Re: GNOME

[Adam C Powell IV <hazelsct@mit.edu>]

James Shearer wrote:

> > On the Gnome website, it says it requires Debian 2.3 or higher. Is this
> > true?
>
> No.  As long as you have X and a recent GTK+, you can get the gnome
> tarballs and compile from source.

Even better, you can also build the Debian packages from source.  All of the
core and libs except gtkhtml and apps through Nautilus 0.5 have built for me,
though others have reported trouble with eog and another app or two.  (If you're
interested, Christian sent me a .diff.gz for gtkhtml 0.8, but the interface is
sufficiently different from 0.6.1 that it would take a *lot* of work to make
gnome-core build with it.)  Just point a source line at unstable or woody and
"fakeroot apt-get -b source whatever".

On unstable, I don't know why the autobuilder is taking so long to get to
these.  Packages like gal, gconf, gnome-print, medusa, gnome-applets, new
gnucash and gnumeric, even nautilus have had their build dependencies met on PPC
for quite some time...

The target GNOME release for woody seems to be 1.4.

> As for prepackaged binaries, I know
> helixcode GNOME offers debs for i386 potato and woody, but I don't know
> about ppc.

There are PPC Helix packages.

The problem with the Helix packages is that their version numbers with "helix"
stuck in are always "greater than" the standard Debian packages' versions, so
you have to force a downgrade to go from Helix to standard Debian.

But a couple of programs, like Evolution, are present in the Helix debs but not
official debs.  Take your pick.

> > Does anyone have it up and running so that I know it's possible?
>
> Yes, it is possible :)

I have it running at home.  1.2 feels quite a lot faster than 1.0, e.g. the foot
menu opens with all of the text and *then* draws the icons, as opposed to 1.0
where it tried to open everything at once.  Nautilus and the new control center
are really nice too, and there are some useful new applets.

And thanks to a lot of bickering from yours truly, just about all of the source
packages now have Build-Depends. :-)

Zeen,

-Adam P.

              Welcome to the best software in the world today cafe!