Installing gnome desktop

[Guest]

Hello everyone. I switched to Kubuntu because I can't stand Unity. Anyway, I apt-get installed gdm, but when I restarted the computer, and I was presented with the login screen, the available choices for desktops were KDE Plasma, and user-defined. I selected user-defined, then logged in, and got an error basically saying it couldn't load session gnome. Even the login screen looks wacked. Instead of showing pictures, it shows a red box with a white X in it. During the installation, I was presented with a dialog box in bash asking which I wanted to use for the login screen. I chose gdm.

I googled this before I posted this here, but the most "relevant" results were on how to remove gnome instead of installing it. I searched on this message board for various relevant keywords, including just "gnome", and I found one other topic dealing with the same error message as mine, but that problem had a different cause, and there was no useful information in it as of yet. Also, the more pages I clicked on in the results, the less relevant the results were, hence I am posting this.

I went to the gnome section under the Desktop board, but surprisingly, I saw zero topics in there, so I posted here.

I'm sure there are some configuration files that need to be fixed, and I'm sure the solution is pretty simple, so I'm still googling.

Has anybody had success installing gnome under Kubuntu 12.04?

Info
****
lsb_release -a:
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS
Release: 12.04
Codename: precise

uname -a:
Linux metalgear 3.2.0-40-generic-pae #64-Ubuntu SMP Mon Mar 25 21:44:41 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Kubuntu 12.04 on i386 platform
I really don't see how posting system specs will help, since this is more of a software issue, and I've never had a problem getting a halfway decent distribution of Linux to work flawlessly on my computer. It's new enough to run K 12.04 great, except for this installation issue. But if someone really needs to know the manufacturer of my RAM sticks or the vendor id, etc. of any of my hardware, I will provide that.

Thanks

[claydoh]

What exactly did you install? gdm is just a login manager.

I am guessing you would need to install the correct package that pulls in all the gnome bits that make up the desktop environment. From a brief look, the package "gnome" will do that. version 3.4

For newer gnome packages, you might have to find a ppa.

[Guest]

Thank you for your reply. In fact, I just started the "gnome" installation right before I checked back in this topic. I mistakenly thought gdm was the right package. However, as the text scrolled up the screen, I caught a glimpse of the word "unity". 0.o I'll wait until the installation is done before I investigate this "unity" crap.

[claydoh]

Unity and gnome 3 are rather similar in many ways

[SteveRiley]

Do you want both GNOME and KDE installed? Or only GNOME?

[rybnik]

I also switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu (initially) because I couldn't stand Unity, but I've since found I really enjoy Plasma. Unity and Gnome 3 seem mostly the same to me and presumably it's the old Gnome 2 interface that you want. So if you get the current Gnome package or just install from the repository, that probably wouldn't work for you. I'd suggest you check out the MATE desktop, which is a fork of Gnome 2 and still maintained. Either that or find a Gnome package that's at least a few years old.

But if the DE alone is the reason for your switch and (apparently) you haven't taken a liking to Plasma, then maybe Kubuntu isn't really what you want. Try Linux Mint, maybe?

And yes, gdm and kdm (and the other *dm out there) are just GUIs for selecting which DE you want. They don't contain any desktop environment themselves.