SVG image files, tied together by a regular CSS file.

The use of CSS for theming Gnome Shell is one of its best features, and should pave the way for many more themes and usability improvements in the future, because anyone with a little web experience can build their own.

For now, this folder needs to be named ‘theme’ and copied over the current ‘/usr/share/Gnome Shell/theme’ folder. You should make a copy of the original ‘theme’ folder so you can revert back to the original look (type cp -rf /usr/share/Gnome Shell/theme original_theme on the command line).

You now need to press [Alt]+[F2] to open the command executor, and enter r to restart the shell and load the new theme. You should see that almost everything looks different, but there are a few notable exceptions. The desktop background and application icons are the two most noticeable, and you’ll need another tool if you want to change these too.

Gnome Shell’s individual elements can be chopped and changed within its settings menu.

5 Tweaking the interface

In a tiny concession to users who don’t want the default options for everything, there’s now a Gnome Shell application you can download and run that will let you change some of the more common settings. This application is called the ‘gnome-tweak-tool’, and you’ll need to look for this phrase if you want to install it on your distribution of choice. After it’s installed, you can run it from the applications list.

You’ll see that the main window is split into five views. The first, labelled ‘File Manager’, will let you display files from your ‘Desktop’ folder on the background of your screen. Click on the option labelled ‘Have File Manager handle the desktop’, and the icons should appear after a few moments. You can also disable the background with the other option on this page.

The Interface page offers options to enable icons on buttons and within menus, along with settings that let you change the window decoration theme and the theme used by the icons. The last two were common options for Gnome 2.x, and they can change a lot of Gnome Shell’s appearance.

Try the Oxygen icon theme, for example, and everything in your application list will look different. The third panel, ‘Fonts’, lets you change the typefaces used to render text. One of the most useful options is ‘Text scaling factor’, which reduces the amount of space any of the fonts use on your screen. Reduce this to 0.8, for example, and everything from the top panel to the window border size is reduced by 20 per cent, which is useful if you’re using Gnome Shell on a netbook.

On the fourth panel, you can solve one of the more contentious issues with Gnome Shell – the removal of the ‘Minimise’ button from a window’s title bar. You can also add the date back to the calendar in the top panel. Finally, in the ‘Window’ panel, you can use the settings to change the default behaviour when you click on a window title bar, either with the left or right mouse button, making the experience less daunting if you’re not convinced the world is ready for Gnome Shell yet.

This feature is taken from PC Plus Issue 310 – on sale now. To view the expanded feature, as well as more fantastic articles, tutorials and reviews, click here to buy the digital version of PC Plus issue 310 now. You can also subscribe to PC Plus or buy PC Plus Magazine back issues.