Seemant Kulleen wrote: I'm glad to be able to finally(!) announce the new Gnome 2 Desktop as
available in Gentoo Linux.

The Gnome 2 release was announced today;
Announcement: http://gnome.org/pr-gnome20.html
More info: http://gnome.org/start/2.0/
Release notes: http://gnome.org/start/2.0/releasenotes.html

With this we are the first Linux distribution to support the Gnome 2
desktop, and it has been many months of quite hard work for me and the
others who are involved in getting this project to run smoothly for all
users.



Installation and Update :
The update process should be very smooth for users, and this has been a
major caveat for us, but we think we have succeeded. To install the
Gnome 2 desktop, you only have to :
emerge gnome

Portage will care for download, build and installation. If you have a
previous Gnome 1.4 installation, portage will stop and complain that
"gnome-core" is blocking, to solve this issue you have to:
emerge unmerge gnome-core

This will remove the conflicts encountered.


Caveats :
We are shipping Gnome 2 with Metacity as the preferred
windowmanager, because sawfish wasn't working for an extended period of
time. Sawfish 2.0 works now, but we retained Metacity because it got
more testing in Gentoo than Sawfish did. You can at any time:
emerge sawfish
and choose to use that as your default window manager in Gnome.



Compability :
Gnome 1.4 Applications will continue to work with your Gnome 2 desktop.
Gnome 1.4 Applets will not work, and programs that use applets will not
run. This is a problem that we are working on.



Debugging :
To help the Gnome project in the struggle to develop a solid desktop
environment, we ship Gnome with debugging enabled. This will be
disabled in a minor update within two weeks. We hope that you will
cooperate and help further the development by providing bug reports to
the Gnome project. This can be done at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ or by
using "bug-buddy", the automated bug reporting tool. Please, forward
your impressions, opinions, ideas and crashes to the Gnome project.



Thanks :
The build and install process should be solid thanks to a large amount
of Gentoo developers and testers, especially Gabriele Giorgetti
<stroke@gentoo.org> who helped me on maintaining and updating Gnome 2
as well as handling bugreports, and Martin Schlemmer
<azarah@gentoo.org> who got sawfish working.


Regards,
Spider (D.m.D. Ljungmark)
Gentoo Linux Developer, Gnome 2 Maintainer and Packager.
(http://gentoo.org/~spider/)(Gnome 2 FAQ. And configuration Guide)


--
Seemant Kulleen
Developer and Project Co-ordinator,
Gentoo Linux http://www.gentoo.org/~seemant