How to start gnome? (My experiences)

[Ollie Oberg]

I wanted to point out that I'm having pretty much *exactly* the same problems starting gnome as described on the mailing list earlier this month.  For what it's worth, I'm running it on a G5 (PPC) with OSX 10.5.8, with the latest Xcode (3.1.4) installed, and the stock X11 app that comes with Leopard.  Also, I've installed Ubuntu on another machine, and despite a few problems, have managed to run gnome though ssh on that machine from my SnowLeopard machine, indicating to me that my setup is okay.  While I would love help, it seems that none is available at the moment.  Instead, I hope to detail my own adventures in installing gnome and failing to run it.  Perhaps this will help somebody else in the future (or me in the present).  In no particular order, 

(assume that port here means "sudo port" as it is necessary)

1. port install gnome 
This didn't work without a lot of extra help from me.  It would start fine, but I ended up having to clean, force deactivate, reactivate, etc. a lot of dependancies.  I think a general port clean all should be recommended any time anybody even thinks of recommending installing a large package like this.  For some reason, also, a lot of packages failed to install this way, but installed just fine using port install foo.

2. Perl5 hell
I often got a lot of errors, or simply frozen, results related to perl.  Often time it had to do with staging into destroot.  The solution was to force uninstall perl everything, then let macports install it if needed.   I still needed to manually activate perl5.12 in one case.  

3. Shell errors
It was a known problem that glib2 has a dependency on gtk-config.  Gtk-config currently has glib2 as a dependency.  Not a good situation for a fresh install.  Even the work-around mentioned in the bug report didn't work for me.  I managed to compile gtk-config on my own, after which I could install glib2, after which I could install gtk-config finally. This was perhaps the biggest headache of them all, with no clear solution.

4. stuck looking for .elc files
This was particularly annoying, because macports would just freeze at "configuring foo."  I had to try to compile myself, and only later found out that even though emacs was present under /usr/bin/emacs, configure couldn't find it until I did "port install emacs"

5. gtk-plugins
I gave up on this one.  None of the gtk-plugins-* installed through macports.  -good complied on it's own manually, -bad and -ugly did not.  I didn't really need totem, I don't think, but it would be nice to know it's not needed (if that's indeed the case) for users who were told "just sudo port install gnome and then run gnome-session."

6. dbus, quartz-wx, etc
I'm still not sure what exactly this is.  It seems to be important to running gnome, but (as discussion here has shown) how it relates to gnome is unclear.  similarly, quartz-wx seems to be important, but there's no explanations I could find what it is.  Sometimes it seemed like it's part of X11.app, other times like it's an alternative to X11.app.  Should users be running XQuartz instead of X11.app?

7. gnome.conf, .xinitrc, .xinitrc.d/90-gnome.conf, com.freedesktop stuff
There seem to be a number of processes, files, and configurations necessary to run gnome.  Again, I've found a lot of conflicting information here.  

It's not at all surprising that running a desktop while already in another one would be no cakewalk.  However, it seems to be rife with mis-information.

-- 
Ollie Oberg '03
ollie at jhu.edu
Department of Civil Engineering
Department of Physics