Hi, I just got SuSE 9 and though I thought it was great I was somewhat disappointed when I found out it doesn't have the latest Gnome. Now I know it doesn't even have that many features from one version to another but I'm obsessed with having the latest software. So I thought of a plan to do the update myself but being the beginner that I am I'm not sure if it is such a good idea. Here it goes:
1. Download the Gnome sources
2. Do a Gnomeless install of SuSE 9
3. Compile the sources
4. Use SuSE provided software to build the RPM's (can't remember its name but I saw it somewhere)
5. Install the rpms.

I'm not even sure this would work but if it can I would like to know how complicated steps 3 and 4 can be. Is there a guide for compiling and is it a complex task to do so and build the rpms? Also, I found some ready-made rpms but they were made for SuSE 8.x so I guess they wouldn't work on 9? I know this might be a hassle but I think doing something like this could help me learn a bit more about Linux. Thanks in advance...

Hi!!

If you have an FTP client, You can find the RPM on Suse FTP Server (ftp.suse.com)

You are going to find them in :
/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/GNOME2/update_for_9.0

I have to say that I tried to install Suse 9.0 without Gnome or KDE and tried to installed gnome from scratch with those RPMs and it never worked...but I'm a too...

I hope you succeed to make it works

Good Luck

Thanks, that is a much simpler solution. I'm going to download the rpm's and I'll let you know if I succeed with the installation so that I can show you how I did it.

I don't think it will work either. I have tried to install separate versions of desktops that Suse originally included and if they don't come from a Suse update, I was toast.
Basically I wanted to do a similar thing and I couldn't get it to work.
What little help I got from Suse suggested they didn't think it would work either.
j

Stick to the available rpms, as there are too many dependancies with other packages to install from scratch, like with pgk-config, glibc (don't touch this if you don't know what you're doing), libXrandr and so on. Rpm installer will show you the dependancies. You won't need the newest version anyway, as most available source code will use <Gnome 2.4.

HTH

well I downloaded the rpms and had no trouble installing gnome 2.4 except for a few other packages that were needed. I pretty much did a default SuSE 9 install and then installed the rpms as indicated on the readme file on the ftp site.