[gnome-love] Installing GNOME as a non root user

[Yuli Fiterman <fiterman gmail com>]

 I'm trying to do something a bit non standard.  I'm trying to move my work dev environment from a windows box to a RHEL-5 linux box where I have no root perms. Then I'm going to connect to it via VNC. I got the VNC server setup with metacity but I have no desktop environment. So it would be really great if I can get GNOME installed and JHBuild would be an awesome way to get packages installed without root access.

For the GNOME install : JHBuild supports prefixes but apparently your docs say I need to register something in /etc/xml/catalog is there a way to avoid this? What else do I need to install as a non-root user?

I would really appreciate help in this. Thanks!