GNOME 2.6: Two Left Feet?

By: Kurt Wall
Thursday, June 3, 2004 11:02:10 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5428/1/

A Foot in the Door

The latest release of the GNOME Desktop, 2.6.1, hit Web and FTP servers near you on 14 May 2004. It's purty, to be sure, and its fonts are anti-aliased. But, it eats your CPU, your RAM, your disk space, your bologna sandwich, and, if you're not careful, your small pets. I've written in this space before that I'll trade performance for eye candy almost every time, so GNOME 2.6 was at a disadvantage before I even got started with it. Nothing in the quality time I spent with GNOME 2.6 the last few days has caused me to change my mind.

The truth of the matter is, simply put, I couldn't persuade GNOME 2.6.1 to run. Just getting it installed took more work than it should have. First, to prove my Linux machismo, I tried building it from source. The build instructions seemed clear and the requirements on external packages (pkg-config, Xft2, fontconfig, FreeType 2.0.9, docbook-xml, and docbook-xsl) were minimal. I had the required development libraries, too, so it couldn't be too hard because the helpful GNOME folks described the build and installation order at http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/rninstallation.html.

No joy. Everything was going fine until I tried to build libgnomeui. I don't recall now what precisely went wrong, but I do recall spending a couple of hours trying to solve the compile problem, which revolved around some circular library dependencies.

I considered trying GARNOME, a GNOME source code distribution that automatically downloads and builds the source tarballs for you, but I heeded GNOME's advisory that "GARNOME is usually used only for testing of unstable development versions of GNOME" and discarded that notion. I was already developing a bad taste in my mouth and didn't want to make it worse.

Giving up on demonstrating my machismo, I decided to take the developers' suggestion to install a binary distribution. I downloaded the latest and greatest slackware-current GNOME packages. that in itself took a couple of hours because there are a lot of packages to download, and some of them are rather large. I let the download finish over night.

A quick upgradepkg *tgz installed the downloaded packages. At the moment of truth, I rebooted, and...

Two Left Feet, Definitely

...GDM (the GNOME Display Manager) complained about missing shared libraries. The first was libatk, an accessibility toolkit for handicapped access. I found that, installed it, ran ldconfig to update /etc/ld.so.cache, tried to restart GDM, and then learned I was missing libbonoboui. How's that? It was installed, the versions were right, and ld.so had created the proper symlinks.

Just in case I'd missed something, I reinstalled the bonobo packages I'd downloaded. Once more with GDM, and now I learn that GNOME wants libXinerama.so. Just for grins, I tried good ole startx as both root and a merely mortal user and got the same error.

Not only does GNOME have two left feet, they're club-footed left feet. I had static libraries for Xinerama (libXinerama.a), but no shared libraries. That's beside the point, though, because I don't run Xinerama! Why in the world do I need Xinerama libraries if I don't use Xinerama? This is brain-damaged, ill-considered design at work: requiring libraries that most people don't have and don't need.

Smelly Feet

I wanted to like GNOME 2.6.1. I wanted to appreciate the eye candy, the better performance, and the more consistent interface. I was looking forward to playing with some of the applications and applets, to seeing how the old ones had changed and what the new ones could do. In the end, I just wanted it to run, but it didn't.

I haven't recounted everything I tried, during a 10-day period, to get GNOME to run. The point being, though, that I shouldn't have to sacrifice goats and wave chicken feet to get something like this to work. I'm prepared to spend three hours downloading a metric buttload of tarballs. I'm willing to spend as much time as necessary building complex software from source code. If the end result works, it's worth it. As it is, I'm not willing to go another step with GNOME 2.6 until I get it as part of my next Slackware release.

Should you run it? Sure, if you're willing to put up with the aggravation and to play the detective game required to make it work. My recommendation, though, is that you should wait until your Linux distribution maker has gone through the pain for you and presents you with a known good product. Until then, GNOME 2.4 is good enough for you and for me.

Kurt Wall is an all-around Linux geek. He has written all or parts of eight books about Linux and UNIX programming and system administration and is the technical editor for over a dozen other Linux- and UNIX-related titles. Currently, Kurt works for TimeSys Corporation in Pittsburgh and lives in South Park, Pennsylvania. He receives entirely too much email at kwall@kurtwerks.com.