GNOME 2.16

Quote of the Day - Josh Billings - "Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there."

Well, you really need to stick on this one till the end to get some good results. Garnome is a user customizable build of GNOME packages. So, you need to download the gnome sources, compile them, install them and then execute them to run your own version of GNOME. This way you can customise the products that you want to be built [ though there is really very less scope of doing this, just because of any dependency failures. ]. But this is definately the best way to get a hands-on on the latest, stable GNOME release. I did this last month for GNOME 2.16

I have SuSE Linux 10.1 running on my desktop, with all the developer packages installed from the CD. Garnome sources are available for download at http://www.gnome.org/projects/garnome/ . After downloading the sources, read through the README quite well and follow the steps at this link http://www.gnome.org/projects/garnome/docs.html very diligently.

The steps are just too simple. After untarring your sources, modify gar.conf.mk file with your build area and install area path. Though, going by the defaults is less painful. Then go to the desktop directory and execute, "make paranoid-install".

During this process, I found that i had to install the following packages on my desktop.

aspell-devel-0.60.3-20
openldap2-devel-2.3.19-18
cyrus-sasl-devel-2.1.21-18
ImageMagick-devel-6.2.5-16.5
libwmf-devel-0.2.8.2-110.5
python-gdbm-2.4-14
Pyrex-0.9.3.1-1
pyrex-0.9.3-5
python-devel-2.4.2-18

Thankfully, these were easily available from rpmbone and google.com :)

I did face another very strange problem though. My proxy server had blocked some of the gnome servers and so i had to make garnome look into some other servers, and most of the time ended up downloading the sources myself. Garnome actually automatically downloads the dependency sources for you and compiles it. This is where my proxy caused me problems. So, i had to download the tar.gz for the sources, and copy them to the "<dependency-package-name>/download/". This way, the makefile would be fooled that it downloaded the tar.gz and directly go ahead untarring it.

This took me around 2 weeks of time to complete, with all the other official work taking away most of my time :p. Then, came the day when garnome finished compiling all the 150+ modules, and I was ready to execute my own GNOME 2.16 binaries. Please make sure that you read all the instructions very carefully for this. You can very easily screw up your existing desktop, if you dont take proper backups of your configuration files. I had to kill avahi, dbus and sometimes even go to single user mode and then run startx to see garnome running for me. Ofcourse, a reboot should take care of all such problems.

But, the worst part is that, after taking so many pains, I did not see any new UI changes between the GNOME 2.12 that i had by default from SuSE to the new GNOME 2.16 that i built now. Hopefully, I should be able to see new changes for GNOME 2.18 :)