As you all gnow, GNOME, the pinnacle of desktop GUI design, is not available on Devuan. I've packaged elogind and gnome-settings-daemon, allowing you to install the GNOME core packages, minus the display manager.

Screenshot

Step 1: install elogind

Go to the elogind package releases, and get the package according to your architecture. Then, open a terminal, and,

sudo apt install ./elogind_234-2.1_i386.deb

where i386 is your architecture.

If the service didn't start, start elogind by typing

sudo service elogind start

Step 2: install gnome-settings-daemon

Alternative solution for step 2

Go to the gnome-settings-daemon package releases, and get the package. Then, type in:

sudo apt install ./gnome-settings-daemon_3.24.3-1_i386.deb

where i386 is your architecture.

Step 3: install gnome-shell

sudo apt install gnome-shell

If you can log out, and log back in with the gnome session, you're gold. You can now install the rest of the GNOME apps.

Compiling elogind and gnome-settings-daemon yourself

To build these packages, you first need to:

sudo apt install git dpkg-dev build-essential

Compiling elogind

- Get build dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential debhelper libudev-dev pkg-config docbook-xsl xsltproc automake autoconf libtool intltool gperf gtk-doc-tools intltool libcap-dev

- Get linux headers

sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

- Build

mkdir elogind-tmp && cd elogind-tmp
git clone https://github.com/shwsh/elogind/
cd elogind
git checkout v234-stable
dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us

You may need to set the environment variable DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck before the dpkg-buildpackage command because there's one test that keeps failing if elogind is already running.

deb packages will appear in the elogind-tmp dir and you may install them with apt.

Make sure you also install libelogind-dev for building gnome-settings-daemon.

Compiling gnome-settings-daemon

- Get build dependencies:

Insert a deb-src repository into your sources.list, i.e.

deb-src http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged ceres          main

, then

sudo apt update
sudo apt build-dep gnome-settings-daemon

gnome-settings-daemon requires libupower-glib-dev (>= 0.99.0), however that's not currently in Devuan's repository, so add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb  http://ftp.tw.debian.org/debian         stretch         main

(Replace ftp.tw.debian.org with the fastest debian mirror)

Then,

sudo apt remove --auto-remove libupower-glib-dev
sudo apt install -t stretch libupower-glib-dev

Remove the last line you've added from /etc/apt/sources.list.

- Build

mkdir gsd-tmp && cd gsd-tmp
git clone https://github.com/shwsh/gnome-settings-daemon/
cd gnome-settings-daemon
git checkout gnome-3-24
dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us

deb packages should appear, and you may install them.

Issues

• gdm3 doesn't run, and will probably never be packaged :(

• network-manager-gnome won't install, as NetworkManager is a systemd thing

Fixing gnome-session exiting on startup

Fixing GNOME Tweak Tool

If you enter 'gnome-tweak-tool' on the command line, and it complains about complains about missing key 'disable-user-extensions', edit /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.shell.gschema.xml. Add these lines after the first "schema" tag:

    <key name="disable-user-extensions" type="b">
      <default>false</default>
      <summary>
      </summary>
      <description>
      </description>
    </key>

Save and quit your text editor, then compile the glib schema:

sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.shell.gschema.xml

After that, GNOME Tweak Tool should work.

GNOME Disks can't be installed

GNOME Disks version 3.25 in the Ceres repository requires udisks (version >= 2.7.2), however that's not in the Devuan repo. So, GNOME Disks must be installed with the ascii version. Add this to your sources.list:

deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged     ascii          main

, then:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -t ascii gnome-disk-utility

gnome-color-manager can't be installed

First, install colord:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install colord

Add this to your sources.list:

deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged     jessie          main

, then:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -t jessie gnome-color-manager