My Mission

My mission is to bring gnome up-to-date on enterprise linux.

I started by pulling source rpms from fedora 9 and building them on el5. However, I wanted to build the minimum number of packages to get the orca screen reader working.

As a side-note, I am totally blind, and have been working in the arena of software accessibility for almost 8 years now, and feel that the gnome desktop may be a viable alternative to windows.

So I built orca, and its supporting crew of atk, gail, and at-spi all successfully. However, the at-spi registry would not startup. After a bit of digging, I discovered that the registry gets started by gnome-session. So I pulled the gnome-session src rpmm and tried to build it. The number of dependencies started growing exponentially. Clearly this is not a trivial task and perhaps not the best way to go about the process.

My next question is how can Icompile gnome from source code?

The answers were garnome and jhbuild both are build utilities or rather processes.

Garnome builds from source tarballs while jhbuild builds from the subversion repositories.
So I tried garnome first. Much of it built the first time thrugh, but not enough to have a working system.

I also tried jhbuild and while only 77 of the 193 modules compiled, there was more information to use to track the problem, so I started debugging the compilation process with jhbuild.