Hi, this may be a somewhat odd question. I'm not sure anyone has ever asked it before. I am looking for the distribution that has a 100% GNOME proper desktop, as if it were compiled from source by the GNOME team themselves.

I want the default background, default theme, default GNOME menus, panels, etc. I want ONLY the official GNOME proper applications to be installed and nothing else (no OpenOffice.org etc).

Does such a thing exist?

And if not, I have a follow-up question. Is there any easy way, or has anyone put up a guide, to changing the Ubuntu desktop configuration so that it would look like default GNOME?

Thanks!

You should be able to theme Ubuntu to look like a normal Gnome GUI if you want.

To be that way out of the box, I think Debian will be pretty close. It might have Open Office... but I can't think of much else.

IGF

You could try the Gnome live CD. Or, since you are using Debian, you could download Gnome from the project web site and install it on a Debian system that doesn't have Gnome.

http://library.gnome.org/misc/releas...rninstallation

I think the default gentoo is "bare"

If you was to install a minimum debian installation and then add Gnome, which pretty much is a bare version of gnome. You could also just add whatever else software you want.

GNOME Live CD is apparently not available. It's listed as "Coming Soon..." on the website.

But it's not. It has a different background, a different set of default apps loaded on the panel, etc. It includes OpenOffice.org and other apps that are not part of GNOME proper.

If you use the Netinst cd to install the minimum then you will only have the basic installed. Around 600mb of files. Everything else would be installed from the repositories.

Once done, all you will have is a text based command line setup. you would have to install everything else, including Xwindow, Gnome and most other software. During installation it may ask you which option to choose, and you would NOT choose the desktop option.