GNOME

Gnome Desktop aims to get things done with ease, comfort, and control.

Prerequisites

• Internet connectivity, unless the packages have been pre-fetched into a local cache.
• A non-root user account.
• The community repository must be enabled.
• Set up eudev.
• Install and configure D-Bus. without D-Bus icons and keyboard shortcuts may be missing.
• Install appropriate Graphics driver drivers for your hardware. Without graphics drivers, errors are likely to occur.

Installation

The Alpine Linux script for quickly setting up a desktop is:

# setup-desktop

On running the above command, you will be prompted to select a desktop environment.

Which desktop environment? ('gnome', 'plasma', 'xfce', 'mate', 'sway', 'lxqt' or 'none') [none]

Once you have chosen a desktop environment, this script installs the chosen desktop along with necessary packages, firefox browser and adds necessary services to run on startup. You can reboot when complete, and the system will boot into a graphical login screen with the chosen desktop environment. To view the packages installed by the script: $ cat /usr/sbin/setup-desktop

When gnome is chosen, the above script enables community repository and additionally installs D-Bus, eudev, Pipewire and gdm as display manager .

Configuration

To manage network through GUI, configure NetworkManager. You may need to Install necessary subpackages like networkmanager-wifi.

To use GNOME Software as GUI front end for Alpine Package Keeper, ensure that apk-polkit-server service from apk-polkit-rs package is running:

# rc-update add apk-polkit-server default && rc-service apk-polkit-server start

Updating GNOME packages

Most GNOME apps and core systems follow a common versioning pattern, and have a similar release cadence. In order to reduce the workload on maintainers, the gnome-aports-utils project exists. It contains a series of scripts that can be used to detect changes on GNOME-related projects, and commit them. When doing major GNOME updates, and doing minor updates on many projects, these scripts can help warranty that no project is forgotten, and reduce the time needed to build and test the upgrades.

We recommend everybody to use and contribute to that repository instead of pushing updates for every GNOME component individually.

Major GNOME upgrade

About every half year, GNOME publishes a new major release. These are announced at: https://release.gnome.org/calendar/ (note the dates are the tarball-due-dates and not the actual release drop).

With this release the whole GNOME stack gets upgraded, this includes G-related libraries, the GNOME shell with mutter, GNOME core apps and other packages following the same schedule. The GNOME release engeneering team publishes dates for alpha, beta, release candidates and stable versions for every major version, most GNOME core packages follow their schedules, but not all of them. Announcements of the releng team are posted on the GNOME forum (https://discourse.gnome.org/tag/release-team) and Release Notes for each phase (with it's upgraded packages) are at: https://download.gnome.org/core/

Therefore we should also upgrade along the dependency tree (glib -> gtk4 -> mutter -> gnome-shell -> other apps). Most important libraries are glib, gtk4, libadwaita. These are mostly already released in the alpha-phase and don't contain many breaking changed. To upgrade other GNOME core package to the latest version in a major version, you can use gnome-aports-utils or also check https://download.gnome.org/sources (sorted by date) (thats where all GNOME core maintainers upload their tarballs).

Also take a look at Gentoo's upgrading guide: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:GNOME/GNOME_Bumping_Guide

Troubleshooting

If you are unable to log in, check /var/log/gdm/greeter.log, there may be info there from X that indicates failed modules, etc.

If GNOME Terminal doesn't start, add the following to /etc/profile.d/locale.sh: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and reboot.

If the on-screen keyboard shows up in GDM after installing other UIs such as Phosh, you need to disable it by opening the Accessibility menu (top right) when you are in the GDM login screen. You can disable the on-screen keyboard there. Or set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-keyboard-enabled to false for the gdm user with dconf

Slow applications or rendering issues

Please note that some applications, i.e. Gnome Web (Epiphany), may require the installation of libraries related to hardware acceleration to work correctly.

In quite some cases, this can be solved by installing mesa-gles (OpenGL ES). Check if you you have issues loading the shared library libGLESv2.so.2. If so, you can install it with:

# apk add mesa-gles

See also

• GNOME - Archwiki
• GNOME - Gentoo Wiki
• GNOME - PostmarketOS Wiki
• Alpine linux packages available for Gnome