Try Out GNOME Shell

(Part of) the next generation GNOME desktop...

First of all, this is still very early-stage, so be aware of what you are doing. Also, note that gnome-shell may have some requirement on hardware. It's not working for me on several machines with old nvidia/intel/ati cards, though runs smoothly on my laptop with nvidia 8400.

So if you want to try out, open a terminal and write:

sudo conary update {clutter,gjs,gir-repository,gobject-introspection,mutter,gnome-shell}=foresight.rpath.org@fl:2-devel

These packages can be installed side-by-side with existing ones (unless you have installed older versions of them yourself), i.e. no conflict with your metacity, gnome-panel and so on.

After they are installed, you can get it running by:

gnome-shell --replace

With this, your window manager (metacity) and gnome-panel will be replaced by gnome-shell. But if you don't see a working gnome-shell, press Ctrl-C and you should be able to kill it (unless you've taken many actions and lost the focus of the terminal window). "When gnome-shell exits (you can kill it with Control-C in the terminal in which you started it), gnome-panel and metacity are restarted."

If it's working well and you want to use it as the default environment, do:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager gnome-shell --type string

Likewise, to switch back to metacity, do:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager metacity --type string

Log out and log in, that's it. Enjoy!

Please file bugs to foresight or to gnome, or chat with us on #foresight on Freenode. And, if you managed to make a screencast (instruction here, but it doesn't work well for me), please attach it somewhere, thanks!