installing gnome-shell gives me gnome 2 instead of 3

Question

I just installed ubuntu 12.04 and wanted to use the gnome 3 shell, according to this site it was just a matter of installing the gnome shell as gnome 3 is already part of ubuntu 12.04

So I did sudo apt-get install gnome-shell and logged out, selected gnome and logged in and I was looking at gnome 2 instead of 3. What went wrong?

Answer 1

gnome-shell requires some level of 3D hardware-acceleration to work.

It doesn't have to be special hardware - integrated graphics should in almost all cases be fine. But 3D acceleration must be working.

Gnome 3's window manager, mutter, is a compositing window manager that is OpenGL accelerated.

If gnome-shell doesn't detect that you have the right capabilities, it'll load into a "fallback mode" which means it loads an old-style panel that looks like Gnome 2 and it doesn't use a compositing window manager.

Ubuntu has helpful ways of installing proprietary drivers for graphics - have you tried these?

Answer 2

What the OP is seeing is the "old gnome 3". Gnome 3.4 is using llvmpipe to support older hardware.

Here is what gnome-shell now looks like in fallback mode (screenshot is taken with an intel GMA500 using the psb_gfx driver, which is 2d only).

As of my post today, the latest versions of gnome-shell and llvmpipe have not yet been fully ported to Ubuntu or a ppa.

There is a ppa for llvmpipe, but because llvmpipe is under rapid development it is currently better to build it from source (git).

See How to install LLVMpipe?

Answer 3

I had the same problem. If you're using an ATI Radeon graphics card like me, this might be the solution:

http://onubuntu.blogspot.ca/2011/10/manually-removing-fglrx-from-ubuntu.html

Here's a copy/paste of the important bits:

~$ sudo apt-get purge xorg-driver-fglrx
~$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri
~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
~$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core