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 LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.
Download (HTTP): https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-session/46/gnome-session-46.0.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: f68f71cb53d650916f9ef9cb6076f643
Download size: 476 KB
Estimated disk space required: 14 MB
Estimated build time: 0.2 SBU
elogind-255.5, gnome-desktop-44.1, JSON-GLib-1.10.0, Mesa-24.2.5, and UPower-1.90.6
xmlto-0.0.29, and libxslt-1.1.42 with docbook-xml-4.5 and docbook-xsl-nons-1.79.2 (to build the documentation)
When running GNOME under Wayland-1.23.0, 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 \
-D systemduserunitdir=/tmp \
.. &&
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{,-46.0}
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
Now, as the root user, remove
systemd units that are useless on SysV systems:
rm -rv /tmp/{*.d,*.target,*.service}
The startup sequence of gnome-wayland needs to create a dbus
session. On SysV, this has to be added to the shipped gnome-wayland.desktop file, which is written for
systemd. As the root user:
sed -e 's@^Exec=@&/usr/bin/dbus-run-session @' \
-i /usr/share/wayland-sessions/gnome-wayland.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-46.2 is the recommended display manager.
It is also possible to start GNOME from the command line. However, you must still have GDM-46.2 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