Travis Angle
Adam Fuller
Roger Smith
Rajiv Zutshi
Robert Petrusz

Assignment 9

GNOME

Introduction

(Travis Angle, Rajiv Zutshi)

Background (www.gnome.org)

GNOME stands for "GNU Network Object Model Environment". GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". It is the GUI desktop of the GNU Project and the version we installed came out in March 1999. GNOME is intended to be "a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software."

It is important to note that GNOME is not tied to any one window manager. You can chose your favorite window manager and use it with GNOME. A window manager is essentially a program within the X Windows environment which controls the placement and appearance of windows on the screen. When you run an xterm, the box of terminal text is the actual xterm. The border, title bar, buttons and so forth are all handled by the window manager. Some window managers have extra features, but all handle window placement and decoration.

GNOME has been reported to work with the following operating systems: GNU/Linux, BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD), Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX. We chose to install GNOME as it satisfied our RPM installation. It was also somewhat complex as there were several RPMs to install in a particular order.

Narrative

(Adam Fuller, Robert Petrusz)

This install was easy. Nothing but rpmz. What would have taken all weekend to compile and install instead took just a couple of seconds. Everything we did during the install can be seen here with the script file. We following the online documentation all the way through to complete the install.

Since all the rpmz we needed were essentially in one directory, we ftped to ftp.geo.net and mgot everything in /pub/gnome/gnome-1.0/redhat/i386, which we put in /usr/local/src/gnome. After that, following the directions in the online documentation, we scanned the rpm database for some essential packages:


% rpm -q gsl umb-scheme guile xscreensaver
We didn't have any of these, so we installed them off of the redhat 5.2 cd. Next we installed the latest glib and gtk+, which was a lot newer than the ones we had compiled by hand, so this was a Good Thing. After that was done, we moved those two packages out of the directory and ran this command:

% rpm -Uvh *.rpm
After making sure everything installed correctly, we then went and put a new Xclients file in /etc/X11/xinit and cranked it up. Success! It worked! Here's what our new Xclients file looked like:

#!/bin/bash
gnome-session

Functionality

(Roger Smith)

Hello my name is Guh-Nome and I pronounce Guh-Nome as Guh-Nome. Yes thats right, the official pronunciation of Gun-Nome is just that. Installing GNOME onto magenta wasn't a very difficult task, except for a few fallbacks. Some of the benefits of GNOME include the following: it is free it uses the GIMP toolkit as the graphics toolkit "all GNOME applications are session aware, which means that if you shut down the GNOME wordprocessor and then start it back up again, it will open the document you had open before."

Pretty cool! So anyway what it all comes down to is that we got it working and we like it.

April 8, 1999