On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 05:13:00PM +0000, Chris Lale wrote:

I have installed Gnome from the official release CDROMs but I cannot get the standard desktop with The "foot" icon, bottom bar, panels etc. I get a custom "debian" background, and menus that appear when I right-click the desktop. There is a workspace icon in the top right-hand corner.

Like most distributions, the version in Debian itself has been customised to connect with Debian's own menu system and use some debian-related images for things like the panel menu and the backdrop. The "workspace icon" makes it sound like you may be running Gnome with Enlightment, which is a rather old combination. Try installing sawfish and see if it helps.

Also I cannot change the window manager via Gnome control center, or find a way of adding items to the menus. I do not know whether the problem is in the window manager or the Gnome configuration.

Changing window manager always worked fine for me. Adding items to the menu can be done with the normal debian menu system. Basically, you add files to /usr/lib/menu and run update-menus

Does anyone know how I can install a clean "standard" version of Gnome?

You could see if Gnome themselves provide debs, but last I knew they only did RPM themselves (Why oh why oh why?).