Saturday, June 26, 2010

Quick Post - Installing Gnome window manager in Ubuntu Server 9.10

To help people reading my posts here in the blog and need further information to complete those tutorials in the posts, I'm going to post the Quick Post. My intenntion is to provide short information and tweaks about the themes.

Well, let's start the first quick post. I'll explain how to install Gnome desktop on Ubuntu Server 9.10.
You could ask me why don't you use Ubuntu Desktop ? In fact I use it on my desktop. The purpose to have an window manager like gnome in the server is to perform some specific tasks impossible to do by command line.
Let me explain that. For example: to create a new Virtualbox virtual machine you need an window manager supported by virtualbox software.
 In the future I could post more examples about features and resources only available over window manager like Gnome or KDE.
Of course the objetive for this post is also support further readings and articles I'll post here in the blog.

Installing Gnome in Ubuntu Server 9.10

Having installed Ubuntu server as usual with only the command line available follow these steps:
  1. sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential ubuntu-desktop
  2. sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
  3. sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
If everything acurred as usual, you should see Gnome login window. Enter your login and password information and you have finished !!


If something is wrong, check error logs in /var/logs/X11 directory or /var/log. Look for Xorg.0.log. Also in /var/log read the messages file and look for some X11 errors.

One of the most known problemas about window manager is misconfiguration for the video card. Sometimes you can fix them using apt-cache search < card's name > For example apt-cache search nvidia. It will show us drivers for nvidia cards. The same could happen with intel cards, onboard chipsets or other brands. Don't forget, look first using apt-cache. If you still couldn't find it, check for vendor specific information using the command: I you found a package for your card you're lucky , now we are going to the easiest part: get the package's name and type

# apt-get install


# lspci
It will show every pci card information

Then, with the card's model you can find drivers at the vendor's webste and read more information about how to install it.

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