My default GNOME WM is GONE!!

[heljy]

Ok, I did install Mandrake using rpm. And I did a search using

rpm -qa |grep gnome and it shows me a list of stuff

but when I tried both

rpm -qa |grep gnome-session
rpm -qa |grep gnome-desktop

it didnt return anything, so I guess thats not installed  


BUT I used which gnome-sesson and it returned:
/usr/bin/gnone-session

and I tried both find and locate

'locate gnome-session' didnt return anything, so I guess its not found

'find gnome-session' returned this:
find: gnome-session: No such file or directory

Anyway, I went ahead and opened up software manager that manages the rpm installed/installable. I looked up Graphical Workstation and Gnome Workstation but didnt find gnome-session or gnome-desktop that i can install. I went ahead and looked at the rpms that I have installed and didnt find gnome-session and gnome-desktop either.

Does that mean I have to install it from the source?


BTW, thanks for being so helpful!    Really appreciate it.

[voidmain]

Actually with Gnome 1.x I don't believe there was a "gnome-session" or "gnome-desktop" RPM, and I don't use Mandrake so I don't know if they package Gnome differently than RedHat. But if you did a "which gnome-session" and it returned "/usr/bin/gnome-session" it would definitely appear that the command is there so it must be part of another package. If you do an:

rpm -qif /usr/bin/gnome-session | more

it will show you which RPM/package contains that file. Since "locate" didn't find it then you probably don't have it set up, doesn't mean that the software isn't installed. The easiest way to use the "find" command to find any occurance of "gnome-session" on your hard drive you would type:

find / | grep gnome-session

which will return pretty much the same thing "locate" would if you had it configured, only it will take much much longer as it has to search through your entire hard drive.

From what you say I believe you probably have Gnome installed. I have never been a Gnome user until just recently so I'm no expert on it. You can probably go to the Gnome web site and get more information on configuration (but remember that you are using v1.x which is a little different then 2.x).

[beltorak0]

locate doesn't need too much setting up; you can run "updatedb" to update the database (or locate -u).  must be done as root, since it stores the file permissions with the file names and prevents users from "locating" a file that they have no access to.  basically all it does is store the file names in a compressed database for fast searching.

as for gnome, ave oyu looked in the default install directories?  in slackware it used to be "/opt/gnome", but it got changed to "/usr/share/gnome" in 8.1, with all of the apps being in their own subdirectories in "/usr/share".

Gnome actually runs on top of another window manager, such as ice, sawfish, enlightenment, etc.  If it is installed, look into the file "/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.gnome" (your directory may vary; update your locatedb and locate the file), which will be the x windows start up script for the gnome desktop.  (the other "xinitrc.*" scripts control the startup of other WMs.)  The last two lines should be

Code: [Select]

.  You can replace sawfish with whatever you want to run underneath gnome.

And finally, I wrote my own script to allow me to switch desktops: it presents a small text menu with choices, and the appropriate script is symlinked to "~/.xinitrc" (which "startx" will check first to control the start of the WM).  see the man page for startx for details.

incedentally, can anyone tell me how to compile gnome 2.x from scratch?  I would like to try it out... but I can't seem to get the order correct.

-t.

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by beltorak0:
locate doesn't need too much setting up; you can run "updatedb" to update the database (or locate -u).  must be done as root, since it stores the file permissions with the file names and prevents users from "locating" a file that they have no access to.  basically all it does is store the file names in a compressed database for fast searching.

That is true however the database will not stay current unless you run updatedb from a cron job that runs nightly. Still very simple. It takes updatedb a little while to run (probably longer than the find command would take to parse through the entire filesystem). So you don't want to have to updatedb every time you want to get an accurate "locate".

In RedHat8 this script is used:
/etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron
which contains:

Code: [Select]

You could set up a similar script on any distro (many come set up like this by default).

[Calum]

just a thought, re: what's up with GNOME, if an older version of gnome is called different things and is in different directories, then the programs that are looking for it might only look in the locations that gnome is supposed to be in if it is a recent version, follow? could this be the case?

also, heljy, if i was using find for this, i would try 'find / -name gnome-* -print' which checks the / directory recursively for anything named "gnome-*" and prints the output on standard out (your screen).