How to Install the Pantheon desktop on Ubuntu

By | May 25, 2023

Pantheon desktop environment

Pantheon is a new desktop environment that comes with elementary OS. It has a mac like look and feel and has been designed very well. It looks superb specially on laptops and can give you a cool looking desktop that you want to show off.

It can be installed on Ubuntu if you want to get the elementary OS like look and feel without changing the OS. In this example we are installing it on Ubuntu 13.04

We covered Elementary OS Luna in another post here:
Elementary OS 0.2 Luna review - now that's more like it

Add the elementary ppa to ubuntu

The elementary ppa provides all the necessary packages to get the Pantheon desktop environment. Add it to ubuntu repositories like this. Also make sure to update.

# sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:elementary-os/daily
# sudo apt-get update

Now install the elementary desktop

# sudo apt-get install elementary-desktop

Thats it, now log out and on the login page, the Pantheon desktop should be visible in the list of desktop environments.

Fix the missing wallpaper issue

There seems to be a bug in the way Pantheon is installed which causes the wallpaper to go missing and a white desktop background displayed instead. To fix this run the following command in your terminal

# gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.background active true

Again logout and login back, and the wallpaper should display fine.

Install elementary tweaks

The next useful thing to install along with pantheon desktop is the elementary tweaks extension, which allows to tweak the pantheon desktop in some ways.

# sudo apt-add-repository ppa:versable/elementary-update
# sudo apt-get update

Now install

$ sudo apt-get install elementary-tweaks

Elementary tweaks will appear as an additional icon in System Settings dialog. Over there you can configure the plank, slingshot etc.

So have fun with your Pantheon desktop and njoy!!

About Silver Moon

A Tech Enthusiast, Blogger, Linux Fan and a Software Developer. Writes about Computer hardware, Linux and Open Source software and coding in Python, Php and Javascript. He can be reached at [email protected].

10 Comments

How to Install the Pantheon desktop on Ubuntu
  1. Reinhold Arnaldo Normanns Garc

    I cant see the shutdown, network, sound and user indicator in the top panel anybody can solve this.?

  2. Guest

    Attempted this in 14.04 and got:
    cryptsetup: WARNING: failed to detect canonical device of overlayfs
    cryptsetup: WARNING: could not determine root devicGAttetpee from /etc/fstab

    during setup

    1. noob

      LiveCD? overlayfs OVERLAYS the cdROM with tmpfs in RAM, as defined in one of the init scripts there is no entry for that in the /etc/fstab…

      1. Rev Paul Webb

        I tried this on 13:10 but the logout/shutdown/restart don’t work….
        Also when I go back to unity my fonts have been changed.

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