[plug] GNOME 2.4 for RH8

[Michael Hunt]

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 13:42, Craig Ringer wrote:

> 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


>From what I have seen of Konstruct it looks very similar to GARNOME. The
only differences appear to be the issue with the dotfiles you were
talking about (GARNOME wouldn't be any help here). Evo 1.5 is not what I
would call really stable at the moment and I probably wouldn't be toying
about with it in a production environment.

Whern gnome.org is fully fixed then you will find GARNOME at :-

http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome

The one thing I really like is that you can run your distro's version of
the gnome and play around with an updated version (available in either
stable or bleeding edge versions) with out affecting your installed
version.

Michael Hunt