GNOME 2.22 in CentOS 5

[kurianthayil]

Hey all,
I was thinking on upgrading my GNOME to GNOME 2.22 in a notebook loaded with CentOS 5. Currently the gnome version I use is 2.16. I can't get the latest GNOME from yum. The reason why Im planning to switch to gnome 2.22 is because there is no sharpness in the images displayed, be it fonts, icons or any (Notebook is 14.1" widescreen). I think its the problem of GNOME. It gave me amazing clarity when I once installed Fedora 8 (gnome 2.20). So how do I upgrade my current GNOME 2.16 to 2.22? I don't find RPM so thinking of going with tarballs!!! Do suggest some tips and some guidelines on installation. Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Kurian.

[daark.child]

I personally would leave things as they are unless you have the time and patience to troubleshoot any problems. GNOME is known to be difficult to build from source (this is why some distros like Slackware dropped it), so most people use prebuilt packages. Its unlikely CentOS will ship GNOME 2.22 rpms because they don't tend to do major updates once they have released a new version. They tend to focus on bug fixing and stability of the existing packages. Introducing completely new features can also introduce new bugs, so its something they don't do.

[kurianthayil]

Hey,
Thanks for the reply. So what do you suggest? Troubleshooting the existing package is the best thing to do. Is there a way that I could improve the clarity of the fonts and icons of CentOS 5 with existing GNOME 2.16?

Regards,
Kurian.

[daark.child]

Can't be of much help with the icons. With regards to fonts, you could rebuild freetype2 and enable bytecode support. This improved the clarity of the fonts on my openSUSE 10.3 KDE desktop.

[kurianthayil]

Hey,
I did some search in the net and came to know about a utility called garnome. It helps u install GNOME. I downloaded GarNome2.22 which will install GNOME 2.22. I executed the one of its script (make paranoid-install) and it started downloading packages from the net and started to install all by itself. It was really good. But I got some dependencies like installing Perl modules which I was able to troubleshoot it very easily. Then came a bunch of dependencies like library conflicts, package missing (around 10 packages at a time). Got really confused and tired. Had to stop. Really can't understand why its so hard for GNOME packages to install!!!!!!!! Even GNOME recommends to install latest linux distro which will have the latest GNOME package.

Regards,
Kurian.

[daark.child]

I was afraid that you would run into the types of problems you mentioned. I find KDE a lot easier to compile from source than GNOME.

[gtbuzz]

AL Desktop repos have Gnome 2.20 for CentOS 5 and Gnome 2.22 in their beta section. The website is in Spanish, but the repo will work to get newer Gnome and multimedia updates for your CentOS/RHEL box.

[kurianthayil]

ok.. let me try that.. Thanx.

Kurian.