Re: Alternative Gnome.

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 05:12:21PM +0000 or thereabouts, Keith Powell wrote:
> Sorry to be so vague.
> 
> Can anyone guess who I am referring to?  Is these alternatives still 
> available; if so where can I find out about them? 
> 
> The jackpot question is:-
> 
> If there is a Gnome2 version available, is it any good and how does it compare 
> with the standard Gnome2?
> 
> Many thanks.
> Keith   

There are a number of possibilities here. Not all of them are still
around, but you might be thinking of any one of:

  * Plain GNOME: rpms built (generally) by Greg Leblanc in 1.2 days
  and I think 1.4. 

  * GARNOME: http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome/ and there's a mailing
  list at http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/garnome-list . Builds
  from tarballs. 

  * Some distros have GNOME 2.0 on them. Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0
  and Debian release-I-forget. I'm sure there are more. You can unpack
  the source (note: source) rpms or debs with a package called 'alien'
  or with rpm2cpio (for rpm-using distros) or something I don't know 
  for Debian. And you can then rebuild them elsewhere as you please, I
  imagine (except perhaps for trademarked images and so on). 

  * CVSGNOME doesn't seem to exist any more. That was around in the
  summer, and let you build from stable CVS (default) or tarballs.
  The website for it is gone.

  * "v-b-s" is vicious-build-scripts. This is a CVS thing only: 
  the scripts live in CVS (in module vicious-build-scripts, amazingly
  enough) and it builds from CVS (only). The scripts are in zsh.

  * jhbuild: James Henstridge's build scripts. Again, the package
  of that name lives in CVS and builds from CVS. Written in python.

  * makegnome: I saw very little feedback on this (did no-one try it?) 
  but this is Peter Wainwright's "generate RPMs from CVS" package.
  I do remember he said it would overwrite some GNOME 1.2/1.4 stuff
  though. http://www.wainpr.demon.co.uk/programming.html

Of them all, I imagine you are thinking of GARNOME: it's the only
one that is tarball-based rather than CVS-based. It's also very 
popular: the archive for this month is up to 32 messages already
and it's only the third of the month as it is.

I haven't used it. I keep meaning to give it a whirl. 

As to "how does it compare with the standard version": it pretty
much is a standard version unless you start altering defaults.
Note that what you see on Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Ximian, etc
is not the standard, if by standard you mean "closest to how
the tarballs are distributed". That's tweaked to fit into each 
distro's idea of how it should look and behave. If by standard
you mean "What most people _see_", then it's impossible to guess
the standard: getting accurate figures for how many people buy
or download distros is notoriously hard, and then you'd have to
work out how many people use each of those CDs. This could be
anything from none (review copies, freebies, etc) to 20 (one
LUG, one ISO image, _lots_ of people burning it. 

Anyway, I'll bet it's GARNOME you're thinking of, but there 
you are: a list of ways to get GNOME. I didn't include Ximian
because you mentioned it already. I didn't include CVS because
that's certainly not tarballs. I didn't include the eazel-hacking
module (another set of build scripts) either, come to think of it.
Oops. But again, that's CVS-based.

I would -definitely- go from packages of some nature myself.
Either distro-provided or GARNOME, I think, simply because they
are the most commonly-used and the most likely to work at any
given moment. 

Telsa