Dear Mark,

It is far more complicated, as dependencies are strewn about testing, unstable, and experimental.

One has to delete or change the pin file in apt, enable all the repos for experimental, etch, unstable and make sure they work for your area.

Then start with:

apt-get install nautilus gdm totem-xine evolution

Then, applets, nautilus burner(which may require a downgrade of a lib or two) and so on. You will end up with a very mixed bag, mostly gnome 18, with a few 16 things. I never bother to do desktop-environment, as I do not need the meta-package.

Thus, there is, at the moment, no easy way. At the moment a knowledge of pinning, chasing dependencies, and so on is necessary.

Now, if one can live with an earlier version of gnome, one can, before anything else, use nano to change the sources list to debian etch, and nothing else, the apt-get install gnome-desktop-environment, but, this will eventually create issues with upgrades. Not now, but eventually, as when one reverts to the unstable branch, compilers change, and a runtime or two.

One can try to activate the ubuntu repositories, which means, for the one shot, commenting out all the others, and installing gnome-desktop-environment, then changing back to debian unstable. This should work without a problem, for those of us who almost never dist-upgrade. (I upgrade basically never)

I think the upgrade to 1.0 is, however, well worth it for production machines, as I noticed a subjective, that is subjective, and to repeat, subjective increase in overall performance. The box just "feels" a lot snappier. Probably due to better 2d performance of oss ati driver on x600 card.

A complete gnome install, as of yesterday, involved about an hour of fiddling with various deps. On the other hand, the resulting system was much, much more useful than a ubuntu install for laptop owners who travel a lot, and use more complicated networking. Also, the options we have in grml are far broader, they just require more skill to get a polished gnome desktop working.

Best, m

On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 22:59 -0700, Mark wrote:

Martin,

Do you use

apt-get install gnome-desktop-environment

or some other method?

Simplicity appeals, but the above command causes problems. Later, apt wants to uninstall the whole gnome-desktop-environment when asked to remove just one tiny piece.

I haven't tested grml rc1 yet. Can you elaborate on the GNOME issues you encountered?

Thanks, MA _______________________________________________ Grml mailing list - Grml@mur.at http://lists.mur.at/mailman/listinfo/grml join #grml on irc.freenode.org grml-devel-blog: http://grml.supersized.org/