[gentoo-amd64] Re: Installing gnome-light

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Anand Buddhdev posted <4300AB9A.4000201@anand.org>, excerpted below,  on
Mon, 15 Aug 2005 16:50:02 +0200:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> So I've finally gotten Gentoo Linux (2005.1 release) going on my shiny 
> new AMD64 system. I've emerged some basic packages, and xorg-x11. But 
> now I want to install gnome. If I do "emerge -p gnome", it prints out a 
> rather hefty list of packages that will get installed. But I don't want 
> all the stuff. I just want the basic gnome desktop, and its 
> dependencies, but not epiphany, evolution, and the several other packages.
> 
> I cannot emerge gnome-light, because it is masked. Is there any way I 
> can install a minimal gnome system?

The short answer to your question is yes, there's a way, it involves
using this package, but it hasn't yet been tested well enough to be marked
stable, yet.  A more detailed answer follows.

I don't know how new you are to Gentoo, so don't know if you know
the significance of ~arch, but gnome-light appears to be ~amd64 masked.

If you don't know the significance of ~arch masking, I suggest you read
the Gentoo Handbook, but basically, it's "unstable", meaning someone on
that arch (amd64 in this case) found it worked for them, but the package
hasn't been thoroughly tested enough to be considered fully-stable yet,
and may have some issues in certain installations or with certain USE
flags.  If you wish, you can unmask individual ~arch packages it by
placing an appropriate entry in /etc/portage/package.keyword.  Again, I'd
suggest you read the handbook and understand the significance of what you
are doing, before you try it, but in theory, it should work, and has
worked for others, or the package wouldn't be keyworded for that arch at
all.

Specifically for gnome-light, according to the comments in the ebuilds
themselves, gnome-light is considered experimental.  In theory, it's the
minimal gnome installation without all the fat, which is what you are
after.  However, such a configuration isn't yet well tested on Gentoo, and
may be buggy in certain cases.  That's why it's still marked unstable. 
Thus, in this particular case, it seems it's not an amd64 specific issue,
but rather that the whole idea of a minimal gnome installation hasn't yet
been well enough tested on Gentoo to be marked stable yet, on any arch.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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