GNOME can be downloaded and installed as a part of a distribution, which also include many GNOME applications. Here’s how you can start using GNOME 3 today.

Live Images

You can try GNOME 3 right now by using a live version from a CD/DVD or USB stick. This lets you try all the GNOME 3 features without having to install it on your computer.

To run from a CD/DVD, burn the download to a disk, insert into your computer and reboot.

To run the GNOME 3 from a USB stick:

• Download the USB image writer (below) and extract it
• Open a terminal and navigate to the extracted image writer folder (eg. $ cd Downloads/abock-image-usb-stick-f3b1002)
• Prepare the image writer by running: $ chmod a+x ./image-usb-stick
• Remove any USB storage devices that you might have connected to your computer and insert the empty USB stick that you want to write to
• Run the image writer script: $ sudo ./image-usb-stick path_to_the_live_image.iso (the script requires Python 2.x)
• To run the live image, reboot your computer with the USB stick attached

Distributions

Some of the most popular distributions will be shipping GNOME 3 as part of the their next releases.

Get the code!

GNOME’s software is Free Software: all our code is available for download and can be freely modified and redistributed. There are several ways to get our code:

• Browse the development code
• Download the code for our latest release
• Use the build tool