How do I check my version of GNOME-Shell?
There’s got to be some simple way I’m missing, but for the life of me I can’t find it. How do I check my version of GNOME-Shell?
2 Answers 2
into a terminal.
The gnome-shell man page doesn’t show —version as an option. Assuming you have installed it from the ubuntu repositories then you can look up the version in the repository. To just show the version:
Determine which version of GNOME is running
You can determine the version of GNOME that is running on your system by going to the About panel in Settings .
Open the Activities overview and start typing About .
A window appears showing information about your system, including your distribution’s name and the GNOME version.
More Information
- Tips & tricks — Get the most out of GNOME with these handy tips.
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How to get the GNOME version?
Is there an authoritative way to get the GNOME version, as long as I have a working GNOME desktop (any version) running? Several of these suggestions don’t work on my system, either because the executables and/or packages simply don’t exist or the menu item isn’t available.
6 Answers 6
For GNOME 4 , they use gnome-shell version. If we look at the source code we can see they are reporting the gnome-shell version as the "GNOME version" in the Settings > Info panel:
There’s a debate right now whether this was the right thing to do, see
info-overview: rename "GNOME Version" to "GNOME Shell Version"
Note the intro to that discussion confirms what I’ve been saying all the time:
The GNOME version and the GNOME Shell version are not the same thing.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they change it again in the future. Until then, to get the Gnome DE version means to get the gnome-shell version so use either
In GNOME 3 , version is stored in this file:
content (on my system):
The file is part of the upstream package called gnome-desktop (note that some distros split it into several packages so on your distro the file may end up in a package with a different name. )
GNOME developers use this file to get the DE version number and display it in System Settings (aka gnome-control-center ). So getting GNOME version "the official way" means parsing the said file and extracting platform , minor and micro values.
If you play with that file you can instantly see the results 🙂
In GNOME 2 the file in question is:
(though this file might be missing on some older Gnome 2 versions IIRC)
Note that for GNOME v.2 & v.3 commands like gnome-session —version , gnome-shell —version , gdm —version etc might return confusing numbers. Those are GNOME desktop components, they are separate packages (with different code, history/changelog and maintainers) and as such their version may be different. They’ll report the right GNOME version only if they have the same version as gnome-desktop (which is not always the case).
How to check GNOME version
GNOME is a community-driven open-source project for desktop environment for GNU/Linux. The GNOME community is also involved in contributing a wide range of core applications that run on GNOME desktop. In this tutorial, I will describe how to check if you are using GNOME desktop, and how to find GNOME version.
Check If You Are Running GNOME Desktop
To verify that you are using GNOME desktop, run the following command:
If the above command displays gnome-session process(es), it means that you are using GNOME Desktop.
Check the Version of GNOME Desktop
If you would like to determine the version of GNOME desktop you are using, use either of the two methods described below.
Method One: gnome-about
gnome-about is a tool that shows GNOME about box, and you can use this tool to determine the GNOME version of your desktop.
If gnome-about command is not found in your desktop, it means that you are using GNOME 3.0 and higher. In that case, use the second method.
Method Two: gnome-shell
The second way to find GNOME version is as shown below. This is output for Fedora 18.
Note that Ubuntu Desktop does not come with gnome-shell installed by default. Thus the above command will produce the following error message instead on Ubuntu Desktop.
In this case, you can query APT’s package cache to find out the version of GNOME for Ubuntu Desktop. To do so, use the following command. This works whether or not gnome-shell is installed.
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