Gnome 2.26.2 for openSUSE 11.1

It’s been a while since gnome released version 2.26.2, a mainly bugfix release in the 2.26 series. openSUSE 11.1 originally was shipped with 2.24 and some great people created a repository in openSUSE buildService to offer the latest gnome also for the latest released openSUSE version.

All this happend back when latest gnome was at version 2.26.1, so ‘latest’ was no longer true.

While hanging around on IRC and looking forward to a long, non-filled weekend of 4 days, Magnus Boman teased me in taking care of updating the Gnome 2.26 repository to latest start.

Using the great provided tools at hand (mainly osc gnome, thanks Vincent!) I quickly grasped an overview of what needs to be done. some many hours of happy hacking later, I created the 33 needed submitrequests, filling up the mailboxes of Magnus and Vincent.

So, enough of pre-text, how can YOU get the latest GNOME 2.26.2 on your openSUSE 11.1 installation? The instructions, including the biggest pitfall, can be found at http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/2.26. Be sure to follow it exactly, especially do not miss the step with the Backport repository.

And then? Logout/Login and enjoy GNOME 2.26.2

RPM packaging for beginners

So, my first post on my blog. The most difficult part: what to write about? As openSUSE just had it’s first community week with plenty of people participating, I decide to go with the flow.

I for myself am mostly active in the community with packaging all kinds of thins, and of couse mailinglists, testing openSUSE Factory and IRC channels.

Packaging is an important part for the community and for a distribution’s users. Not everybody has the knowledge or will to install something from source. Some packages are highly complex, others are very simple.

Let’s start with something simple, which does not end up in a complex spec file (the spec is the package build instructions). During the Community week, I was asked to package up cairo-clock, which ended up being fairly easy and suits perfect for this example.

Pre-required knowledge: how to install a program from a source tarball.
Typically this is handled with

./configure
make
sudo make install

And this is exactly true for cairo-clock (once all the build dependencies are satisfied).

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