K3RNEL

“You get the Best of Both Worlds”.
Hannah Montana

Gnome 2.32. Fedora 15. You know you want it. The above is no Gimpjob, it is an actual screenshot. And I know you’re wondering… How’d you do it?

It wasn’t simple. And I’ll let you know if I run into any additional errors in the following days. Yes, additional. Please read the whole thing before trying it yourself. Then read it again. Then ask yourself if you’re really *that* interested in Gnome 2.32.

For starters, I grabbed a Fedora 14 install, updated to the latest packages. I removed some packages I think I no longer need, to shorten the update time.

I then used “Ctrl-Alt-F2″ to switch to a console. Logged on as root. Typed in “init 3″. This’ll kill Gnome, and it’s the only way to safely upgrade.

yum update yum && yum clean all && yum –releasever=15 –disableplugin=presto distro-sync –exclude=gtk3* –skip-broken -y

Caution, a massive wall of everflowing text will show up. Any and all attempts to read it may result in nausea, confusion, dizziness and a sense of loneliness. It will also probably fail, because pygtk2-libglade requires a very specific version of pygtk2. I ended up removing pygtk2-libglade, which in turn removed a lot of system-config-* packages. Oh well, my system was already configured. I won’t need “system-config-printers”, right?

So I ran the yum command again. This time it worked. As a note, you might want to add | grep more at the end of the command, it’ll have you press ‘spacebar’ every freakin’ time and you’ll get tired of it, but at least you can read what’s going on.

yum –releasever=15 –disableplugin=presto distro-sync –exclude=gtk3* –skip-broken -y

So I waited, downloaded, installed the packages, and was brought back to my root login. I rebooted my laptop, and expected everything to fail miserably.

And it did. So I shut it down manually, added ‘init 3′ to the grub boot line, and proceeded to login as root again. I then ran:

yum reinstall systemd*

Partially because I’m ignorant, and partially because Fedora’s Common Bugs page seemed to suggest it. I also did a yum update kernel* because I was apparently still running the old Fedora 14 kernel. After that, I rebooted, added ‘init 3′, logged in as root, ran ‘init 5′, and was greeted with the gdm. Logged into Gnome, and everything was working, except for the gnome-music-applet. That thing’s broken. (But Rhythmbox works, oddly enough!)

I noticed that there’s a weird error. “Unable to fix label of /run: read-only file system.” Google revealed nothing, so I then jumped onto #fedora, and nirik suggested that I run a command

fixfiles onboot; reboot

Sorry to say, this didn’t fix the /run error. I’m hoping someone smarter might provide the solution because I’m not sure how to fix it yet. Regardless I can boot into the laptop in graphical mode. No init 3/init 5 switch required. Thanks nirik!

So, what works and what doesn’t? Well, to be safe from Gnome (s)Hell, I added gtk3 to yum.conf’s exclude list. Just open yum.conf and add:

exclude=gtk3*

Also, you might want to alias “yum” into “yum –skip-broken” because you’re forever doomed to never update any of your Gnome 2.32 packages. The rest of the updates seem to work, but some things like Firefox 4 require the newer NetworkManager, which in turn requires the new Gnome. See the problem? We’re stuck with Firefox 3.6 (Unless you had Spot’s Firefox4 installed, like I did). I’m also stuck with old OpenOffice because for some reason, LibreOffice requires stuff that requires stuff that ends up requiring gtk3.

So, besides the funky /run error, and the lack of gnome-music-applet, I can’t say I found any issues with Fedora. Even the Nautilus-Dropbox plugin works on my Fedora 15 hybrid! (Which is something you can’t say with Nautilus-3). Oh, did I mention that shutdown/reboot is broken? I’m forced to force-shutdown the laptop. Probably somehow systemd related, but what do I know?

I’m overall wary of this installation, and I’m going to try some.. alternative… methods of setting up Gnome 2.32 on Fedora 15, without breaking Fedora 15′s updates. Which brings me to the most important point of the blog. I’m seriously considering (And have already started) providing gnome-old packages. My goal is to allow Gnome Shell and Gnome “Classic” installed on the same computer, by using separate folders for file installation, and separate file names. The final goal would be letting the user choose gdm or gdm2, and using the chooser to select which look and feel they prefer.

I’m also considering providing packages like Nautilus-Old, because new nautilus isn’t dropbox friendly, and while I’d normally blame Dropbox for being slow, I’d rather provide a patch in the form of Nautilus-Old. I also prefer the old Nautilus’ Look & Feel. So… I’m wondering… where do I draw the line? Gedit & Gedit-old? Cheese? Evolution? My goal is to have as much Gnome 2.32 as I can, with as many new Gnome 3 apps as I can.

So, to summarize. There’s a Catch-22. You can get Gnome 2.32 on Fedora 15. But I wouldn’t suggest it unless you know what you’re doing. If you know what you’re doing, you wouldn’t suggest it. Ah, infinite loops. Kids? Don’t try this at home. Unless you want to. You know you want to.