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.
GNOME 3
version is stored in this file:
/usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xml
content (on my system):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gnome-version>
<platform>3</platform>
<minor>6</minor>
<micro>2</micro>
<distributor>Arch Linux</distributor>
<date>2012-11-13</date>
</gnome-version>
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:
/usr/share/gnome-about/gnome-version.xml
(though this file might be missing on some older Gnome 2
versions IIRC)
And no, you shouldn't use commands like gnome-session --version
, gnome-shell --version
, gdm --version
etc. 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).
-
1A friendly update: as of this writing, Debian Stretch (Testing) seems to provide file /usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xml in package gnome-desktop3-data . To see installation history, on Debian: zgrep " installed" /var/log/dpkg.log* | grep "gnome-desktop3-data" | cut -d':' -f2- | sort -r – iokevins May 30 '16 at 18:36
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1@iokevins - possible... but I'm not using debian/ubuntu/derivatives and my post isn't distro-specific: upstream, there is only one package and that is
gnome-desktop
; some distros may chose to split the package and call the parts whatever. I'll edit my post to be more specific. – don_crissti May 30 '16 at 19:39 -
-
here is a
bash
example using xmlstarlet to query the XML in the files to which @don_crissti points. – TomRoche Feb 7 '17 at 3:44 -
1Thanks, @don_crissti. Here is a Python 3 script to retrieve the info from that XML: gnome-version.py – Luciano Ramalho Apr 30 '17 at 1:45
If you launch gnome-system-monitor
it shows the version in the dialog:
% gnome-system-monitor
My aging Fedora 14 box
Ubuntu 12.04
Try gnome-session --version
. There is a man page for it on my Debian (namely GNOME-SESSION(1)
) but the --version
option is not listed. Well, for me it says gnome-session 3.4.2.1
.
You can run it in the console
DISPLAY=":0" gnome-session --version
(possibly having to change the display).
-
This reports 3.2.1, and
gnome-system-monitor
reports 3.4.2, so it doesn't look right. And my distro is fully up to date. – l0b0 Apr 22 '13 at 5:33 -
See don_crissti's answer. On my system, /usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xml has 3.4.2 in it. gnome-session --version reports 3.4.2. gnome-system-monitor reports 3.4.1. based on that and a rough morning I'd say gnome-system-monitor is junk. Further exploring shows that the gnome-system-monitor version (not the gnome version) is 3.4.1.... so that's what that's reporting. Further exploration in my package manager, shows that I have, even with an up-to-date system, a mixture of 3.4.0 (gnome-common), 3.4.1 (gnome-shell) and 3.4.2(gnome-desktop3, gnome-session etc.) components. – SuperMagic Apr 22 '13 at 11:47
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@SuperMagic: Those numbers are fairly consistent, although it is irritating not to be able to get a definite answer. My
/usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xml
says3.4.2
, butgnome-session --version
says3.4.2.1
so that's sort of correct (?). Maybe the morale of all of this is that the version isn't holy; it is just a number. – Emanuel Berg Apr 22 '13 at 22:39
$ apt-cache show gnome-shell | grep Version
(Vivid or Wily)
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3As I said in my post,
gnome-shell
is just agnome
component so this method is unreliable. Use what the gnome devs use. – don_crissti Sep 3 '15 at 18:46