Ubuntu 11.10 : you should try gnome-shell

Ubuntu 11.10 is provided with Unity, the graphical user interface from Canonical. Compared to the previous release (Ubuntu 11.04), you can now swith to Gnome Shell. But, why should you swith from Unity to Gnome Shell that you could consider as very similar? My opinion is that Gnome Shell is more pragmatic and beautiful than Unity.

So, how to activate Gnome Shell ?

1. Go to the software center and activate the patner repositories in the software sources
2. In a terminal, run sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
3. Activate it by default with sudo /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -s gnome-shell
4. Reboot and enjoy!

Now that you have almost a prefect shell, you should install some addons :

1. sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras (for flash, java and dvd features)
2. enable dvd decryption with sudo sh /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
3. sudo apt-get update
4. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
5. sudo apt-get remove firefox
6. sudo apt-get install smplayer

A good thing is also to enable numlock on lightdm :

1. sudo apt-get install numlockx
2. echo 'greeter-setup-script=/usr/bin/numlockx on' | sudo tee -a /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

That's all for my default config.