Information on GNOME

GNOME stands for GNU Network Object Model Environment. It's goal is to make a user-friendly interface for Linux. It's still fairly BETA, but it's coming along quite nicely. Most of the things work right out of the box.

You can find out how to get it at the GNOME homepage. I'll put some information here about how to make it work if you're stuck on some common problems. I might eventually put up the things I found when playing with CVS, but I think there will be a new GNOME CVS FAQ coming out soon.

Some problems that I exprienced installing GNOME 1.0 from RPMS
• I couldn't get sound to work. Something was wrong with the EsounD RPM. I tried recompiling from the SRPM so that EsounD knew to look for my ALSA driver, but still no go. I eventually just got EsounD from CVS and installed it with the --prefix=/usr option on configure. I always get a dependency error say that the RPM needs libesd.so.0, but I just give the --nodeps option and force it to do it anyways. As long as libesd.so.0 is in the dynamic library cache, it's okay. (run ldconfig to update the cache.) Everything works fine, except for Enlightenment. There is GNOME sound, but no Enlightenment sound. Hmmm....

GNOME session management, and session management in general

Session management is really kinda wonky with RH 5.2 systems. So here are some tips, and information that I found help keep things a bit more inline. Hopefully this will reduce some of the traffic on the GNOME mailing list.

1. Make sure that the loopback device in started at boot time. This means to make sure that the right 'network' initscript is in the rc.* directory. Use ntsysv or tksysv on RedHat and making sure that 'network' is started on your run-level. To check whether your loopback device is working, type ifconfig, or ping 127.0.0.1. Things should show up.
2. Make sure that localhost and localhost.localdomain (or whatever you call your computer) is in /etc/hosts and that they refer to the loopback device.
3. Now RedHat systems have crazy connection scripts for ppp. If you use ifup/ifdown or usernet, you will notice that your hostname changes if you use dynamic IP. Try it. Type hostname before you log on. Then see what name you get after you log on. It may be different. If it's different and you are experiencing problems like GNOME crashing when you run a new program after you log on, try changing the hostname back to whatever it was before you logged on, or to localhost. You can do this by becoming root, and typing hostname localhost, or whatever your computer name is. This hopefully will allow you to continue to use your computer. It's a pain in the ass to do this everytime you log on, so as soon as I find out how, I'm going to write a login script so it doesn't do this. Or I'll check out these ppp-setup programs they have. I'll let you know if I find anything.

Current Problem: Session Management. Finding a ppp-script that doesn't change my hostname.

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