Re: Yet another newbie

[Marcus Brubaker <spoon elpaso net>]

Well, first off I will just tell you that we realize that the install
process of GNOME is a bit difficult and that the documentation is not up
to date.  The fact that you couldn't locate RPMs is nothing uncommon as
the GNOME team itself does not produce RPMs, only tar.gz's.  Various other
parties produce the RPMs and make them available for download.  Hopefully
by the time 1.0 is out, things will be a bit smoother to install.

> First I struggled to install GNOME 0.30 from the CD and after many hours I
> gave up, gapped me a copy of KDE and after 15-20 minutes KDE was installed
> and I was connected to the internet.

Very understandable.  Although GNOME really doesn't have anything to do
with internet connectivity.  Perhaps someone should write a nice GNOME
tool for configuring PPP connections.

> I like KDE, but as I said, I'm a newbie so when I saw that there was a
> Danish user group in my area I joined it, and all was talking about GNOME so

I wish I could join a users group.  Anyone in the Central Illinois area
(Peoria) want to start one?

> I decided to give it a second try, I gapped the latest RPMS 0.99.3 ( the
> whole directory ) and was trying to follow the 'getting started' from
> www.gnome.org  step by step.

Someone needs to update this.  I think the FAQ has some better
documentation on how to install things now.

> The first stop was when I should install libPropList I could NOT find a RPM
> which included the libPropList - later I found that I had to download and
> compile it - no problem but it was not mentioned on the step-by-step page.

Like I said before, the GNOME team does not produce RPMs.  And again,
someone should update the page to reflect stuff like this.

> The next problem occurred when I came to the point where I should install
> gnome-admin, as before, it was missing !
> I found 0.30 on the RedHat CD and installed it - well tried to It failed to
> install due to dependency errors so I did a rpm -ivh --force

Last I checked gnome-admin isn't really being kept all too up to date with
the rest of GNOME.

> Due to various dependency errors I did a rpm -ivh --force *.rpm

Just as a word of advice, this is a really dangerous thing to try to do.
RPM's, when properly created should never need to be forced except for in
the rarest of circumstances.  If they are forced, or installed with
--no-deps, bad things tend to happen.

> Next step was to configure my system to use GNOME, and according to the
> config page it should be easy -  well yes if one knows Linux it might be,
> but I don't know Linux that much so I ended up with that I should
> edit/create .xinitrc and here is how it looks:
> 
> panel &
> background-properties --init &
> screensaver-properties --init &
> mouse-properties --init &
> exec enlightenment &
> exec gnome-session
> 
> This seems to work, but I don't know if it's the best way to start GNOME ??

With the latest RPMs, all you should have to do is run
gnome-session...maybe run your WM before hand, but that just kinda
depends.

> Once again, the step-by-step have misleading information: according to the
> page, one should add /opt/gnome/bin to the path, well I have /opt as a mount
> point, but the RPMS is NOT installed there !

RPMS, by default, should go to /usr/local or /usr.  I think /opt/whatever
was refering to if you installed from source.

> The performance is a bit slow on my machine (K6 200 MHz - 128MB RAM), I hope
> that it is due to incorrect configuration of GNOME ??!!??

Probably.  I have a K6 233 w/ 128 megs and it runs perfectly, but I
compile from source and work off the latest CVS sources.

> As I'm sending this mail I'm downloading the latest source, and hope to
> compile it using the gcc supplied with RedHat 5.2 ( 2.7.2.3 - I think)

This is probably your best bet.  I would recommend that you remove all the
GNOME RPMs you have installed before compiling from source or things could
get messy.

> And as the fast ones can see I had to switch to my old NT to write this mail
> as I can't make GNOME connect to the internet.

As I mentioned above, connecting to the 'net should really have nothing to
do with GNOME.

Anyway, installing from source is really your best bet.  Good luck and
feel free to email with any specific problems.

Regards,
Marcus Brubaker
spoon@elpaso.net
http://www.elpaso.net/~spoon

You might be a gamer if...the phrase "Collect Call of Cthulhu" brings back fond memories.