[plug] GNOME 2.4 for RH8

[Craig Ringer]

Quite some time ago, I wrote:

> I suspect I'm well into wishful-thinking "just go compile it yourself
> you lazy bastard, it'll only take a week" land, but does anyone know of
> a recent GNOME version available for RH8?

To which Lawrie Abbott responded:

> I dont know about Gnome (other than SRPMS)  but you can get qt-3.3 and 
> kde-3.2.1 rpms for RH8.0 from
> ftp://apt.no.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/8.0/RPMS.testing/



For anyone else interested in upgrading the GUI on their server without
upgrading the distro or anything similarly horrific, I've found an amazing
way to do it. Stuff RPMs - use 'konstruct'. It's amazing - easy, smart,
flexible. Not fast, alas - my Dual Xeon is /still/ compiling - but you can
even run the incompletely compiled KDE once 'kdebase' etc have finished.

I was looking for GNOME 2.4 earlier, but ... stuff that. I've just fired up
KDE 3.2 on one of our thin clients, and it's so fast it's absurd. In fact,
it makes XFCE4 look appallingly slow. This is on a P133 with 32MB of RAM
and an s3 video card (though admittedly running over 100baseTX to a 
dual Xeon with 2GB of RAM).

I guess the qt and KDE folks have been doing the work required to make
KDE run cleanly and efficiently over a network. Wow.

One other thing that impressed me is that it's easy to run KDE 3.2 and earlier versions
in parallel, as KDE understands and honours the KDE_HOME environment variable to
control where it keeps its dotfiles. I've been wishing for a UNIX-wide convention
on controlling where to keep dotfiles for some time - but a KDE-wide one is better
than nothing. It's also easy to install KDE 3.2 and all the libraries it needs to
pull in into /usr/local, so you don't affect your other installs. You can even
have /usr/local/kde3.2, /usr/local/kde3.2.1, etc to make testing upgrades easy 
and safe. Konstruct rocks.

I haven't tried GNOME 2.4 yet, but frankly I don't see a reason to. The only
thing I think the users would really want would be the simpler file manager
(I still don't like Konqueror - I think it's cluttered and bad at information
hiding), and the desktop/Evolution integration (which only works with 
the alpha version, 1.5, anyway). Hopefully by the time we're ready to use
Evolution 1.5, KDE will be able to talk to evolution-data-server too. I think
I can get Konqueror to work a little more like I'm hoping, it'll just take 
a fair bit of fiddling with settings.

So ... thanks for the pointer, Lawrie. I went about things in a totally different
way to what you suggested, as I was unhappy with the invasiveness of the RPM ports you
linked to, but have found another way to do what I wanted. It's worked amazingly
well.

I'll let you all know how I go testing this all up and deploying it for our users, 
as I'm sure there are others here who could be interested in similar setups.

Craig Ringer