GNOME can be used as a part of a distribution, which also include many GNOME applications. Here's how you can start using GNOME 3 today.
Take GNOME 3.6 for a test drive
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. Download the live image
Insert the drive (any data it contains will be erased!)
Run dmesg in a terminal: this will give you the location of the stick in square brackets, such as sdb
To write the image, run sudo dd if=GNOME-3.6.0.iso of=/dev/DRIVE bs=8M conv=fsync, replacing DRIVE with the location (e.g., /dev/sdb but not e.g., /dev/sdb1)
Once the write operation has finished, you can reboot with the USB drive inserted (you may have to specify the boot device on startup)
Distributions
Some of the most popular distributions ship GNOME 3 as part of their next releases.
From Ubuntu 11.10 onwards, GNOME 3 is just a click away.
GNOME 3 can also be used through many other distributions, including Arch Linux and Debian. Check out their websites for more details.
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:
