Thinking of upgrading to GNOME 2.6

Message

iCeFuSiOn · Post by **iCeFuSiOn** » Thu May 20, 2004 12:34 am

I've been using Gentoo as my OS now for about 7 days (I've used Linux in the past but just to mess with, nothing serious, now its my main operating system and I swear by it.. hehe), and when I set up the system I installed GNOME 2.4; and I was wondering if its worth it to upgrade to 2.6, and if so, how would I go about doing it? I have 2.4 set up just the way I like it, everything works perfectly, and as they say, "if its not broken, don't fix it"... what should I do?

David_Escott · Post by **David_Escott** » Thu May 20, 2004 12:39 am

If you aren't feeling like you really need to update wait until mid-june. 2.6.2 will be out then, which will be the last stable release for ~5months.

brsett · Post by **brsett** » Thu May 20, 2004 3:03 am

I don't think there is an active Gentoo maintainer for Gnome any longer. If you are interested in gnome (and its a good DE and deserves interest), you might think about changing distributions. I'm using Fedora on my work PC now, and have thought about changing at home as well. I think some of the gentoo developers run fedora as well (Lovechild perhaps?!?)

shm · Post by **shm** » Thu May 20, 2004 3:21 am

brsett wrote:I think some of the gentoo developers run fedora as well (Lovechild perhaps?!?)

Lovechild is a gentoo developer? That's news to me, since if anything, he maligned the Gentoo gnome developers..

duoduo · Post by **duoduo** » Thu May 20, 2004 4:40 am

It seems gentoo developers are very slow with gnome2.6, but i'm still waiting it

Hypnos · Post by **Hypnos** » Thu May 20, 2004 4:48 am

* foser is the Gentoo developer most active in creating and maintaing GNOME ebuilds

* GNOME 2.6.1 is in Portage right now, soft-masked. I believe he is waiting for dependencies between the many packages to fully stabilize before declaring the who shebang stable under Gentoo, but as it stands now it is quite usable. Just do

Code: Select all

# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge gnome

Malakai · Post by **Malakai** » Thu May 20, 2004 10:20 am

brsett wrote:I don't think there is an active Gentoo maintainer for Gnome any longer. If you are interested in gnome (and its a good DE and deserves interest), you might think about changing distributions. I'm using Fedora on my work PC now, and have thought about changing at home as well. I think some of the gentoo developers run fedora as well (Lovechild perhaps?!?)

You know it's very impolite to suggest changing distro's in the Gentoo forums. Chances are people posting here are looking for help with gentoo, not looking to get pointed to redhat :rolleyes:

Erik2v · Post by **Erik2v** » Thu May 20, 2004 2:09 pm

I too have been waiting for the real 2.6 to become 'mergable'. It's been at least a month since 2.6.0 was out. I'm not here to compain, but to say a few things.

It's as if 2.6.0 will NEVER be stable enough to be unmasked. If that's the case, it would be nice to know. I'll go back to 2.4 then.

Yes, I know, that I can do the accept_keyword.... and get 2.6.0. I HAVE. The problem is that I don't want EVERYTHING upgraded... just gnome. And YES I have done accept_keyword emerge gnome. Which leaves me with an up to date system AND an up to date GNOME 2.6.0.

Here's the real problem... I've been on 2.6.0 for a LONG time now. I can't upgrade my system 'emerge world -up' until either 2.6.0 get's marked officially stable, or I bite the bullet and go back to 2.4. Emerge world -up wants to downgrade to 2.4. There is no easy way to upgrade the system WITHOUT downgrading gnome.

It would be nice for the maintainers to go back using package.mask as they used to. Then, It's just a question of me commenting out a block of masks, versus modifying a ton of ebuilds to mark them stable, removing the ~x86 tag.

I'm looking into Fedora as well, soon hereafter. Now since they've got aptget I can probably tolerate a redhatish distro.

It sure would be nice to have a package.mask instead of ~x86.....

infinyt9 · Post by **infinyt9** » Thu May 20, 2004 2:18 pm

bah, 2.4 is good 4 me... I say don't rush into a masked DE... you might find yourself swearing till tomorrow

superjaded · Post by **superjaded** » Thu May 20, 2004 2:23 pm

Erik2v wrote: It would be nice for the maintainers to go back using package.mask as they used to. Then, It's just a question of me commenting out a block of masks, versus modifying a ton of ebuilds to mark them stable, removing the ~x86 tag.

This is the point of /etc/portage/package.keywords.
This would have also been easier to do if GNOME 2.6 were still masked since then you could jsut take the stuff from profiles/package.mask and transpose it into that file and you'd be done.

But regardless, /etc/portage/package.keywords lets you specify specific ebuilds as "stable" regardless of how they're set in the base portage. Simply stick all the ebuilds that make up GNOME into this file and you're able to cleanly emerge the unstable GNOME without breaking emerge -uD world.

but as infinyt9 says, it's masked for a reason so don't come crying if something breaks.

YMMV but GNOME 2.6 works fine on my end.

jonnevers · Post by **jonnevers** » Thu May 20, 2004 2:24 pm

Here's the real problem... I've been on 2.6.0 for a LONG time now. I can't upgrade my system 'emerge world -up' until either 2.6.0 get's marked officially stable, or I bite the bullet and go back to 2.4. Emerge world -up wants to downgrade to 2.4. There is no easy way to upgrade the system WITHOUT downgrading gnome.

you can do a emerge -Upv world/system/etc the -U implies update and means update-only, it won't try to downgrade your ~x86 packages.

-Jon

mmealman · Post by **mmealman** » Thu May 20, 2004 3:40 pm

Erik2v wrote:I too have been waiting for the real 2.6 to become 'mergable'. It's been at least a month since 2.6.0 was out. I'm not here to compain, but to say a few things.

It's as if 2.6.0 will NEVER be stable enough to be unmasked. If that's the case, it would be nice to know. I'll go back to 2.4 then.

Yes, I know, that I can do the accept_keyword.... and get 2.6.0. I HAVE. The problem is that I don't want EVERYTHING upgraded... just gnome. And YES I have done accept_keyword emerge gnome. Which leaves me with an up to date system AND an up to date GNOME 2.6.0.

Here's the real problem... I've been on 2.6.0 for a LONG time now. I can't upgrade my system 'emerge world -up' until either 2.6.0 get's marked officially stable, or I bite the bullet and go back to 2.4. Emerge world -up wants to downgrade to 2.4. There is no easy way to upgrade the system WITHOUT downgrading gnome.

It would be nice for the maintainers to go back using package.mask as they used to. Then, It's just a question of me commenting out a block of masks, versus modifying a ton of ebuilds to mark them stable, removing the ~x86 tag.

I'm looking into Fedora as well, soon hereafter. Now since they've got aptget I can probably tolerate a redhatish distro.

It sure would be nice to have a package.mask instead of ~x86.....

GNOME is a fairly complex package and likely has a lot of failure points when compiling, not to mention it relies on a lot of libraries which themselves need to go stable. Gentoo will sometimes lag behind other dists when it comes to stable updates on huge projects like gnome.

Fedora is nice and is what I'll likely use as a corporate Linux OS if my company ever manages to get that project off the ground, but keep in mind that Fedora is basically an "unstable" distribution. I don't see much diff between ~x86 on Gentoo and Fedora, except in Gentoo you can pick and choose what ~x86 you want.

Also, thanks Jonn for the emerge -U tip. It works great.

Erik2v · Post by **Erik2v** » Thu May 20, 2004 7:17 pm

Thanks for the help people. Gnome 2.6 seems stable enough for me too.

So emerge -uU is case sensitive. I'll be using the -U for my world update then! Cool.

As for the keywords file, thanks... I didn't know about that feature either.

I just read the Fedora 2 just got a really bad review. Saves me the trouble.

I'm probably going to be using Gentoo for a long time to come.

Thanks!

tom56 · Post by **tom56** » Thu May 20, 2004 9:23 pm

read this!

emerge -U will kill your Gentoo
taken from robmoss2k's sig

doquar · Post by **doquar** » Fri May 21, 2004 2:56 am

I just emerged sync to find that gnome-2.6.0 has been unmasked. Yay!

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Fri May 21, 2004 3:14 am

doquar wrote:I just emerged sync to find that gnome-2.6.0 has been unmasked. Yay!

I'm glad its not just me, was beginning to have a heart attack thinking I broke something

xy77 · Post by **xy77** » Sat May 22, 2004 6:44 pm

I just emerged gnome 2.6.0 and restarted gdm. I could log into gnome session, but the panel died telling me it would have been started before. that happened about 10-20 times. I started a console and killed gnome-panel and started it manually. that worked, but it's not such a nice solution.
Can anyone help me please? Thanks.

- xy77

--EDIT--

from the first 5 minutes I have to say gnome 2.6 rocks! It's much faster and nicer and I found out networking works smoother. Good work!

NoControl · Post by **NoControl** » Sat May 22, 2004 7:39 pm

I was thinking about emerging Gnome 2.6 since it's marked stable in Portage now, but I read on gnome.org that 2.6.1 and 2.6.2 will be bugfix releases.
Also, I have seen quite a number of Gnome 2.6.0 problem-posts here.

So should I wait for Gnome 2.6.1 or 2.6.2 to be marked stable in Portage (how long do you think that'll take?), or should I go for 2.6.0 right now?

On one side the new features and enhancements of Gnome 2.6 look tempting, but I hate to work with crashing software (like many posts here have reported).
So what should I do? Wait or emerge?

(P.S.: I know about the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS flag to get 2.6.1 now, but I don't feel like having a mixed x86 / ~x86 system.)

Leunix · Post by **Leunix** » Mon May 24, 2004 2:46 pm

it still wont compile for me, it fails on the gnome-desktop

i really want it to work for me :S

Broot · Post by **Broot** » Mon May 24, 2004 3:37 pm

I wish there was a USE flag for Epiphany. It really sucks that you have to mandatorily download and compile both the monstrous Mozilla and Epiphany when all I really want is Firefox.

Thinking of upgrading to GNOME 2.6

Thinking of upgrading to GNOME 2.6

gnome 2.6 unmasked

Re: gnome 2.6 unmasked

gnome 2.6.0 gnome-panel problem

Update now or wait for 2.6.<1|2>?