Building GNOME 2.5

Going with jhbuild to get GNOME 2.5 compiled was most fun. It had 88 modules to compile, most of which were performed seamlessly, and went things went bad, I installed appropriate packages. I did a stock Workstation install of Fedora Core 1 to begin. I used jamesh’s sample .jhbuildrc, which loaded stuff into /opt/gtk2 (I’ll have to rebuild at some stage with Mozilla stuff as I’ve modified the sample.jhbuildrc now).

First error came with shared-mime-info (#132899), and I ignored it. Next hit was the gnome-vfs module requiring libbz2. Solved easily by yum install bzip2-devel. At module 27/88, we have the icon theme issue (#107979).

I was still ridden with a few more errors: 69/88 nautilus-media, 80/88 mozilla-gtkmozembed (the .jhbuildrc I used ignored Mozilla, so this is acceptable), 81/88 gnomemeeting whining about aclocal errors, and 85/88 glade. That said, I followed the README from the cvs checkout and it told me to add a file to /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions; I tried, but did not get far sadly (5.45am, sleepy, tired).

The “correct”, Fedora way is to go to /etc/X11/dm/Sessions, and create an executable file called jhbuild.desktop. It’s contents are:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=GNOME2.6
Comment=GNOME2.6
Exec=/home/byte/bin/jhbuild run /opt/gnome2/bin/gnome-session
Icon=
Type=Application

GNOME2.6 will be an option in your GDM now, so login, and have a ball of a time. I’m testing it now, and most of everything works wonderfully.


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