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Some of the volunteers of the Indian Linux Project, along with team members of a few other South Asian Linux localization projects are trying to get Linux running on a low cost Geode based system. Join the indlinux-group mailing list if you are interested in helping out. The latest Indlinux Newsletter mentions this effort briefly.

The title says that it is the trailer. Nice troll attempt btw.

Having nothing better to do (and wanting to do a bit of testing on the localization stuff we are working on), I decided to download the latest beta of GNOME - GNOME 2.3.5 (Jebe) . Since the RC release freeze is imminent, and the feature freeze is already in place, the system that I am running currently will not be significantly different from GNOME 2.4, when it is released on September. In this article, I would be briefly describing the new features and applications of GNOME 2.4. However, I would concentrate mainly on the packages in the core GNOME system, and will not be going beyond those.

Installing the packages (WARNING: slightly hairy) To GARNOME or not...

I had heard that installing the GNOME packages in the right order could be a tricky process, and I was looking at GARNOME and other tools for an easy way out. However, after some poking around, I decided to do the install by hand. This decision was largely prompted by this document, and I am really grateful to its author.

The system

The usual convention before doing a description of any large scale installation process is to give a short summary of the specs of the machine in question, and so, without much ado, here it is:

Processor: 700 Mhz Pentium III
RAM: 192 MB
Swap: 250 MB
OS: Redhat Linux 9.0 (Shrike)
Kernel: 2.6.0-test2

It is obvious that this is not a very modern machine, but such boxes are quite common in where I live (India).

The installation

Most of the files needed for compile and install are downloadable from the directory ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/2.3/2.3.5/sources/. There are also a few "extras" which are usually included in stock "development machine" installations, like the Docbook 4.1.2 DTDs, etc. If you don't have them, the ./configure script will complain, and you will find them in your distro CDs.
I did not download the gtk2, the glib2 and the pango packages. More or less up to date GTK2 and glib2 are already included in RH 9.0 and I usually keep in sync with the Pango development process through CVS (I have to keep track of certain outstanding bugs in Pango w.r.t bengali rendering). If you follow these steps, please ensure that you have the devel packages installed as well.
To avoid a mess, I had decided to install the new GNOME packages under /opt. That meant that the new libraries and the header files would be installed in /opt/lib and /opt/include. So, I had to set the $PKG_CONFIG_PATH to /opt/lib/pkg-config (by issuing export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/lib/pkg-config) so the pkg-config utility searched /opt/lib/pkg-config before the usual /usr/lib/pkg-config. I had also added the line /opt/lib to the file /etc/ld.so.conf. Moreover, the usual ./configure was replaced by ./configure --prefix=/opt so the installation folder was /opt.
I followed the following sequence while installing packages. It works for me, and it may or may not work for you.

1. atk
2. libart_LGPL
3. libgnomecanvas
4. libxml2
5. libxslt
6. libIDL
7. linc
8. ORBIT
9. intltool
10. GConf
11. libglade
12. libbonobo
13. gnome-mime-data
14. gnome-vfs-devel (needed to insta

1. Bengali - www.bengalinux.org, www.nongnu.org/freebangfont, www.banglapenguin.org
2. Hindi - www.indlinux.org