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?"

Comments

Re:Definately

[ksheff]

I've been installing gnome by just compiling the source since about version 0.30. There is a compilation instruction 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 course they don't.

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]

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?"

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.
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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