It's Gnome, Jim, but not as we know it!

ferrix · 2004-04-03 09:57:58

I'm not very familiar with Gnome, so after installing Gnome 2.6 (with some difficulty, but I installed it eventually), I started reading documentation. This is when I discovered that although I installed both gnome and gnome-extra, all kinds of things are either missing or I just don't know how to enable them:

- for starters, the default desktop comes up with a single, completely blank panel. Missing are the gnome foot, Applications and Actions menus that I believe are supposed to be there by default, as well as the entire bottom panel that I think should be present as well.... I added these myself, but I'm not sure - is it a sign of problems, or a very 'minimalist' default configuration? In which case, minimalism is all well and good, but shouldn't our version of Gnome stick to Gnome defaults?

- Nautilus is supposed to have a side pane. According to Gnome docs I should be able to get it with View->Side Pane. But there is no such option in my View menu.

- according to Gnome docs Nautilus should display jpgs in its own viewer. It doesn't; it calls Gimp instead, and I see no way of changing this.

- To add a bookmark, I should "display the item in the view pane. Choose Bookmarks->Add Bookmark.". .. except my Nautilus has no Bookmarks menu!

- much has been said about improved handling of ftp and other server type connections. Selecting File -> Connect to Server should produce a shortcut on the desktop. It does, but since it never asks for username/password, I can't connect. As I understand this, it is the function of gnome-keyring. I've got gnome-keyring installed, but it doesn't seem to work.

So ... is my installation borked, or what?

skoal · 2004-04-03 13:45:59

ferrix wrote:

...so after installing Gnome 2.6...I discovered that although I installed both gnome and gnome-extra, all kinds of things are either missing or I just don't know how to enable them...
So ... is my installation borked, or what?

Borked? Haha...I can think of another 6 letter word instead. My Gnome was kinda catty-whumpus too when I first installed it. However, I found that blowing away the Gnome hidden directories in my user home directory and re-logging back into Gnome helped, since it would recreate everything for that user at default settings. I think the directories I smoked were "Desktop", ".gnome*", ".gconf*", ".nautilus", and ".metacity".

The moral of that story was that I didn't install Gnome the AL/Pacman preferred way. Which is `pacman -Syu gnome'. I had originally installed individual packages one at a time. Heck, I didn't know what the heck the "sync" option was for...but, I do now.

I recently updated my Gnome to 2.6. I followed the website news advice and installed it that way. The only hitch I had was some .xml file conflict...so, I blew that file away and continued with update. No worries mate....works like a charm now.

* I would tend to believe that you may have follied the way I did initially when I installed Gnome. I din't use the "sync" option. Just blow away those directories, re-login and see if you get the default Gnome settings. If that doesn't work, update to 2.6 the way the website says...

ferrix · 2004-04-03 20:46:26

I *did* install with pacman -Syu gnome... This did a whole lot of nothing at the time, so I started adding things one by one... The next day doing another update helped a bit, and also I discovered there is a group gnome-extra - it just wasn't mentioned in the announcement! So I installed that as well. At that time I removed the lot, and did pacman -S gconf, gnome, gnome-extra... skipping gnopernicus (whatever that is), because it had unsolved dependency. But otherwise I think I have everything I should have.
So that was my installation. Also, this was not an upgrade from previous versions of gnome - this system had no gnome at all prior to 2.6... All in all, very disappointing. I guess I'll blow it away and try again in a couple of days...

I loved that April's Fool Day announcement: "As the title says, gnome 2.6 is in the house. There isn't much to watch out for, Arjan and JGC did a good job catching conflicts in the testing stage so the install should go flawlessly." That was almost as funny as Google's lunar station

Xentac · 2004-04-04 01:51:29

Just as a note, the -u option to pacman makes it ignore everything else. If you'd pacman -Sy gnome it would have done more what you wanted.

ferrix · 2004-04-04 02:27:27

Hmm... unfortunately 3 days later I just can't remember if I really did 'pacman -Syu gnome', or was this just what I typed in my message. I am certainly used to using -Syu, so it could be either way...
But the question is, what should I do now to bring my Gnome closer to what it is supposed to be?

Arch Linux

#1 2004-04-03 09:57:58

It's Gnome, Jim, but not as we know it!

#2 2004-04-03 13:45:59

Re: It's Gnome, Jim, but not as we know it!

#3 2004-04-03 20:46:26

Re: It's Gnome, Jim, but not as we know it!

#4 2004-04-04 01:51:29

Re: It's Gnome, Jim, but not as we know it!

#5 2004-04-04 02:27:27

Re: It's Gnome, Jim, but not as we know it!

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