Is There a GNOME that's not Ximian?

ahde asks: "I tried to install Ximian Gnome 1.4 on a customized Redhat 6.1 box that their Red Carpet installer didn't like. No big deal, I thought I'd just download Gnome and install it myself, only to discover that there is apparently no such thing. Gnome.org tells you to download from Ximian, which only allows installs through their Red Carpet. I have nothing against Ximian, but is there another way to get Gnome without downloading a hundred separate RPMs and then going through dependency hell?"

Obslashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Open Source! If you don't like things the way they are, download the source code, make your own version, and distribute it under the GPL so that everyone can worship your greatness!

Re:How about checking into a think called reality?

[Glytch]

Gee, I'm sorry that "make World; make install" is too hard for you to understand. I guess you'll always have to get X in binary form. And the whole two hours that it takes on my P2 are absolute hell; I might even have to go read a book or spend some time away from that one computer while it compiles! Gasp! The horror!

Granted, Gnome is more of a pain, but just untar all the packages in a directory, and make a shellscript that'll go into each directory in the proper order and do a "configure ( with the proper options set) ; make ; make install ; ldconfig" and it's easy. Gnome takes longer, granted, but just leave it going while you sleep and it won't matter. Same with KDE if you prefer that.

Oh, I'm sorry I've offended you. I mean, installing from source?! What the hell am I thinking, installing from source in an open source operating system! Pre-packaged binaries are the only way to go. You're absolutely right. In fact, I think I'll wipe out my Slackware installations and replace them with Debian, the One True Distribution. Not.

Geez, now I'm starting to understand where all the BSD folks are coming from. And as to your remarks on slow computers, it is precisely in those older machine that one needs even the smallest performance gain.

Re:Avoiding dependency hell is why you use Ximian

[meridian]

avoiding dependency hell is why you use debian
coping with redhat and getting the latest gnome is why you use ximian

i think the first option is way more preferable

Re:Yes

[terpia]

Im in full agreeance. Unfortunately, Ask Slashdot has turned into more theory throwing and distro wars more than the helpful how-to type stuff it once was. its evolution for better or worse. you're question is good, but the answer is not so easy. Which is probably why you submitted an Ask Slashdot anyways. The truth is, you'd have beeter results asking a question like this @ linuxnewbie.org [linuxnewbie.org] or something similar.

BTW: I dont have an easy answer for you either, Im an apt-get snob, but only cause its easier for simpleminded folk like me. and linuxnewbie has answered many question of mine and made many clarifications, even though Im no newbie. its helpful.

use rufus.

[Zurk]

download all the gnome RPMs from rufus.w3.org and do a rpm -Uvh *.rpm on them.

GPP

[De]

The GNOME packaging project provides RPMS of GNOME 1.4. See here [linux.org.uk] for the files.

Count your blessings

[Stinking Pig]

Good thing that red-carpet didn't like your system - it did a number on two of my Mandrake 7.2 systems. Everything seemd to work fine until I logged out and discovered that the gdm and sawfish configs had been hosed. X doesn't want to start without a DM, and is kind of hard to use without a window manager. One machine, I would have been annoyed -- two machines is too much. I switched back to XFce.

Re:Yes

[Nailer]

ahde wants to install Gnome without having to deal with "dependency hell."

No he doesn't, otherwise he'd be using Red Carpet.

And APT has nothing to do with any particular distribution or packaging system, not is it a unique tool (ie, Red Carpet and urpmi and functionally equivalent).

The large Deb archives are useful, and the standards of the packages. But RPM 3.05 is the stadnard packaging system, is used more frequently, and how has tools such as APT and its competitors to work with it. There are also far more current stable (and unstable fior that matter) packages in RPM format.

Debian

[Agthorr]

Yes, install Debian testing, then:

apt-get install task-gnome-apps task-gnome-desktop

Admittedly, this is probably not the answer you were looking for :>

-- Agthorr

Re:Yes

[dilvish_the_damned]

I'm getting really sick of people who think that... Well not really sick just amused at people who are critical of others posts without giving an alternative way of doing things. Here, I will show you what I mean:
[example]
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I'm getting really sick... (yadda) apt-get (yadda)... is ever a good answer to a general question.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Instead you should give them something a bit more usefull like:
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Most distibutions have there own packaged and branded Gnome distro in your favorite package management scheme, tho usually slightly behind the cutting edge stuff.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp You might try looking at your Linux distros web site to see if they have anything available for download.
[/example]
So basically if you want people to live up to your standards then have some standards worthy of living up to. If you don't understand the difference, quit posting here. :)
Actually I am just kidding, you all post what you want, I just found it rather funny. Besides, this is looking like a self perpetuating arguement.

Re:How about checking into a think called reality?

[NNKK]

Because people don't have the time or hardware to build from source means that they should just use Windows? That is the single most absurd thing I have heard in my life.
To start with, my 800Mhz Athlon with 256MB PC100 RAM and 7200RPM ATA/100 IBM HDD is superior to the MAJORITY of the CURRENT INSTALLED BASE of PC hardware in the U.S. and certainly the world, and I wouldn't bother building anything major (GNOME, X, etc.) from source unless I was in FreeBSD or another BSD (in which case the compile time is offset somewhat by ease of installation, though I wouldn't recommend it for, say, the developer in crunch mode trying to get a product out the door.)

One hasn't needed to be able to build pretty much anything from source in order to use a GNU/Linux system as a standard desktop OS since around 1998.

Compiling for your system provides minimal performance gain, I belive the averages that have been found for compiling for i586 over i386 was something like 5-8% performance gain, and that's only in CERTAIN areas in CERTAIN programs. i686 likely wouldn't provide much better gain.

Also, I'm not defending GNOME, GNOME is a peice of shit.

And also, take standard hardware being sold by, say, Dell (replacing any equipment like a winmodem with a linux-compatible equivilant.)
Now, install windows on it, any version you want, Win98SE or Win2k would serve for the best comparisons.
Use it as a desktop system for a while.
Then install Slackware or RedHat or whatever, configure as needed.
Use it as a desktop system.
Note the performance gained from using a far more efficient OS like GNU/Linux?
The point is, people with a P2-266 or similar speed aren't going to want to be compiling the big packages, but they'd get significantly better performance in GNU/Linux than in Windows.

How does not having the knowledge time or hardware to compile from source lead to "They should just use Windows" ? It's attitudes like that that are PREVENTING widespread acceptance of GNU/Linux on the desktop.

Re:Download Link

[NNKK]

Even if it's a troll, the poster has one good point.
Gnome is slow and bloated, KDE is still reasonably lean and can run on something less than a Pentium II 350-400 with less than 128MB of RAM, and still be both usable and reasonably complete.

How about checking into a think called reality?

[NNKK]

Who said he can't? You ever compiled XFree86 and Gnome or KDE in their entirety? Takes a hell of a long time, and sometimes requires editing of makefiles and possibly even the source itself.
Compiling the kernel is a far cry from compiling large GUI-related programs (too big... all this shit is bloated, but that's another story.)

So let's run through it, first you have to
download the source tarballs, this takes a while even on fast cable and DSL connections, and all those sources are generaly much larger than the result of compiling and installing them.

Then you have to decompress and untar these things, gunzipping or bunzip2ing takes a while by itself, untarring takes quite a while too.

Next you have to go over the docs for the details on what compile-time options you need, and any makefile or code changes that might be needed for specific hardware and software configurations.
Also need to read the docs to know if you need to change other settings on your system or upgrade package ImAHugeDependancy, and then you have to make those changes/upgrades.

The configure script also takes a little time, adds up after a few packages.

When you actually get around to typing "make" (or "make *" where * is some obscure string of characters inserted to drive you crazy) you get treated to the HOURS of watching the screen scroll along while GCC plays tag with the developers and all the .c and .h and whatever other extensions there happen to be hiding that it needs.

Once GCC is done playing with its friends (and/or enemies), you'll often get to type "make install" at which point 150-300MB of binaries, libraries, graphics, and whatever else gets tossed around from / to /usr/local to /home/* to /etc.

Then you get to go through the extensive configuration files for each of these packages, configuring them properly, or else when they try to start they'll treat you to mysterious error messages that the developers pull out of thin air (or Hell, maybe there's a rogue dimensional gate that Doomguy and the UAC missed.)

This all of course assumes that compiling goes fine after "make". If it doesn't, you get to hunt through the docs and post pleading messages asking for assistance, and wait for hours until someone who knows the solution happens to log on. IF anyone knows the solution, murphy's law is always at work, you may have run into a problem that either nobody else has had before, or is simply of an unknown origin that nobody can seem to fix.

Most of this could have simply been avoided by installing the binaries, then the only thing you'd have to worry about is basicaly configuration of XFree86 itself, which isn't all that difficult, IF your mouse decides not to go nuts.

Now do you see why people don't just install from source and instead prefer apt-get?

Re:How about checking into a think called reality?

[NNKK]

You have misread and compeletely misinterpeted my messages, and until you go back and read more carefully, there is no point in replying.

Re:Yes

[quantum bit]

ahde wants to install Gnome without having to deal with "dependency hell." My suggestion (phrased glibly in my original post, admittedly) is to switch to a distribution that would allow him to do exactly that. I'm sorry you don't consider that constructive advice.

Like the FreeBSD distribution?

cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome
make install

Sorry, couldn't resist! :)>/p>

Re:Definately

[UberLame]

Actually, sometimes configure compile install run doesn't work so well. I've spent the past week trying to install enough stuff to get Mozilla, GnuCash, and Gnumeric to run. I've had to tweak the source code to get some things to compile (libgpopt for one), and an currently stuck on GAL (which seems to be complaining about berkeley db problems, but I haven't been able to figure out exactly what is the problem).

The biggest issue is the lack of clear direction of what order to install things in. So, I know that Gnumeric requires glib and gtk, so I install those, then try building Gnumeric. So, it complains about a lack of libole2, so I get that and it complains about missing 10 things. I fix those, and now Gnumeric complains about missing another library, and so on. I'm hoping that GAL is the last one.

I'm using Debian testing by the way. I just prefer a source installed gnome since than I know exactly what versions of what packages and where they are installed.

Re:Definately

[ksheff]

I've been installing gnome by just compiling the source since about version 0.30. There is a compilation instruction [gnome.org]web page at gnome.org that lists the packages that you must have and the order that they must be compiled.That's what I normally do on my main machine at home. Unfortunately, there are some packages that are in the unstable directories that are needed by packages in stable and these aren't listed on the compilation instructions. For my debian systems, I just use apt-get. I did have a PPC system that the installer couldn't recognize (IBM workstation), so I just installed all the RPMs from the command line, which wasn't difficult.

Re:Download Link

[Skeezix]

I have run Gnome on a pentium I 100Mhz with 32 Megs of RAM and it was ran fine. Do you have any facts to back the "slow" and "bloated" claims?

Re:Yes

[hilker]

I'm getting really sick of people who think that

apt-get install

is ever a good answer to a general question. People don't bother to submit to ask /. to get simple information.

Of [slashdot.org] course [slashdot.org] they [slashdot.org] don't. [slashdot.org]

They submit their questions for ask /. to get advice. If you don't understand the difference, quit posting here.

ahde wants to install Gnome without having to deal with "dependency hell." My suggestion (phrased glibly in my original post, admittedly) is to switch to a distribution that would allow him to do exactly that. I'm sorry you don't consider that constructive advice.

Avoiding dependency hell is why you use Ximian

[Nailer]

<i>gnome.org tells you to download from Ximian, which only allows installs through their Red Carpet. I have nothing against Ximian, but is there another way to get Gnome without downloading a hundred separate RPMs and then going through dependency hell?" </i>

Avoiding dependency hell is why you use Ximian. Red Carpet resolves dependecies from other GNOME packages and distro packages automatically. Red Carpet si a good thing.

If you've got apps that you want to compile from source, make source RPMS. If you can waste endless amoutns of time compiling GNOME from source, then you can learn anough to make SRPMs.

That said, Ximians own unqiue programs menu sucks. As does their old habit of dirty tricks upon KDE (removing KDE from GDM, Google adwords for KDE trademarks). They stopped the latter, and also seem to have stopped the forme on moroe recent RC GNOME 1.4 installs.

On *what* basis is that flamebait?

[Nailer]

Its factual response. So some research - all of the above is true.

* Red Carpet exists expressly for the purposes of downloading, installing and fixing dependencies. The person who asked the question doesn't know this, although its fairly obvious from readign Ximians site.

* APT doesn't have anything to do with a particular distribution of packaging system. Its developers claim they designed it to be independent of such systems. An RPM port exists and will eb merged in with the next stable release.

* Red Carpet and urpmi do perform equivalent functions - download software from mirrors and satisfy all dependencies necessary to get the app running on the machine.

* Deb has an excellent set of packaging guidelines and this is acknowledged by just about everyone

* RPM 3.05 is the standard packaging system according to LSB 1.0.

* There are more RPMs. There are more packages (excluding different versions) avaliable on rpmfind than the 4-6Gb avaliable from the main Debian archives. This figure scales. Additionally, very few proprietary apps are avaliable in other nonstandard packaging formats, which makes sense as the vendor has no desire 9and shouldn't have the need) to maintain multiple packages.

* RPM is used more frequently. Nearly every study says that Debian has less than three percent of server market share and Red Hat has more than half. The rest is mainly made up of other RPM based distros.

The moderator is a fool who dislikes RPM for whatever reason using their mod points to (rather weakly) influence others opinions.

options

[Phork]

yes, it veyr much is is possible, redhat does(or at least did with 6.2) provide RPMs or gnome, and not just the ximian ones. But even still it is a large number of RPMs. Why so many RPMs you ask, because there are a lot of sperate components, and you may not want want all the compontents, for instance, i dont want gmc, or gdm installed, and if it were just one package, i would have to install those. With many seperate packages it makes it so you only install what you want, the problem with that is that if you don't knwo what components you want(which im guessing by your desription is true in your case), it makes it more difficult, so you should proably just nmake it easy on yourself and install them all, and remove any that you later find you dont want. The other solution is to build from source. The source is available on gnome.org. But i would recomend that unless you have a strong reason not to, use the ximian packages as they have gone through more QA than most of the distro packages. oh, and just as a note i am using non-ximian gnome-1.4 packages that are a part of debain GNU/linux(http://www.debian.org).

Re:Clarification

[ahde]

Looks like a VNC ask slashdot showed up just in time.

Yes, Slackware 8.0

[fredlwm]

The most up to date GNOME and utilities are included in Slackware 8.0. No Ximiam.

Well said (if not a bit trollish)

[green pizza]

(See Parent)
Teehee! Well put... I too have noticed GNOME evolve into something that almost seems to have been developed and marketed from Redmond. Interesting how a group's tolerance levels shift over time. But then again, it was only about 24 months ago when the average distro (with all the goodies installed and running) was still zippy on a 486/100 or P60.

Me? I use XFCE, but find KDE to be nifty as well. My next box will probably run either Blackbox or KDE most of the time.

Not exactly

[JCCyC]

rpm -Uvh is better; the U because it updates things already installed (unlike i) and the vh because of the visual feedback (it takes an awful lot of time).

You might have to go through a couple of interactions to get things right though. For instance, the Ximian FTP site has one or two obsolete RPMs along with the "live" ones you may have to get rid of; also, their way of dividing Mozilla into RPM's doesn't match any other distro I know.

Usually, after two failed "rpm -Uvh ", with some deinstalls and installs from the distro CDs inbetween, you are able to get everything in.

Re:Yes

[lizrd]

I'm getting really sick of people who think that

apt-get install

is ever a good answer to a general question. People don't bother to submit to ask /. to get simple information. They submit their questions for ask /. to get advice. If you don't understand the difference, quit posting here.

________________________

Clarification

[ahde]

I mentioned in the original submission (but it got cut) that installing Debian wasn't an option at this time (so neither is freebsd or anything else) since there is a lot of custom development and it kinda needs to be kept on line and intact.

The box is a P233 with 128M memory with redhat 6.1, but I've had to make (./configure &&; make &&; make install) a lot of custom modifications like migrating the whole file system over to reiserfs. I should have upgraded the whole thing at the time, in retrospect.

I did manage to install most everything a package at a time (rpm -i * did not work) except the two packages I actually wanted. Sawfish and GNUCash. This was because guile failed and ximian does not include an rpm for umb-scheme. So I got a source rpm from rpmfind and compiled umb-scheme and the guile rpm worked. But its a lie because Sawfish and GNUCash still won't install. Sawfish chokes when I try to make from source, too.

I can just write my own accounting scripts for a web front end, so that's not a problem, and since its too slow for anyone who'd need to use GNUCash anyway, I'll have to live with it. Although I may just build a toolbar (maybe steal tkdesk) and have twm running because it will *eventually* be only remotely administratable, and any on-site maintenance will be done by windows users. That's why I wanted Gnome & especially Sawfish, because it is much faster than enlightenment. I have nothing against KDE, but I don't know it well enough. Maybe my next ask slashdot will be for comments on VNC and alternatives.

Thanks for the input. I guess maybe the answer is, simply: No, nobody but Ximian packages Gnome, and gnome endorses ximian exclusively.

Definately

[Gleef]

The message you got is because GNOME doesn't distribute binaries, they leave that up to others.

If you are looking for a binary distribution, Debian's GNOME distribution is very good (you can probably install it on Redhat via alien, or just switch to Debian).

Regardless of distribution, you can always download the source from ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources [gnome.org].
Configure, compile, install and run. It takes a bit more disk space this way, but it's not as hard as you might think.

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