[gentoo-dev] GNOME 2.4 marked stable on x86

[Mike Gardiner]

Hi list(s),

As of now, the fruits of our labour in the GNOME team are available in
the form of GNOME 2.4, marked stable on x86. New GNOME users should have
no problem acquiring the GNOME Desktop with the command 'emerge gnome'. 

Those of you upgrading from 2.2 may however, run into several small
problems, commonly heard on IRC and the forums these past few weeks as
"Help!, my bonobo-activation is blocking gnome?". The reason for this,
is that bonobo-activation has been merged into libbonobo in versions
post-2.4.0. 

Some method for auto-cleaning blocking deps would be ideal, but we don't
have the portage functionality for that. Therefore, the best method for
upgrading is to 'emerge -u gnome' until you hit the blocking
bonobo-activation. 'emerge -C bonobo-activation' and then 'emerge -u
gnome' to continue the installation. 

This should ensure that you keep the bonobo-activation libraries
installed, right up until they are removed and then immediately replaced
by those included in libbonobo. This reduces the chance of missing
libraries causing other compile time problems.

The same may apply to gnome-utils and gucharmap for you as well, just
'emerge -u gnome-utils' at the blocking point before gucharmap is
merged.

Another issue is that of the inclusion of the Epiphany web browser in
the default GNOME distribution. For Gentoo, the GNOME team distributes
the GNOME Desktop as it is made available from the official GNOME team,
and gnome.org. We make an effort to follow their packaging and
guidelines closely, to provide a complete GNOME distribution. 

As of GNOME version 2.4, Epiphany is now included as the default web
browser. Epiphany is a GTK2 and Mozilla based browser with a lightweight
frontend. However, it requires that Mozilla is available, and has been
compiled with GTK2. Some people find that this adds a hefty weight to
their GNOME desktop, and may prefer to use a different browser.

In this case you are best to inject epiphany with
emerge inject net-www/epiphany-1.0
so that it is included as installed and wont bug on upgrades.

So what can you expect in your new GNOME 2.4 installation ? GNOME 2.4
doesnt hold a wealth of new features and options, but it does have many
changes, under-the-hood, so to speak, as well as a healthy portion of
general bugfixing and maintenance. Here are only a few of the changes
you might notice.

The unified panel makes it's first appearance, covering with one panel
what was previously provided with 4 different types.

A personal favourite of mine is the "Screen Resolution" control (found
under Applications->Desktop Preferences) which provides an interface to
XRandR and allows you to change X resolutions on the fly.

Nautilus-cd-burner is now included for those USE'ing the "cdr" flag
allowing drag and drop burning (check out Nautilus help with F1 and then
the "Writing CD's" topic).

Nautilus also now integrates better with media through the use of
gstreamer and gst-plugins (Nautilus->View Menu->View as Audio).

Please report valid bugs via the usual, official channels (bugzilla).
For us to help and fix bugs, they really need to be reproducable, not
one off occurances. Also remember your emerge info and relevant build
logs/evidence :).

I think that just about sums it up. We wish you success in installing
GNOME 2.4, and hope you enjoy using it for your desktop.

The Gentoo Linux GNOME Team
(gnome@g.o)


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