Re: HowTo for Gnome2??
On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 08:17:46PM -0600, John W. M. Stevens wrote:
> I upgraded from stable to testing, in order to be able to start using
> Gnome2, only to find that there was no good way to get a complete,
> usable Gnome2 installation.
"Oops." GNOME in testing seems to be in very poor shape right now.
Things are halfway migrated from 1 to 2. You can get a usable GNOME2
desktop (well, as usable as GNOME2 ever manages to be), but not a
complete one.
>
> 1) Fonts. They are really ugly, and it seems that the previous
> defaults were just ignored.
GNOME 2 (well, GTK2) uses a different font configuration back-end. When
I tried to sort through that on other systems with GNOME2 I found that
the documentation is so shamefully poor that all I could do was search
the web and look at other people's solutions. Is anybody keeping score
on how many different and unrelated font configuration systems we have
now?
> 2) The Gnome Settings Daemon was not installed, and it repeatedly
> complains about that lack. I can't find any package that indicates
> that it might contain this semi-mythical daemon.
I think that's because you need the GNOME Control Center, and that
hasn't made it in to testing yet. Core pieces of GNOME2 haven't been
moved from unstable to testing, while other pieces have.
> 3) It seems impossible to figure out what will conflict with what,
> without actually trying just about every combination. Incompatible
> packages are all stuffed into the gnome section, with no clue as
> to what packages should be installed to get a reasonably complete
> Gnome2 installation. I seem to have installed, and uninstalled,
> parts of both Gnome and Gnome2 several times now.
>
> There was rumour of a gnome2 meta package. It doesn't seem to
> actually exist. Perhaps it's only in experimental?
Probably. If there were such a thing in testing you couldn't possibly
install it because not all of the dependencies exist. At a minimum, it
would need to pull in the Control Center and GNOME-Terminal, neither of
which seems to be in testing yet.
> 4) There SHOULD be a way to run both Gnome and Gnome2 on the same
> machine, as the major number of the libraries is different, but
> the packages seem to be configured in such a way as to insist
> that these are incompatible.
>
> Yes, this will eat up more memory (both library versions must
> be resident at the same time), but if Gnome2 in testing simply
> isn't yet complete, then I really have no choice.
I'm not sure that GNOME 1 and 2 could easily coexist even if the
packages did allow it. They have different pieces of infrastructure, and
GNOME applications tend to start up any infrastructure they need that
isn't already running. And then they leave it running when they exit.
--
Michael Heironimus
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