Upgrading to Gnome3 PPA on Natty resolved

Upgrading to Gnome3 PPA on Ubuntu 11.04 had a very unstable behaviour ( Screen flickerings, Nautilus without theme icons etc ..). This occured cause upgrading to Gnome 3 on Natty breaks the default theming used by Ubuntu Classic & the new Unity desktop environments by setting the icon-theme to gnome and the gtk-theme to Adwaita.

Gnome 3 ignores the previous gconf interface settings and only reads the dconf ones.
You can set it right by editing the dconf file using dconf-editor or try the steps below.

Few things as workaround that can be done before GNOME 3 gets a permanent fix, the below steps worked for me hope it helps you too.

1. Remove gnome-accessibility-themes and install gnome-themes-standard
sudo apt-get remove gnome-accessibility-themes
sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-standard

2. Edit /usr/share/xsessions/gnome.desktop
change the line Exec=gnome-session –session=ubuntu to
Exec=gnome-session –session=gnome

below are the content of gnome.desktop file

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Ubuntu
Comment=This session logs you into Ubuntu
Exec=gnome-session –session=gnome
TryExec=gnome-session
Icon=
Type=Application
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=gnome-session-2.0
~

3. Install gnome-tweak-tool
go to interface tab, set gnome theme to “ADWAITA” and
icon theme to “unity-icon-theme” and reboot

bug # 734563