The Garnome Home Page

[Paul Miller <location one verizon net>]

Here are some general suggestions about the garnome home page, which 
have occurred to me during my most recent experiences with garnome. 
Assume I am a rank newbie, (which I practically am).

Basically, a new user goes to the gnome.org site & wants to get the 
latest version
of Gnome and is sent to garnome - there is no way to choose just to get 
the latest stable version of Gnome as an rpm or something and just plain 
install it - you either choose 'sources' or 'garnome'.

You then find out it's a "bad-edge bleeding-ass (sic) GNOME distribution 
for testers and tweakers everywhere" Hmmmm, I just wanted the new GNOME, 
do I really want to get into THIS? But it sure sounds better than 
falling "into the depraved addictions and co-dependencies of testing 
from anonymous CVS." Boy, I guess Garnome is for me! (BTW, I LOVE your 
intro! Don't change a thing!)

The garnome-download page says nothing about stable versions - just to 
"grab the latest release" .... well, OK!

It then says you need a sane GNU tool chain .... well, I HOPE I got 
that. How do I know? Am I sane enough to tell?

It then lists some basic libraries you need and says you probably 
already got them.
How do I find out? If I don't have something how do I get it? Do I 
install something I need in the garnome directory, or up in 
/usr/god-knows-where? (For the 1st lib: libpng3-dev, I did "rpm -qa | 
grep png". Would a Linux-challenged user know how to do this?  I got:
libpng-1.2.2-6
libpng10-1.0.13-5
libpng10-devel-1.0.13-5
libpng-devel-1.2.2-6
Well, 10 > 3, so I guess I'm OK, but what if I did: "grep libpng3"? I 
wouldn't have found anything. And what if some things weren't installed 
with rpm, how do I find those? Remember, I'm a rank newbie and just want 
to try the latest Gnome.

It also says something about meta/gnome-desktop. Where is this directory?
(I seem to recall garnome had a meta directory back around .24 or something)

I think a new user is just going to ignore the lists of lib dependencies 
- which I did - and just HOPE everything works OK, so I still don't know 
- for sure - if everything is up to date. Maybe some of my many compile 
problems are due to these things.

How do I configure GARNOME?

(I'm a newbie, I NEED the following:)
In your home directory, make a directory called garnome and put your 
garnome-*tar.bz2 in there. Uncompress then extract the file:
> bunzip2 garnome-*.tar.bz2
> tar xvf garnome-*.tar
cd into the garnome-* directory. Currently the default install location 
is $HOME/garnome. If you'd prefer to install GARNOME elsewhere, edit the 
"main_prefix" entry in the gar.conf.mk file.

GARCHIVEDIR: I STILL don't really understand this. It speaks of a 
tarball collection - you mean my garnome-*tar.bz2 file? I don't know 
anything about tarballs. (I've gathered, by looking at the list, that 
you can somehow download some or all of the tarballs ahead of time and 
put them in GARCHIVEDIR, but why would I want to do this when garnome is 
supposed to do all this for me?) I guess I'll just leave that alone for 
now and hope it all works.

CAQ (Constantly Asked Questions)

1) How long does garnome take to build?

Assuming no problems: hours.
Assuming problems: days.

2) How much space does GARNOME require to build?

I did a: du -sh garnome/ and got
6.9G    garnome
Can this be right?

2a) Should I do a "make clean" or something after I've successfully 
installed garnome to free up some space? If so, in my desktop directory, 
or in the garnome-0.... dir?

3) Assuming I'm happy with my current version of garnome, could I, 
should I, install it as root in /usr ?

4) I built garnome before; can I build the new version in $HOME/garnome 
without breaking my old one?

5) What does GAR! GAR! GAR! mean? Is that bad?


Some of the other FAQs seem to be out of date, and I'm sure there are 
other questions that keep coming up, but I haven't been witht the list 
long enough to know what these are.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Garnome, & think it's an amazing piece of 
software, and the people on garnome-list are great about helping out new 
users; I just think the introduction to garnome can be made a little 
less daunting for newbies. I myself got discouraged with garnome around 
28 or so - I had lots of problems with the index.sgml problem (since 
fixed) -
and it'd be a shame to lose new users just because it starts to look 
scary. I know garnome says it's for testers & tweakers, but gnome.org is 
sending lots of people here for the new GNOME who AREN'T testers and 
tweasers (sic).

I wouldn't mind helping out with this, updating the FAQ or html or 
something, but I'm not really knowledgeable enough about garnome to know 
what questions are asked and what the answers are. I'd even be willing 
to take suggestions from more knowledgable members, put them into some 
kind of new page and submit it for approval. I have a fair amount of 
free time right now and could do this pretty quick. Let me know if you'd 
like some help

Sorry for the long email - thanks for listening :)