Compiling Gnome

[Mart van de Wege <wege34 zonnet nl>]

Folks,

Please don't laugh, but the following happened and led to some
questions:
I like messing around with my system, tampering with config files
etc. (Just bought the PC after 5 years of not touching one except for
work). Now it seems that I really messed *up* my system. No
problem, as I don't have any critical data on there yet, so I did a
clean reinstall (RH 6.2 Deluxe, Gnome as default ssession).

I have the Gnome stable source, version 1.2.0, as tarballs. Last time
I compiled them by hand (with --prefix =/usr because I got sick of
the error messages), Gnome worked fine, except it didn't show up
in the sessions menu in the login screen. My trouble started after
logging in in KDE,  I couldn't get Gnome back.
1. If I compile by hand, how do I get gdm to recognize Gnome?
2. Compiling with rpm -tb solves this, but now my panel icons are
gone. Any pointers on solving this?
3. Can I compile by hand and then use rpm to build a binary insted
of using make install? If yes, how?

No complete answers are needed, just point me in the right
direction. Not at any net pages over 20 Kb though, as I don't have
full internet acces yet.

Mart van de Wege