[desktop] gnome2 install experience

[martine@cs.washington.edu]

I just set up a new machine with gnome2.
Everything pretty much worked right out of the box, but here are some
details:


I use testing, and I just want to be able to pull packages out of
unstable.  My /etc/apt/preferences:

	Package: *
	Pin: release a=testing
	Pin-Priority: 900

	Package: *
	Pin: release a=unstable
	Pin-Priority: 200

Then:
	apt-get -t unstable install gnome

And after that finished:
	echo gnome-session > ~/.Xsession
	startx

Everything started up more or less as I would expect (though the
"loading" window showed half and half across my monitors, that's most
likely their bug and not Debian's).

"Most likely their bug and not Debian's" probably describes most of the
problems I've found:
 - The default font was a monospaced font.  (I was using GDK_USE_XFT=1
   already for some other GTK2 stuff before I installed GNOME.)
   The font preferences showed it defaulted to "sans", but apparently
   that alias wasn't pointing anywhere useful (for the GTK2 stuff, I was
   just using 'gtk-font-name = "verdana 11"' in my ~/.gtkrc-2.0).

   This is... what... an Xft misconfiguration?  I'm not sure how it
   could be fixed, unless defoma starts managing /etc/X11/XftConfig to
   make sure that "sans", "serif", "monospace" are aliased to
   appropriate fonts.  Or maybe we just need to wait for Xft2 so
   fontconfig can magically find the right fonts?
 
 - The terminal lets me chose an Xft-style font with the GTK font picker,
   but doesn't actually use that font.  Are they still using zvt in
   the terminal or something?

 - The "Debian" menu is empty (am I lacking a package somewhere?), but
   ironically the "KDE" menu has a few programs in it (though I've never
   installed any KDE software and I don't even have libqt on my system).

 - Nautilus is slow on my 1.4ghz x86 machine.  Shameful.

-- 
      Evan Martin
martine@cs.washington.edu
  http://neugierig.org