Fri Jan 20 22:41:10 EET 2012

How to install GNOME 2 desktop environment on Xubuntu / Substitute Xubuntu's XFCE desktop manager with GNOME

XFCE in Xubuntu looks quite nice, the developers of Xubuntu made it look and work really well.

Anyways XFCE was lacking many of the features that GNOME offers (among which the most important one in that case was creating Icons on the desktop).
Even though creation of XFCE icons on the desktop has ways to be done, this is quite a complex process and its complete un-interactive. Besides that I could not find a way to add programs to XFce's main menus (as icons).

Therefore Xubuntu's Xfce is not suitable gui envorinment for Linux novice who had no knowledge on Linux commands and stuffs.

On the other hand I've seen many users coming from Windows world to Linux to have cope approximately well with GNOME.

Therefore I decided to subsitute Xubuntu's XFCE with GNOME
I used apt-get to install GNOME desktop environment like so:

root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install --yes gnome-desktop-environment
...


Now simply logout from Xfce and on the GDM login screen I had to choose GNOME Hence I used apt-get to install GNOME desktop environment on Xubuntu like so:

root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install --yes gnome-desktop-environment
...


Now simply logout from Xfce and on the GDM login screen I had to choose GNOME and I can use the way more user friendly and easy to customize GNOME 2.