CyGNOME Installation Notes

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Notes for latest Cygwin & Cygwin/X

CyGNOME-1.4 was built at Cygwin-1.3/XFree86-4.2 era, but now Cygwin came to 1.5 and Cygwin/X to 4.3, and most libraries are updated to newer upstream. These facts would cause some mismatch in the package dependencies.

Perhaps a bad news to you, but we haven't a plan to rebuilt all these package on newer platform, because of the shortage of hands. Currently we'll focus on the work of porting GNOME-2.x.

As the prefix of DLL's name in Cygwin/X 4.3 was changed to 'cyg' from 'lib', CyGNOME-1.4 would refuse to run under Cygwin/X 4.3. You need to install package XFree86-lib-compat which contains the old shared libaries, which is provided in the Cygwin 'net release'.

Note that now perl also goes to 5.8, python to 2.3, those packages built on perl-5.6/python-2.2 would fail either. This only affects some appliations of less importance, such gnome-python, xchat, glimmer. If you want use they on newer platform, you have to rebuild it yourself.

[ The following descriptions is not updated, thus maybe kept outdated. ]


Preinstall Requirement

Windows 2000 or XP is required.

This work was done on Windows 2000, but the patched sources should also build OK on NT and XP. Great efforts toward Windows 9x/Me were made by Steven in these months, "the desktop still fails to run correctly on Win9x/Me because of a problem with cygwin's implementation of fork() on those platforms; hopefully that can be corrected soon."
Although Cygwin GNOME works on FAT/FAT32 file systems now, NTFS is still recommended. Problems with file locking mean that the system may not run properly on FAT/FAT32 file systems.
"You should set text file type to unix format (\n line-endings) and keep all mounts in binary mode. If not, launch Cygwin setup.exe, choose default text file type option to UNIX. Maybe a reinstallation is needed. The build do not attempt to deal with the text file/binary file issue (what reason to use a DOS style?). " (Steven O'Brien)
The 1.4 Beta2 release is built on cygwin-1.3.20,  with gcc-3.2-3, binutils-20021117-1, and gettext-0.11.5-1. So on older system, they may or may not work. And Cygwin/XFree86 (>=4.2.0) is required (even if you intend to run it in other X server, such as WinaXe, Exceed). Now XFree86 could be installed via setup.exe.
The following packages are required to run CyGNOME:
libdb3.1(>=3.1.17):    The Sleepycat Berkeley DB Library v3.1 - runtime  
libintl1(0.10.40)/libintl2(>=0.11.5) :  GNU Internationalization runtime library (runtime)
libiconv2/libcharset1(>=1.8):  GNU character set conversion library and utilities (runtime)
libpopt0(>=1.6.4)>:   Library for parsing cmdline parameters (runtime)
jpeg(>=6b-7):   A library for manipulating JPEG image format files
libpng12(>=1.2.5):  PNG library - 1.2.x runtime
tiff(>=3.5.7):    A library of functions for manipulating TIFF format image files
libungif(>=4.1.0):    Libungif is a library for using uncompressed GIFs
zlib(>=1.1.4):    The zlib compression and decompression library
libbz2_1(>=1.0.2): shared libraries for bzip2 (runtime)
XFree86-base(>=4.2.0)
The version number gaven in the bracket is the minimal.  Cywin GNOME is supposed to work on higher version of these packages. If  you find it not work on higher version of these packages, please fire up a bug report.

In order to build GTK+/GNOME based applications, you also need:

libdb3.1-devel
popt
libpng
libiconv
XFree86-prog
XFree86-lib
And the following padckage are recommended:
Perl 5.6.1
Larry Wall's Practical Extracting and Report Language
xscreensaver and xlockmore
xscreensaver is required in a standard installation of GNOME Desktop
ImageMagick
An X application for displaying and manipulating images. (Imlib would fallback on it to load unsupported image format.)
XFree86-xwinclip
Provides rudimentary integration between the Windows clipboard and the X clipboard.

Note that each indivisual package has its own package dependencies. Please read the corresponding *.README file to detailed info. For example, some applications are linked to libperl5_6_1.dll, thus you must have perl5.6.1 installed.


Download

Original Sources Packages:
Due to bandwidth limit and the limitation on the space of homepage, we cannot made source code avialable from Cygwin setup for all the packages. You have to goto the File List page to download the source packages.

Note that the source of all version of all GNOME core libraries and desktop applications could be found on www.gnome.org or its corresponding ftp site.   You can found some of its mirror sites here.

And for you convenience, for other packages which is not hosted by gnome.org or its mirror site, we've provided the homepage URL source package location in the Package Reports or correspoding *.README files.

Cygwin Patches
Steven O'Brien's Cygwin GNOME patches are updated from time to time. You can find the latest patches there.

For some packages, if we found that maybe just a patch is not enough, we'll provide source packages (for example, Sawfish, which needs some little tricks to make it could be built on Cygwin).
Other patches could be found on in the the Package Reports page. .

Binary Packages
There are 3 ways to obtain binary packages:

Installation

To ensure the package dependencies, we recommend you to download these packages first, and then to install them along with packages downloaded from Cygwin net release, rather than to install directly from the Internet .

Postinstall

Some packages contains postinstall script in Cygwin setup style (placed in /etc/postinstall). But installpkg.sh couldn't handle the postinstall stuff, you had to execute them by hand, or you can wait for Cygwin setup to do this the next time it installs something.
And there are some work you need to do after all the GNOME packages are installed. For example, to make info pages newly installed could be found, you need to update the dir
	$ for f in /opt/gnome/info/*.info.*; do
install-info $f /opt/gnome/info/dir
done

Uninstallation


Next: Running Cygwin GNOME

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