Hi, I finally managed to get GNOME 2.8 starting up mostly fine today. It took quite some time to get all the packages built (I did that mostly some months ago) and figure out the issues, the latter was mostly done by Neal.
A screenshot is here: http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/media/hurd-gnome.png The packages are at deb http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/hurd-gnome/ ./ The caveats: 1. gamin doesn not work (and FAM is not ported), so there is no automatic file update for gnome-vfs. Volunteers are needed to figure out why gamin does not work (when I built gnome-vfs against it, it made the whole box freeze). There were some test suite failures, so this would probably the best way to start. 2. orbit2<->gconf2 is flakey. Neal Walfield's pflocal patch (along with a smaller patch he sent to libc-alpha today) should make orbit work fine (the test suite passes now), but we have not tested this yet in action. As an work-around, one can force orbit to use TCP/IP by putting 'ORBIIOPIPv4=1' into ~/.orbitrc. Thanks to Barry for figuring that out. 3. There is a pretty severe issue with pthread_attr_setstacksize() from libgthread resulting in nautilus to abort. I hacked around that in glib for now, Neal might be able to look into that later on. 4. A lot of GNOME packages seem to link with --as-needed these days, so you might have to export LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libpthread.so.0.3 until Roland's glibc patch is committed/in the Debian package. 5. Several minor issues like PATH_MAX stuff; and Build-Depends on things we don't have (sound libraries, gstreamer, etc.). For the latter, we'll have to figure these out together with the Debian GNOME team. For the former, we should file bugs upstream. 6. Most applications are not yet built, not even all the ones from gnome-core. 'apt-get install gnome-applets gnome-control-center gnome-icon-theme gnome-panel gnome-session metacity nautilus scrollkeeper' (along with the above APT source) should get you started. 7. I probably forgot something. In summary, I hope we will be able to get a fully working GNOME system[1] (not only for Debian, but for anybody building the upstream sources) by the time 2.12 releases. Maybe we can get some of the bigger issues patched in the 2.10.x releases. In any case, we should be able to get GNOME working in Debian once sarge is released and 2.10 moves to unstable. enjoy, Michael -- [1] Of course, these days GNOME is using advanced kernel features like D-Bus, HAL etc. and also Gstreamer, so we are lacking behind feature-wise. Maybe we can get as far as Solaris mid-term at least. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
