This page contains general information about building and configuring GNOME Flashback. If you want to hack on GNOME Flashback, contribute patches or fix a bug, you will first need to get a current GNOME Flashback environment in which you can test your changes.

Creating a GNOME Flashback environment requires the following steps:

1. Build all required GNOME Flashback modules. The preferable method to do this is to use JHBuild. Alternatively you could grab the recent tarballs for each module from the Releases page and build those, but we do not recommend that.

2. After you have created a successful build you will need to configure your environment to get a new session entry which you can use to login into a session that runs the modules that you have just built.
3. When every thing is setup, you can logout, select the your newly created Gnome Flashback session in the Display Manager and login into your GNOME Flashback session. Once in there you can hack on the code and use JHBuild to restart individual modules.

When you have built modules with JHBuild, then you should not simply run a module directly (e.g by typing ./src/gnome-panel --replace). Instead you should use jhbuild to that it. This will ensure that the required environment variables are correctly setup.

There are generally two ways todo that:

1. Start a new subshell and run the module from there:

   jhbuild shell
   # run some module, for example gnome-panel
   ./src/gnome-panel --replace

1. Use jhbuild to run the module directly

    jhbuild run gnome-panel

Old instructions which need to be cleaned up:

 sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/xsessions/gnome-fallback.desktop /usr/share/xsessions/
 (and, if you use your distribution's gnome-session:)
 sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/gnome-session/sessions/gnome-flashback.session /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/