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Gnome 2.2 backport for Debian Woody available for download
Feb. 21, 2003

Jamie Strandboge announces a Gnome 2.2 backport to get you up and running with latest Debian . . .


The Debian GNU/Linux distribution has 3 different 'versions' at any particular time. 'stable', 'testing' and 'unstable'. Unstable is where the development work happens, and after it is known to work for a while new software goes into testing. After a while, no new packages are allowed into testing, and it is tested and debugged to eventually become the stable version. Stable only receives security updates, and since Debian's stable release cycle is slow, software in stable is often old.

So what is a backport exactly? Jaime tells DesktopLinux.com that his backport uses software from unstable, which is compiled to run on Debian stable. This is a great boon to user's of Debian stable that want the stability and security of Debian stable, but with updated software. It is an "unofficial" backport, but many have provided feedback that they found it useful.

Jaime writes . . .

First of all, a big thanks to all the Debian maintainers for making such good source packages. They did all the real work. Also, thank you to DebianPlanet.org for hosting the archive of my gnome2.2 backport for Debian 'Woody'. The upgrade has been smooth for me from gnome 1.4 (woody)
as well as from Gustavo Noronha's gnome2 backport.

Instructions:

Add this to your
/etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://mirrors.evilgeniuses.org.uk/debian/backports/woody gnome2.2/
deb-src http://mirrors.evilgeniuses.org.uk/debian/backports/woody gnome2.2/

I recommend exiting gnome if you are currently in it. To install, simply do:

apt-get update
apt-get install gnome-core gdm gtk2-engines*


For the gnome2.2 development packages, you can do:

apt-get install gnome-core-devel


And to pull in various other pieces of gnome software, do:
apt-get install gnome


I have backported gnucash 1.8.1, mozilla 1.2.1, galeon 1.2.7, and evolution 1.2.2 among other things. If you want to upgrade evolution, it is advised that you shutdown evolution and run the 'killev' script.

You can optionally do an
'apt-get -u dist-upgrade' 
which will pull in all the development support packages that were needed to compile these (eg backported automake, debconf, etc).

These packages were tested on various machines, and appear solid. Bugs should be filed here unless you think it is a packaging bug (eg it conflicts with other woody packages), in which case send them to me.

Potential problem: when logging in for the first time, you may need to run 'fc-cache' from a terminal. This appears to be a fontconfig issue and is not specific to this backport.


If you are interested in how the backport was done, please visit this link.



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