“If you build it, they will come”
Field of Dreams
Update: We’ve got a logo now!
Building on the previous post, I decided to make a ‘clean’ implementation of Gnome 2.32 for Fedora 15 (And beyond!). Specifically for those of us who have already updated, and dislike the new experience.
Project BlueBubble aims to bring Gnome 2.32 packages in a Fedora-15 compatible way, breaking the least amount of packages possible. It’ll be a repository you can set up, and just “yum install gnome-desktop-classic”to get up and running. The only catch? It’s either Shell or Classic, a lot of packages conflict, but I’m trying my best to allow Gnome-Classic with Gnome 3.0 packages like gedit and totem.
The final goal? To provide installable media (32 and 64bit DVDs and CDs) that will allow you to install a straight up “Fedora Classic” experience.
This’ll be a remix though, which means we’ll have to shed the cool branding, replacing it with blue, empty circles.
My progress so far? I’ve rebuilt Nautilus, Evolution, gedit, gnome-terminal, and some others, 2.32 flavor, running on Fedora 15. Still missing the good parts, gnome-panels being ‘the big one’.
I’m renaming all my packages to -classic variants, which will get you nautilus-classic, gedit-classic and so on. Each Provides its original package, with the version it should, and Conflicts with the original version, which will probably make things complicated.We’ll see.
The target audience? I’d say its same people who want the “Old Coke” flavor to come back.
The E.T.A.? None. I don’t want to rush this. I’ll announce a public repository once I have one.
The help? I’d appreciate help, testing, and guidance. I’m flying solo here, and blind, too. Reach me at Freenode IRC. I’m in a dozen #fedora-* channels too.
I think the best thing about having switched to KDE, is that I can safely yum remove gnome* and see how my packages are working, one by one.
Finally, I want to leave you with a quote:
“The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.” ~ Francis Crick
I’m a very stubborn man. And I really want my Gnome Classic. The future can wait.
Really great news. I hope it can be done and you have some experiences with building packages so it couldn’t be veeeery difficult for you. GNOME3 have a couple of things which I like but overall it’s painful to configure and use as I want so now I am using XFCE spin of F15.
P.S
Do you know any addon to firefox to automatically capitalize “i” to “I” ? It’s funny to write it that way.
Can’t help you with the Firefox Add-on, sorry.
I’ve packaged before, I know the rules of packaging. This is my first “big” packaging project, and I’m not sure if there’s any guidelines that might help me out.
What worries me is that I may not be doing this in the best way possible, and I refuse to do anything less than that.
You are my hero if you fix this.
After upgrading my laptop to Fedora15 I been forced to switch to xfce, and I’m not going to upgrade my main workstation from 14 to 15 as long as I am forced to use the vista-gui of gnome3.
Kudos on your effort! I for one would really love to move to FC15 with Gnome 2.32.
I’m not really familiar with package build, but it will be good if we can rally some support from those who can contribute.
I could so help with this, cause I know some people who, well, ”would” desire a non-goofy desktop.
Whoow, great news, we in Fusion Linux would love to have you packages included in our Fedora Remix so that we can provide classic Fedora GNOME 2 look. Are there already packages uploaded somewhere so we can test them?
Cheers,
Valent.
I haven’t uploaded my packages anywhere, but I would *love* to cooperate with Fusion Linux. Could you reach me at IRC Or Gtalk?
How about RHEL6? Would it be easier to bring EPEL on the level and switch to Scientific Linux 6 by the time FC14 will become history? In this case you would get long term Red Hat release support and a lot of people will be grateful.
Huh? I didn’t understand the question. EPEL’s suck on old/awesome GNOME 2.32 probably until after the world ends in 2012. Why would they need another set of GNOME 2.32 packages?
I do am one of those who switched to XFCE. I’d love to have Gnome 2 in Fedora 15
You have my best wished, but I won’t be using it. I never did like Gnome 2. I didn’t expect to like Gnome 3 either, but I find that it’s a rather enjoyable experience. Now if they’d just get rid of that pile of junk called Evolution…
Wayne
You have my support, and best wishes!! Let me know how I can help.
erik (c instead of k) at viagloria dot com
How are you executing this? Are you using Fedora 14 sources and repackaging with newer upstream versions and building on Fedora 15 or is there an extended effort involved in porting from version to version?
Do you have a source repository, or patches that could be pulled and built? I have been holding off on Fuduntu 15 since it relies on GNOME 3, however with 2.32 packages being available in Fedora 15 that may change my opinion on that.
How are your packages different from the current GNOME 2.3x packages supported in Fedora 14?
I’m rebuilding the packages to be compatible with the latest GTK2 and all its surrounding libraries wherever possible. In one very specific case(gnome-bluetooth), I grabbed the latest build direct from git instead of a released tarball as it just wouldn’t build with gobject-introspection 0.10.
I haven’t uploaded any of my source files anywhere, I’m getting a new server this weekend and plan to set up everything shortly afterwards.
Gnome 3 takes longer to get personalized, it takes more clicks to change settings, menus are clumped together, wireless no longer works out of the box, and so on.
Gnome 3 = The future? Not even close.
It’s a good thing to bring back gnome2 into F15 and name it bluebubble. But how do you plan to make it evolve in the future?
Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!! I’ll hang around on your IRC channel for any assistance you may need. Would love to contribute to this.
Why not migrate the GTK2 to GTK3
maintaining the same look/apps/cleanishin/asdf that Gnome2
in other words: Same that using gnome2 but build in gtk3
Because of ABI changes, I have to actually learn to code, rather than patch things up
Besides, I don’t have the resources(time) to actually maintain my own Gnome Fork.
Is there any way you could just install this version (gnome2) to /opt/gnome2 so that it doesnt conflict with the other software on the filesystem?
That was my original goal, but it’s a lot harder than it seems. All the apps would link to the gnome 3 libraries and would crash and burn miserably. In the end, and due to time constraints, I ended up just adding conflicts.
This project is a massive waste of time and effort.
Gnome-3 includes almost everything that distinguishes gnome-3 from gnome-2, namely gnome-panel. Gnome-panel is referred to (within gnome-3) as “fallback mode”.
Some people seem to think that gnome-3′s gnome-panel is crippled compared to gnome-2′s. This is really not the case. In fact, the biggest source of confusion is that configuring the panel now requires you to hold the “ALT” key. Do this and your right-click menus come back.
There are a few other differences;
1) They’ve taken away the “System” menu. This is easily rectified, either through reverting certain parts of gnome-panel, or (much much better) by introducing an altogether new installable widget (call it “gnome2-menu”) that *is* the full applications-places-system menu…. *OR* a widget that is *JUST* the “System” menu (call it gnome-system-menu) which the user can place immediately beside the “Applications-Places” menu to achieve identical results.
2) Some widget functionality is lost. Specifically relating to widgets written in python. This is only because gnome-python2 has not (yet) been fully updated to gnome-3. The missing piece of the puzzle is the package “gnome-python2-applet” from the source package “gnome-python2-desktop”. Missing dependency “libpanelapplet”, which has not yet been updated to gnome-3. Specifically, there is a version mismatch against gnome-panel-libs.
3) Its a different color. This is trivial to change.
Wouldn’t it be better to add to gnome-3 rather than to revert everything? Also a lot less work since there are only two things that really need to be changed to obtain 100% gnome2-shell functionality within gnome3-shell.
It’s my massive waste of time, and since I already finished, there’s no point complaining about it
That should be gnome2-panel functionality within gnome3-panel.