GNOME
Gnome Desktop aims to get things done with ease, comfort, and control.
- Create a non-privileged user account for security reasons, if you skipped this step during Installation.
- Enable community repository. Setup-desktop script automatically does this for you.
- Install graphics driver for your video hardware.
Installation using setup-desktop
The Alpine Linux script for setting up a desktop quickly is setup-desktop.
# setup-desktop
On running the above command, you will be prompted to select a desktop environment.
Which desktop environment? ('gnome', 'plasma', 'xfce', 'mate', 'sway' or 'none') [none]
Once you have chosen a desktop environment, this script installs the chosen desktop along with all the necessary packages, firefox browser and adds the necessary services to run on startup. You can reboot when complete and the system will boot into a graphical login screen with the desktop environment. Depending on the desktop chosen, the script also activates the necessary services like dbus, elogind, login manager etc..
To view all the packages that are installed by the script for the chosen desktop you can issue the below command:
# cat /sbin/setup-desktop
When gnome is chosen, the above utility also installs Pipewire for audio and gdm as display manager.
Installing Additional packages
If you want, you can install additional GNOME apps for a more complete GNOME experience with:
# apk add gnome-apps-extra
And even all of GNOME games with:
# apk add gnome-games-collection
Enabling GNOME Shell screen recording
For the embedded screen recording in GNOME Shell to work, you will need some additional packages:
# apk add pipewire wireplumber gst-plugin-pipewire
Enabling GNOME Software
For GNOME Software to be able to manage APK packages, it needs the apk-polkit-server service working. To enable it and start it up:
# 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).
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