Re: SuSE and GNOME

[HpG <gisler ntb ch>]

Hi Gnomers

I only can confirm, that the SuSE 6.1 GNOME rpms are not usable.
It's a pitty, as I really like the SuSE dist. and don't
want to change to RedHat.
So I build all the GNOME rpms by my self and at least
I got better results.
Here some issues which seem to be important.

1. The ImageMagick packet which is distributed by
   SuSE doesn't seem to work correctly with
   GNOME. On my box, no PNG icons dit appear (on the panel).
   So I have rebuilt that package on my own as well and
   that solved the problem.

2. As Michael Perry has stated correctly, SuSE has problems
   with their GNOME rpms because they put everything onto
   /opt/gnome, ImO that's not so good an idea.
   I have put only the gnome-... packages into that dir.
   All the other supporting libraries e.g. Imlib, glib, gtk...
   I have put as usual in /usr.
   As gtk has been put into /usr, gtk-engines of course goes
   there as well.

3. What's also very important, when comiling the packages on
   your own and you want to put GNOME into /opt/gnome, is
   to add the following link in /opt/gnome/share:
   aclocal -> /usr/share/aclocal
   But that is, if I remember correctly, noted somewhere
   in the GNOME doku.

4. In quite a lot of the GNOME packages, the *.spec files
   do a 'Prereq' check on /sbin/install-info.
   This actually is not so good, as in the SuSE distribution
   this file is located in /usr/bin/install-info
   So I had to check all the *.spec files for that file
   and change it to /usr/bin/install-info
   I don't know a great deal about .spec files, but isn't it
   possible to replace these absolute path' whith something
   more reliable?

5. In the package gnome-core the installation-path part
   of gnome-core is broken for me. (Perhaps I am doing
   something wrong here :-/
   The original gnome-core.spec features (appart from others)
   the following lines:

   %{prefix}/share/gnome
   %config %{prefix}/share/default.session

   When trying to build an rpm according to that, in the 
   build directory, the file default.session doesn't
   reside in {prefix}/share but in {prefix}/share/gnome
   So I had to replace to above two lines with
   the following ones:

   %{prefix}/share/gnome/apps%config 
   %{prefix}/share/gnome/help
   %{prefix}/share/gnome/default.wm
   %config %{prefix}/share/gnome/default.session
  
I belive, that's all I have done to get a working GNOME
system on my SuSE 6.1 dist.

A question on my own to the GNOME community regarding
gmc:

gmc used to show the contents of tar, gz and rpm files
when double clicked. Now with the currect version (.33)
gmc doesn't seem to recognise no more these file types
and thus doesn't show their contents.
Do have have to use some special compiler switches to
reactivate that? Thanks for your help.

Cheers
Hanspeter (Switzerland)