Excuse my giddiness, but it installed and nothing is obviously broken.

debian64:~# aptitude install -t experimental gnome-desktop-environment

It took aptitude a couple tries to resolve the dependencies, and aptitude gave it a score of something like -9911, but no errors on the install and everything looks good.

I don't believe it can be done on the 32-bit release yet.

Awe, I gotta say it...

GNOME-2.16 is soooo last year. It's nice, though. It's.... well.... slicker than 2.14 IMHO.

lol

I expected that. I know it's available in binary on some distros, and it can certainly be compiled, but I'm an unapologetic Debian guy, and the Etch freeze has brought cutting edge stuff to pretty much of a standstill.

Also, it's been compiled first for AMD64. That's a harbinger of things to come.

That I know from seeing your posts in the infinite "Which Distro is for Me" threads...I put 2.16 on my pure 64-bit CLFS last fall and will probably build 2.18 when it hits the street. Metacity's compositing is supposed to by stable in the 2.18 branch.

True, true, true...

Sorry, english is not my native language so I didn't get all the bits from your post

Do you mean Gnome 2.16 can't be installed/compiled on 32bits?


Pity then

You could get the source and compile it yourself (big job), but you can not get it yet using Apt.

Hum that's a good aptitude exercise, let's try on my tiny Pentium
Score -9951:
I'm still alive

Some metapackages are not upgraded but I don't care.

edit:
No in fact I miss some others like metacity

Since I had such good luck with Gnome, I decided to try the Experimental fglrx drivers (ver. 8.31.5) Also worked without a hitch ... This is fun!

After a few weeks, I'm still a happy camper. My only problem is that Gedit doesn't work at all. Immediate BugBuddy when I try to open it. I'd be interested to know if anyone else has experienced the same thing (AMD64-Gnome 2.16)

Apart from that, occasional intermittent application crashes, but overall, very solid.

I am a KDE guy but I tried installing gedit from experimental and have no problems

Strange ... I have a feeling this problem is unique to me. Maybe in a few days, I'll completely remove Gnome and reinstall.

I hate to say it but debain is quickly becoming the distribution of choice for a base distribution to re engineer and build a better distro (I.E. Mark Shutleworth the founder and head cheese over at Ubuntu and (Warren the brains behind MEPIS which is based off of Ubuntu)).

They're not making better distros, they're just pandering to incompetents. As PT Barnum famously said, "You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

The reason so many distros (over 100) are Debian based is that it's the best, most reliable Linux available. OTOH, Debian, itself, refuses to make things easy for beginners so there is easy pickings from the field of Debian rejects for the Ubuntus of the world. If you want the best, there is only one, If you want hand-holding every step of the way, there are many.

For your entertaiment, Here's an example of a person who'd have been jeered off most Debian support lists. The guy providing the help is definitely a candidate for sainthood.

After something like 20 days, I switched back to kde, I prefer. I still have gnome from experimental but don't like it so much.

Tell us what you really think

I actually agree with you though