How find the current gnome version in ubuntu 14.04?
Solution 1:
for the version of gnome
$ dpkg -l libgnome2-common
and for gnome-shell:
$ dpkg -l gnome-shell
works whether the packages are installed or not.
Solution 2:
I do not see an issue: you do NOT have gnome-shell installed so any command asking for a version of gnome-shell, or any command related to gnome-shell, will error out. And you have Unity installed and that would be the case when you installed a default Ubuntu
unity --version
will show you the version of that.
Solution 3:
for the version of gnome
$ gnome-shell --version