Ever since I blogged about the status of GNOME 3 in Debian experimental, my web logs show that many people are looking for ways to try out GNOME 3 with Debian Squeeze.
No GNOME 3 for Debian 6.0
Don’t hold your breath, it’s highly unlikely that anyone of the Debian GNOME team will prepare backports of GNOME 3 for Debian 6.0 Squeeze. It’s already difficult enough to do everything right in unstable with a solid upgrade path from the current versions in Squeeze…
But if you are brave enough to want to install GNOME 3 with Debian 6.0 on your machine then I would suggest that you’re the kind of person who should run Debian testing instead (or even Debian unstable, it’s not so horrible). That’s what most people who like to run recent versions of software do.
How to run Debian testing
You’re convinced and want to run Debian testing? It’s really easy, just edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and replace “stable” with “testing”. A complete file could look like this:
# Main repository deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free # Security updates deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security testing main contrib non-free
Now you should be able to run apt-get dist-upgrade and end up with a testing system.
How to install GNOME 3 on Debian testing aka wheezy
If you want to try GNOME 3 before it has landed in testing, you’ll have to add unstable and experimental to your sources.list:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
You should not install GNOME 3 from experimental if you’re not ready to deal with some problems and glitches. Beware: once you upgraded to GNOME 3 it will be next to impossible to go back to GNOME 2.32 (you can try it, but it’s not officially supported by Debian).
To avoid upgrading all your packages to unstable, you will tell APT to prefer testing with the APT::Default-Release directive:
# cat >/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/local <<END APT::Default-Release "testing"; END
To allow APT to upgrade the GNOME packages to unstable/experimental, you will also install the following pinning file as /etc/apt/preferences.d/gnome:
Package: *gnome* libglib2.0* *vte* *pulse* *peas* libgtk* *gjs* *gconf* *gstreamer* alacarte *brasero* cheese ekiga empathy* gdm3 gcalctool baobab *gucharmap* gvfs* hamster-applet *nautilus* seahorse* sound-juicer *totem* remmina vino gksu xdg-user-dirs-gtk dmz-cursor-theme eog epiphany* evince* *evolution* file-roller gedit* metacity *mutter* yelp* rhythmbox* banshee* system-config-printer transmission-* tomboy network-manager* libnm-* update-notifier shotwell liferea *software-properties* libunique-3.0-0 libseed-gtk3-0 libnotify* libpanel-applet-4-0 libgdata11 libcamel* libcanberra* libchamplain* libebackend* libebook* libecal* libedata* libegroupwise* libevent* gir1.2-* libxklavier16 python-gmenu libgdict-1.0-6 libgdu-gtk0 Pin: release experimental Pin-Priority: 990 Package: *gnome* libglib2.0* *vte* *pulse* *peas* libgtk* *gjs* *gconf* *gstreamer* alacarte *brasero* cheese ekiga empathy* gdm3 gcalctool baobab *gucharmap* gvfs* hamster-applet *nautilus* seahorse* sound-juicer *totem* remmina vino gksu xdg-user-dirs-gtk dmz-cursor-theme eog epiphany* evince* *evolution* file-roller gedit* metacity *mutter* yelp* rhythmbox* banshee* system-config-printer transmission-* tomboy network-manager* libnm-* update-notifier shotwell liferea *software-properties* libunique-3.0-0 libseed-gtk3-0 libnotify* libpanel-applet-4-0 libgdata11 libcamel* libcanberra* libchamplain* libebackend* libebook* libecal* libedata* libegroupwise* libevent* gir1.2-* libxklavier16 python-gmenu libgdict-1.0-6 libgdu-gtk0 Pin: release unstable Pin-Priority: 990 Package: * Pin: release experimental Pin-Priority: 150
Note that I used “Pin-Priority: 990” this time (while I used 500 in the article explaining how to install GNOME 3 on top of unstable), that’s because you want these packages to have the same priority than those of testing, and they have a priority of 990 instead of 500 due to the APT::Default-Release setting.
You’re done, your next dist-upgrade should install GNOME 3. It will pull a bunch of packages from unstable too but that’s expected since the packages required by GNOME 3 are spread between unstable and experimental.
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It seems libpulse is broken in experimental right now (at least it fails to install in my sid with experimental VM).
What’s the problem you saw? I have the latest libpulse0 on my i386 installation so it worked for me at some point. But maybe something else changed since then.
So you’re right, the problem is already reported: see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=624847 and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=629394
Hopefully a fixed version will be uploaded soon.
That said, in the mean time you can get the missing libcxb1 package from Squeeze (and since I have squeeze in my sources.list it got automatically picked).
That worked well, thanks!
However, there seems to be some issue with VirtualBox. My VM randomly crashes when launching gnome-shell (and f.ex. glxgears).
Some times the session starts (but in fallback mode).
I see this in .xsession-errors:
gnome-session-is-accelerated: GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE is too small.
I tried it both on my desktop with nouveau and the laptop with intel, so I assume it’s a VB issue…
The .xsession-errors is in the VM or in the host?
Did you try tweaking (increasing?) the amount of RAM allocated for the virtual video card?
It’s in the VM. And I increaded the allocated video RAM to 128 MB.
Note that unstable does occasionally break entire systems. The recent issues with /run breaking udev (breaking the boot), and the bug in glibc which caused /lib64 to disappear (breaking all dynamically linked programs) required some careful rescuing to recover from. I wouldn’t recommend unstable to anyone who can’t recover from such situations. Testing, on the other hand, has issues that severe filtered out by those of us who run unstable. 🙂
Guess that there is no way to test GNOME 3 while keeping 2.32 installed and untouched? Back when KDE4 first came out packages were available to install under /opt and thus did not disrupt 3.5..
Perhaps its not a priority for the packagers
Indeed, I don’t know of any such packages.
I have tested gnome3 environment using schroot – it was quite sufficient
In this time the package gnome-session and gnome-session-fallback has breaking depends:
gnome-settings-daemon depends libgnults (>=2.11.7-0)
This seems to be an amd64 specific problem probably because the uploader built it against experimental. Add libgnutls26 to the pinning file and you’ll be fine (i.e. you should allow apt to pick up the libgnutls26 from experimental which satisfies this dependency).
Sorry, this problem is fixed today in repository 🙂
So does this mean that Gnome3 isn’t really “Made Of Easy”? LOL
awesome guide mate. thank you.
nothing like living dangerously 😉
I have following error after running “apt-get update” as root
E: Syntaxfehler /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/local:4: Zusätzlicher Unsinn am Dateiende
What can I do? This is the content of “/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/local” is:
APT::Default-Release “testing”;
END
Remove the “END”, it’s not meant to be part of that file.
Thank you, that worked. (o:
Now, I have a different issue. I could’ve something to do with the fact that I am running this in virtual box. GDM3 works fine, after logging in I only see the desktop-background abnd the desktopf-switcher, if I use them.
Maybe I am missing some packages in the APT pinning. I head to force a the version from testing for gnome-session-deamon, but “apt-get disk-upgrade” wants to install it. Luckily I have a snapshot before updating anything and can try it again to make it right
Hi, thanks for your tips,.
So, When we will have gnome 3 for debian 6 ?
thanks a lot
Raphael hi,
I did as you suggest but with “apt-cahe policy gnome3-session” not exists, just “gnome-session”
i.e. i’m with linux-image-3.2.0-rc7-486
Hi,
I tried to update my Wheezy to Gnome 3.2, but
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get upgrade
is not installing gnome-shell, only other programs
sources.list:
deb http://ftp.at.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.at.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
apt.conf.d/local:
APT::Default-Release “testing”;
apt.conf.d/local
APT::Default-Release “testing”;