FreeBSD GNOME Project Site Open For Business

Joe Marcus Clarke writes: "The FreeBSD GNOME project is proud to announce the opening of our project site. This site is devoted to the GNOME desktop and its development on FreeBSD." While the port is an ongoing project, quite a few applications are ready, as are instructions on putting GNOME on your FreeBSD box.

Comments

Oh, the pain of installing or upgrading.

[Jayson]

There are two great way to install on FreeBSD:

pkg_add -r gnome

or for those of you who like source:

cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome; make install

To upgrade application gnome-app:

portupgrade -r gnome-app

You might also want to install the package/port called gnome-fifth-toe, since that will include things like Gnumeric, GNUCash, Gimp, etc....

Re:So what ... big deal.

[Arandir]

Difficulty #1: Gnome is written for Linux. Since FreeBSD doesn't follow the LSB (or what Gnome thinks the LSB should be), there are of course problems. Nautilus simply couldn't build under FreeBSD for the longest time.

Difficulty #2: Gnome is written for Linux. Linuxisms abound in Gnome. To be fair, they abound in KDE as well, thus the existence of the FreeBSD KDE Project. Instead of submitting endless bug reports to Gnome, only to see them closed as "not a problem on my Debian box", I suspect the FGP will do much of this work fixing themselves, then submitting the patches to Gnome.

Difficulty #3: This is still FreeBSD, after all. Someone has to maintain these ports. Since there's quite a few of them (and more being gobbled up by the 'g' prefix every day) it only stands to reason to have a central point of portage.