The GNOME Session package contains the GNOME session manager.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the book.
Download (HTTP): https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-session/43/gnome-session-43.0.tar.xz
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-session/43/gnome-session-43.0.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: 02ae90bc41fd06e780169b760fb55670
Download size: 476 KB
Estimated disk space required: 12 MB
Estimated build time: 0.1 SBU
gnome-desktop-43.2, JSON-GLib-1.6.6, Mesa-22.3.6, Systemd-253 (runtime), and UPower-1.90.0
xmlto-0.0.28, and libxslt-1.1.37 with docbook-xml-4.5 and docbook-xsl-nons-1.79.2 (to build the documentation)
User Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/gnome-session
When running GNOME under Wayland-1.21.0, environment settings are not imported for the user using the system profile. The Wayland developers are currently undecided on a standard method to provide system environment settings for user sessions. To work around this limitation, execute the following command to make gnome-session use a login shell:
sed 's@/bin/sh@/bin/sh -l@' -i gnome-session/gnome-session.in
Install GNOME Session by running the following commands:
mkdir build && cd build && meson setup --prefix=/usr --buildtype=release .. && ninja
This package does not come with a test suite.
Now, as the root user:
ninja install
Move the documentation to a versioned directory:
mv -v /usr/share/doc/gnome-session{,-43.0}
This package creates two Xorg based .desktop files in the /usr/share/xsessions/ directory, and two Wayland
based .desktop files in the
/usr/share/wayland-sessions/
directory. Only one is needed in each directory on a BLFS system,
so prevent the extra files showing up as options in a display
manager. As the root user:
rm -v /usr/share/xsessions/gnome.desktop && rm -v /usr/share/wayland-sessions/gnome.desktop
--buildtype=release:
Specify a buildtype suitable for stable releases of the package, as
the default may produce unoptimized binaries.
The easiest way to start GNOME is to use a display manager. GDM-43.0 is the recommended display manager.
It is also possible to start GNOME from the command line. However, you must still have GDM-43.0 installed for some portions of the desktop to work. One reason to start from the command line is if you want Wayland support on a system that has the proprietary NVIDIA driver installed, since GDM will not show the Wayland session type on such a system.
To start GNOME using xinit-1.4.2, run the following commands:
cat > ~/.xinitrc << "EOF"
dbus-run-session gnome-session
EOF
startx
Alternatively, to start GNOME with Wayland support, run the following command:
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session gnome-session