[Pan-users] Well, 112 packages later, Gnome works . . mostly :)

[Mark Smitka]

Apologies for the off topic nature of the post, but I thought it worth 
mentioning that following my initial joy after upgrading to GTK 2.2, I spent 
about 72 hours trying to completely restore *all* of Gnome's functionality. 
I'm not sure why, as I really never used the Gnome desktop anyway, but heck, 
what's more fun than fixing something you broke for no good reason?

Anyway, for those who may have followed me down the road to ruin:

I'm running Redhat 8.0, and following my GTK 2.2 upgrade, some/most of the GTK 
apps I used worked, but others (most notably the Gnome applets) did not. They 
all crashed with a segmentation fault. It was then that I began the long hard 
lesson of learning about Gnome's dependencies (sheesh, you might think that 
MS authored Gnome!).  Being a full time Linux user for only 3 months, I've 
made a lot of progress, I build most of the apps I use from src, but am still 
a bit queasy when it comes to managing dependencies, and building with a 
quagmire of special options, prefixes, etc.  So, I figured it might be best 
to get what I needed via Redhat's 8.1 beta phoebe release RPM's. For the most 
part, that worked. I believe there were a few libraries I needed to grab and 
build from Sourceforge, but with the help of RPM Wizard, Synaptic (I use it 
primarily just to identify dependencies), I got all of the Gnome applets 
working again (at least within KDE).  Great, right?  Not quite. Now, the 
Gnome desktop launched, but the panel would flash about 5 times and die. 
There was something about libgen_util_applet-2.so that it didn't like. Now, 
the "throw caution to the wind" stuff started. I put the old version of 
libgen_util_applet back in place, and Badda-Bing-Badda-Boom, the panel works. 
Now though, the panel applets wouldn't dock in the panel. The panel itself 
was happy with the older libgen_util_applet file, but the applets were 
complaining about not finding the libgen_util_applet-2.so version. YIKES! So, 
this began a 12 hour resting period (my brain was fried). I had tried "faking 
it out" by attempting to link so.0 to -2.so, but no go. 
Finally, late last night, I decided to try to build the very latest 
gnome-panel from source, and a configure error indicated that libwnk was an 
old version. Yes, I had missed upgrading libwnk to the latest version. I 
grabbed that via the phoebe RPM, and it works!  Everything works!  Well, 
almost. The panel is great, the desktop works, and in fact, for the most 
part, it all looks great with the exception of:

1) The icons in the panel vanish after after messing with Nautilus 
preferences. If I hover the mouse over them, they re-appear. I think I 
noticed a post somewhere (who can remember, I've been to so many sites and 
newsgroups) saying that this was a known issue with the very latest and 
greatest Gnome release (perhaps Gnome panel?).  Dare I even think about 
updating the Gnome panel?  I suppose, if I do so, I'll need to be sure the 
other 111 files are all updated as well. 

2) Nautilus displays only a "piece of paper" icon for all files and folder, 
and the theme preferences dialog crashes when I drag a new theme onto it.

Otherwise, 112 RPM's, and about 2 dozen pots of coffee later, Gnome works for 
the most part, and GTK 2.x apps look just a little bit snazzier.  <groan>

Mark
-- 
e-mail: address@hidden
web: http://kickme.to/marksmitka

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