HowTo: Find the GNOME Desktop Version

by on February 6, 2008 · 7 comments· LAST UPDATED May 7, 2012

in , ,

How do I find out GNOME desktop version from a shell prompt or GUI?

You need to use the gnome-panel or gnome-about command from the shell prompt to find out the GNOME desktop version. The GNOME panel displays an area on your screen, which acts as a repository for the main menu, application launchers, and applets. Open terminal type the following command:

gnome-panel --version

Sample output:

GNOME gnome-panel 2.24.1

Or type the following on modern gnome desktop systems:
$ gnome-about --gnome-version
Sample outputs:

Version: 2.30.2
Distributor: Debian
Build Date: Friday 12 November 2010

Gnome 3.x user need to use the following command:
$ gnome-session --version

View the GNOME Desktop Version Using GUI Dialog Box

Click on System > About Gnome

Fig.01: Find Out The GNOME Version

Fig.01: Find Out The GNOME Version



If you would like to be kept up to date with our posts, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or even by subscribing to our RSS Feed.


{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Arky April 14, 2009 at 4:07 am

I think the trick is to use gnome-about like this.

$ gnome-about –gnome-version
Version: 2.26.0
Distributor: Ubuntu
Build Date: 03/19/2009

Reply

2 Alex October 14, 2011 at 11:55 am

Just install Ubuntu 11.10 with the hope Gnome 3 was installed.
Guess what, it isn’t…

$ gnome-about –gnome-version

Reply

3 Serrano October 20, 2011 at 1:45 pm

I installed Ubuntu 11.10 yesterday and Gnome 3 was installed by default. If you want to login into Gnome 3 instead of Unity, you can choose the option “GNOME” in the login screen.

Reply

4 lsafladsf October 16, 2011 at 9:33 am

on GNOME 3.2 open the process-monitor application and go to the “System” tab. There you should find the kernel, ubuntu and gnome version.

Reply

5 lsafladsf October 16, 2011 at 9:36 am

i ment the app “gnome-system-monitor” not process-monitor.

Reply

6 blah February 1, 2012 at 6:44 am

The correct way to do this is:

gnome-about –gnome-version

(note there are two hyphens before gnome-version)

Reply

7 Serrano February 1, 2012 at 9:37 pm

Unfortunately that no longer works for the latest versions of Ubuntu. Both

gnome-panel

and

gnome-about

are no longer available since the switch to Unity/GNOME 3. Instead you can use

gnome-session

, which is also backwards compatible with older versions of GNOME:

gnome-session --version

Reply

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes for your code and commands: <strong> <em> <ol> <li> <u> <ul> <kbd> <blockquote> <pre> <a href="" title="">

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Previous Faq:

Next Faq: