The Great Wakka's Journal: Attempt at Installing Ximian Desktop

I tried to. According to their site, all you have to do is type
lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh
and you're in. Or you can do it the manual route, downloading the installer. Both turned up the same error: "ERROR: Unable to download package set info." and a little while later: "ERROR: Unable to download package list." Whatever that means. It seems that Ximian's mirrors are broken (?). I've tried many different mirrors, none of which work. Is Ximian really worth the trouble required to install it? Have you installed Ximian, and have you like it? Is it possible to just install the RPMs for Ximian and totally circumvent the installer? Post your comments below...

Wherefore art thou Ximian?

[fm6]

I've had similar experiences with recent attempts to install Ximian. Ended up downloading all the RPMs and doing it by hand. Which was not only time-consuming, but ended up breaking the encryption setup in my RH 7.1 install. Couldn't log in! Managed to restore the necessary libraries from a bootable CD.

And I never did get Red Carpet working.

What's really painful is that all the Ximian documentation assumes Red Carpet and other auto-install systems are working. So it's very difficult to find out the manual methods.

But the first time I installed an early Ximian beta I had no trouble at all. I think the crucial difference was that I was able to use Akamai [akamai.com] as a download source. But that's expensive, and Ximian had to stop using Akamai early on.

Re:Wherefore art thou Ximian?

[rendler]

I still don't fully understand what Ximian actually is but the gist that I have in my head of it is that it's a pre-packaged GNOME desktop made especially for business, where they can also sell support with it. The fact that they have normal users is just a side issue for them because their packages are usually a lot older to say some of the official packages in the unstable branch of Debian. So the only people I can see wanting something like this is either a company/user who wants a slightly more integrated GNOME desktop, stability, support and a easy upgrade path. Which is all fine but because of that the packages may be slightly older with a lack of official Ximian packages for all the other GNOME apps out there (so you might as well install the normal GNOME desktop anyways). I might be so off mark there that it's not funny because I personally have not tried any of Ximian's software.

While on Debian there are official apt sources for Ximian, which a couple of months back would seriously bork the system if you installed them. Also on the 'ximian' factoid in apt (#debian@OPN bot) it says most people end up removing the official ximian packages anyways. I don't know why I mentioned that but apt is usually right about most things ;) So unless you need the support from Ximian I see no reason why normal users should use their software and not the normal version of GNOME.