gnome starter

[Andrea D'Amore]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 5:09 PM, io <paolodamessina at libero.it> wrote:
> Dear Brad, I pointed out that I am an end user, so that I never could pretend to write an effective documentation.
> However, I enjoyed  some very fine pieces of soft from macports, e.g. g95, with its precious but simple control of warnings. I need not gnome neither kde, but I would like experiment with them. If we consider macosX, really only a little of all sofware coming with it is useful and used by an user, that in turn knows little of inner mechanism of osX. I have some difficulty to understand why, if one seeks for an alternative os, that os is awkwardly difficult to invoke. Another disappointment there is when one is bound to make some cleaning after the use of a ported software, that may alter defaults, how in particular often happens when the software uses Xwindow. Porting to me means not only that the software works either as an app of osX or by one (1) command by terminal, but also that is a noninvasive host, able to quietly disappear when it is requested no more. In conclusion, I think that one should say 'well, I ported this soft ' only when the above requirements are satisfie
>  d.

While I understand the frustration from an user point of view you
can't dictate when a port should be considered done by the port
writer. You can, of course, submit bugs and suggestions about making
the user experience better using the Trac system [1]. Did you?

Consider we (most of us) do ports on spare time. I usually port
software that I use, there's no proudness in that but macports is a
tool to help you, building all from scratch and keeping dependencies
updated would be much more of a hassle than install ports and
configure those.

About your original issue you didn't specify what version of OS you're
running, what version of Xquartz you're using and if macports and
ports are up to date (port selfupdate).
My palantír [2] is currently broken [4] but I guess the issue is about
Xorg configuration, you're probably launching Xquartz default, that is
quartz-wm, thus preventing metacity to start.
On my 10.6.5 system with XQuartz 2.5.3 [3] I can put "exec twm" into
~/.xinitrc and have twm running when I launch Xorg both using "startx"
from command line or running XQuartz.app . If you can reproduce this
then you can use a ~/.xinitrc file containing:
/opt/local/bin/metacity &
exec /opt/local/bin/gnome-session

You may need to export the env variables separately.

> Best regards,
> Paolo Denti

Ciao

-- 
Andrea




[1] http://trac.macports.org/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr
[3] http://xquartz.macosforge.org/
[4] yes, that's a joke, the orb is in great shape