Hello, After just on two weeks and many rebuilds later I can say that we ARE able to install gnome on top of a base linux from scratch SYSTEMD build.
There are not really that many changes required to get it running nicely if you use their build tool (jhbuild). Using this tool it installs gnome to a /opt/gnome directory, and it really isolates the build and only installs within that environment, so there is no way that it can break a users system, unless they try and deviate from building within its "sandboxed" environment and install it to the /usr tree. I tried going through the normal installation of installing the source tar balls to /opt/gnome and failed. The installation of telepathy-glib is a real odd-ball, as it installs to nested sub directories and pkgconfig is unable to correctly read from it for other programs that require it, even if you go through and specify it on the ./configure line. The one thing that remains broken is GDM (gnome display manager). It will not start up even though all of the permissions are set up correctly, and the developers only seem interested in making sure that it works in a red hat environment as red hat have thrown vast sums of money their way and all the gnome documentation on line states that it works on the latest red hat. That is a real shame that open source can be bought off like that, as red hat is a corporation that does sell enterprise software and just happens to have a free version as well. I have gotten gnome to start up using lxdm as the display manager at boot time. There are issues with the version of atk, that are installed if you go through the BLF book and install the gnome packages and not the full gnome using the build tool. The versions need to match what jhbuild uses, else when it comes to linking, even though it is in a sandbox build environment, it still sources some files from those installed on the system, and linking will fail. I had to work with several developers to track down just what was causing the build failures. Also the XORG developers have made changes to fontsproto and to the server itself. They are now available as a release tar ball, and they are the stable version. I have the gnome-3.12 series installed. I am more than willing to share the changes that are required to be made to the modulesets that jhbuild uses as well as provide the jhbuildrc that I have used to get a working gnome environment. I am willing, if this is something that the development team is wanting to be added to a systemd version of BLFS to learn the svn tree and at least make a draft copy of it for discussion purposes to see if it is what you want added. I am not entirely sure when or if it has been marked as a RELEASE version, as details are rather sketchy on gnomes site. I think that some of the pit-falls that I came across could be avoided by installing only xorg after a base lfs systemd build and using jhbuild to build gnome, which will pull in the dependencies of atk and its family. I am willing to try again and build gnome from tar balls, but with the failure to do so this time round, it may not be possible without a LOT of changes. Please let me know what you think. Regards, Christopher -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
