GNOME Release Notes for Red Hat 5.1

This is a technology preview of the GNOME desktop project. It is the results of about 4 months of feverish work by an InterNet based development team. The aim is to provide a completely free (source and license) desktop to complement the killer-OS -> Linux. This demo of the GNOME desktop is intended to give a glimpe of what is coming soon to a desktop near you. The programs are for the most part fully functional (all the GNOME developers use them daily) and should be relatively bug-free. However, since this is a preview release, understand that there are a few rough edges here and there. But don't let those get in your way, go ahead and play around and see what all the fuss is about!

Installing GNOME

You will need to install all of the RPMs in the RPMS directory. This can be done with the rpm command:

cd <directory with GNOME RPMs>
rpm -Uvh *

This will install the GNOME desktop onto your RH 5.1 system. Now you will need to edit the way X11 comes up on your system. This is usually done with a .xinitrc, .xsession, or a .Xclients file in your home directory. Determine which of these is being run on your computer before proceeding. If you have just installed RH 5.1 and none of these files exist in your home directory (try 'ls -a' in your home directory), you can just create a .xinitrc from scratch.

In this example we will be using fvwm2 as the window manager, but you can use any window manager with GNOME. To use the panel most effectively, you might want to disable any taskbar your window manager creates. To make this easy to do with fvwm, there is a .fvwm2rc file included with this distribution called 'fvwm2rv.gnome'. Copy this file into your home directory with the name '.fvwm2rc.gnome' to use it.

Now edit the file which your system uses to startup X apps. Make these lines appear at the end of the file:

panel &
background-properties --init &
keyboard-properties --init &
mouse-properties --init &
fvwm2 -f .fvwm2rc.gnome

You will want to make sure that no other window managers, desktops, etc get started before these final lines of the file, or it will most likely not work.

Now start X11 on your box and GNOME should start up, with a panel at the bottom of the screen. You should now read the 'Introduction To GNOME' docuement to learn more about GNOME.

NOTE: Be sure you logout of the panel first, and then exit the window manager. You have to do things this way so the panel can save state information about itself. In the future you will not be required to logout and exit the window manager separately. If you feel bold, you can run the window manager in the background, and run the panel last. If you do this when you logout of the panel everything will shutdown.

Also, you can check the GNOME website at www.gnome.org for more information...

GNOME Tricks

Try dragging an image from gmc or ElectricEyes (main and thumbnail mode) onto the panel or the background-properties little monitor for a preview of the awesome abilities the DnD will bring to your desktop.

You can also drag an image from gmc onto the ElectricEyes main window. A good place to find sample images to play with is /usr/share/pixmaps