F. Heitkamp wrote:
but my menu is empty, the gnome-control-center main windows shows nothing (nothing means nothing at all), neither desktop properties appear when i rick click the desktop and select it.I sympathize with you. I have had troubles getting menus to work too when compiling Gnome from sources. When people answer to the effect: Why download from sources and compile? Just get the binaries...blah. I just want to say, If I wanted to install the binaries, I WOULD. I install from sources because: a) I want to learn about compiling sources and, b) I want to install in a non-standard location.One thing that I have found (probably by grep-ing though sources) is that the environment variables XDG_DATA_DIRS, and XDG_DATA_HOME seem to be important. XDG_DATA_DIRS should be set to a PATH-like statement. For example mine is set to: /usr/local/gnome-unstable/share:/drives/sg3/kde/kde3/share:/usr/share:/usr/local/share, XDG_DATA_HOME wants to point to a writable area to write a database. If it is unset Gnome will use your home directory.
I absolutely agree. There are hundreds of reasons to compile from source. The person that just changes distros when they want to upgrade an application is doing themselves a major disservice when all the tools are right at their fingertips. I've learned so much about *nix systems from compiling programs from source. And it all started way back when I got frustrated that the Solaris machines at my work were stuck using crappy GNOME 2.0 with a really old GTK. Anyway, enough pontificating.
The Linux From Scratch project has helped me out repeatedly even when I'm building software on Solaris. In particular, Beyond Linux From Scratch explains how to install all the X software and multimedia apps. Look at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/ and choose to view the stable version online. They are detailing GNOME 2.8, but you will find out about lots of configure switches and environment variables you didn't know about before. In fact, in the page about desktop-file-utils it specifies the same two variables XDG_DATA_DIRS and XDG_DATA_HOME that Fred talked about. Obviously, you can't follow word for word because you don't have the exact same system built up to that point, but it's a lot more useful than just ./configure, make, make install.
Good luck, Dan Nicholson