Gnome 2.6.1 upgrade

As this blog entry is been written the CPU is quitely ticking away while the hard disk whirls at the task of compiling gnome 2.6.1 from source. You will no doubt wonder why I am installing 2.6.1 now when 2.6.2 is already available. Well I downloaded this 2.6.1 version some time back and as usually happens with projects like this it never got off the ground.

I am simply too lazy (and too stingy - downloading is as expensive as driving a BMW) to bother downloading the new version of a desktop that i will rarely use (I work almost excluseively on KDE) Which version? 3.1 would you believe!

Installing from source code is not for the faint hearted. There are numerous packages and unless you install them in the right order you get nothing more than a heap of errors about failed dependencies.

It took me quite a while to figure out this sequence. Unfortunately i didn't write it down so if I have to install gnome again I have to go through the whole painfull process again.

While bogged down with this I decided to uninstall the existing (already badly damaged) version of gnome on my machine. This was a big mistake; not just because the uninstallation is painfull affair but because lots of software still depend on version 1.2 of glib.

One of the most prominent products that depend on this older version of glib is mozilla, I had to google with konqueror to figure out that the only solution is to reinstall the glib-1.2 which I did from RPMs.

Right-O, I have come to the end of the blog enty but gcc is still hard at work, will let you know about the outcome tommorow.