May 8, 2011

Gnome3 on Squeeze

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Debian

Has anyone managed to get Gnome3 working on Squeeze?

8 Comments

Comments

May 8, 2011
Goineasy9

I'm not running squeeze at the moment so I can't give you any help with your exact question, but, there are a few problems that I can see. Gnome3 requires modern graphics drivers to work properly. I don’t know if squeeze is advanced enough to run these.
I ran Gnome3 on fedora 15 for about a month, this is what I learned. ATI and Nvidia proprietary drivers don’t do well with Gnome3. The open source drivers are what’s needed. Unless squeeze contains the most recent version of nouveau and radion drivers and the most recent Xorg, Gnome3 won't perform well. If you have an older video card or the drivers aren't the most recent, Gnome3 will go into a fallback mode, which is just a stripped down version of Gnome2.
One would think you would need to be running testing (wheezy) or Sid to get a functioning Gnome3 at the moment. Unless someone at Debian has created a backport that will update all the needed parts of the graphics system to allow it to run Gnome3 properly.

If there are any squeeze users reading this, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

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May 8, 2011
kerneldaemon

Thanks, that all sounds a bit out of my depth for right now so I guess it's another distro time :-)

Would you recomend Fedora 15 over the OpenSuse 11.4 option?

Cheers :-)

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May 8, 2011
Goineasy9

Fedora 15 is still in Beta, with many complaints still pouring in. I haven't tried OpenSuse. Downloading LiveCD's of each would be what I would do. Check them both out.

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May 26, 2011
GrouchoMarxist

Goineasy9 wrote:

I'm not running squeeze at the moment so I can't give you any help with your exact question, but, there are a few problems that I can see. Gnome3 requires modern graphics drivers to work properly. I don’t know if squeeze is advanced enough to run these.
I ran Gnome3 on fedora 15 for about a month, this is what I learned. ATI and Nvidia proprietary drivers don’t do well with Gnome3. The open source drivers are what’s needed. Unless squeeze contains the most recent version of nouveau and radion drivers and the most recent Xorg, Gnome3 won't perform well. If you have an older video card or the drivers aren't the most recent, Gnome3 will go into a fallback mode, which is just a stripped down version of Gnome2.
One would think you would need to be running testing (wheezy) or Sid to get a functioning Gnome3 at the moment. Unless someone at Debian has created a backport that will update all the needed parts of the graphics system to allow it to run Gnome3 properly.

If there are any squeeze users reading this, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm running Squeeze at the moment. To prevent myself from accidentally destroying my system should [Shift] hit the fan, I will be creating a virtual Squeeze installation in VirtualBox OSE running GNOME 3. I'll post my results ASAP.

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May 26, 2011
kerneldaemon

Very interested if you get it working! I have Fedora 15 running from a fob, it has defaulted to the low fat Gnome 3 but even that is beautiful compared to Unity!

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May 27, 2011
Goineasy9

Fedora 15 has been released and has the full Gnome 3 experience, plus Gnome-shell extensions to make Gnome 3 more configurable. Luckily some of the Gnome developers are on the RedHat payroll, so, I'm sure that helped a bit. Without the extensions, I find Gnome 3 quite unwieldy. Poll in the Fedora Forums show about a 50-50 split as to those that like it and those that hate it. Guess we're back to the normal Gnome vs. KDE numbers again. And I'm back to using KDE. It was my first DE using Linux, and it feels like I'm home again.

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May 27, 2011
marc

Goineasy9 wrote:

Fedora 15 has been released and has the full Gnome 3 experience, plus Gnome-shell extensions to make Gnome 3 more configurable. Luckily some of the Gnome developers are on the RedHat payroll, so, I'm sure that helped a bit. Without the extensions, I find Gnome 3 quite unwieldy. Poll in the Fedora Forums show about a 50-50 split as to those that like it and those that hate it. Guess we're back to the normal Gnome vs. KDE numbers again. And I'm back to using KDE. It was my first DE using Linux, and it feels like I'm home again.

I'm obviously a KDE guy. I didn't like the gnome 2.x branch but I found it usable. I gave a try last week to gnome 3.0: My God that was a terrible experience!!!

I dunno, to me Gnome seems to be transforming into a kind of "mac" for linux and I *hate* being told how to do things. Previews and demos looked kinda great but... wow, the user experience is definitely horrible in my humble opinion. You need way too many clicks for simple things and it's not keyboard friendly, at all.

I seriously encourage everybody to stay with the old gnome or any other DE.

Regards

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May 28, 2011
kerneldaemon

I gave up on squeeze, gnome 3 was not my only issue with the distro, I lack the skills and patience to iron them out right now so jumped to fedora 15. I had squeeze on my laptop (Dell Studio) and recently banished windoze 7 for Ubuntu 11.4 on the family PC so for the most part I have been using unity recently. Gnome 3 by comparison is awesome! I am really really really into gnome 3 right now, for a terrible moment I was considering KDE (again) but now there is no need!

There is a whole bunch of stuff missing from Gnome 3 at the moment I feel but very happy regardless.

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