Unfortunately, gnome-shell doesn't work well in VMs due to the fact that it requires 3D acceleration. AFAIK, virtualbox is the only platform that supports 3D em

Unfortunately, gnome-shell doesn't work well in VMs due to the fact that it requires 3D acceleration. AFAIK, virtualbox is the only platform that supports 3D emulation but I can't speak to how well it works because I haven't tried it myself. However, software rendering support has been recently added to rawhide (which will become Fedora 17 in about 6 months). If you're interested in seeing gnome-shell in a VM, you may want to give Fedora 17 a try when it is released.