I downloaded all the contents off fto.gnome.org that mark the most recent stable release. In addition to that it requires software packages outside of it, like the new fontconfig package, so I got that to. I sat down and noticed a few things.

There is no global 'INSTALL' file in which can guide you on what package to choose. So i took the smallest, most end-user-ish package and worked my way up by the errors the ./configures gave me to figure out which should be first installed.

In addition to this, overwriting your current glib, gtk, etc breaks LOTS of things. Is there a recommend way on doing this? Should all these packages have a defined --prefix at the ./configure line? Im very confused on this.

Lastly, is it just me or pkg-config a pain?

Files seems to be spread out everywhere, so I guess this is a rant as well as the simple question; whats the default method of upgrading your Gnome desktop?

Why couldn't the whole package be one giant build, seeming as how most of the little packages need the larger ones anyway.

Driving me crazy! Crazy I say!

Compiling gnome from source is hell. Seriously, it's one of the most painful software installation experiences you can have in Linux (IMO), it's best not to compile it on your own.

Anyways, what distro are you running? If it's slackware, try dropline (look it up on sf.net). If it's gentoo, you should be able to emerge it. If it's Redhat, I'm sure there's an easy way to do it, but I don't mess with RPM based distros, so maybe someone else can help you there.

Also, pkg-config is actually very cool, just make sure that....
a) /usr/local/lib/pkg-config is in your pkg config path
b) you move all the .pc files in /usr/local/lib/pkg-config to /usr/lib/pkg-config

I run Redhat 9 and I haven't found any dropline-like scripts for it.

It's terrible that such a feature packed software suite cannot be easily installed like other packages...

I think im beginning to understand pkg-config better, Im just disgusted with the file orginization (conflicts) that developers have.

Thanks for the reply, I think I'll take a look into a newer distro, like Suse9 er something like it.

You can try Garnome which is set of scripts that compile Gnome. They are on Gnome wbebpages somewhere.

Yea, I tried that before but the documentation on it was terrible. Wasn't sure what do it. It downloaded from CVS (took a while) and then it brought me back to my bash prompt...

Installing Garnome is very easy and the instructions are pretty good, IMHO.

1. Install the required packages (several development packages).
2. Untar the tarball somewhere under your home directory.
3. cd down to meta/gnome-desktop/
4. Type make install

Then you have to have some sort of session script for it. The one provided on the Garnome homepage works straight out of the box for me.

Usually I install Garnome in /usr/local/garnome nowadays and add the Garnome lib dir to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, even when not running Garnome itself, to have it accessible and usable for all users and so that other programs I compile from source can use the Garnome libs.


Håkan

Thanks, I'll give that a try and report back with my desktop status.

Whoops, I forgot about Garnome. I've heard great things about it, you might want to try that out.

Yea, I think I've mistaken a different package for Garnome - this is rather simple to use