Posted by Jim at June 6th, 2004

So, I moved over to Gnome 2.6 from 2.4 over the past week. It was less a result of enthusiasm for a new version of the Gnome desktop than a desire to avoid screwing up my life.

The great thing about FreeBSD is that it’s easy to upgrade to a new version of a program from the old version. FreeBSD automatically upgrades all the old things that a new version depends upon. This works great except in one situation.

If you’re using a program that includes many parts and you upgrade a different program that depends on some (but not all) of those parts, the original program may stop working or work rather strangely afterwards. In reading blogs, I ran across the story of that sounds rather similar to that.

Thus, in an effort to avoid having that randomly happen to Gnome when I’m not expecting it, I upgraded Gnome myself, running the script that FreeBSD provided.

The first time I tried, it took literally hours and then informed me that it couldn’t install some libraries. In looking over the instructions, I suspected that I would have to deinstall an old version of a program (gstreamer) and install the new version. That’s where the log seemed to be informing me the problem existed anyway.

GNOME’s documentation, however, seemed to indicate that installation problems with gstreamer had been solved earlier. This worried me because I wasn’t sure what would happen if I deinstalled an old version and installed a new version that this installer was supposed to install itself.

Worse, I was trying to think this out and read the documentation while watching Abby. Trying to do system administration or even thinking coherently while a toddler is entertaining him/herself is near impossible. Bored toddlers have a tendancy to pick on their siblings, hit things with toys, climb on parents and sometimes press computer reset buttons as a way of making life interesting.

They also sometimes attempt to press buttons on the keyboard. This is particularly bad when you’re logged in as the root user. Root users are capable of deleting the operating system if they so desire.

Thus, rather than trying to figure things out (a lost cause given my state of mind at that moment), I just ran the GNOME 2.6 installer a second time, occupying my computer for the next 6 hours. I went to bed before it finished.

The next morning, however, I was relieved to find that it had worked. I can’t say that I’m awed by 2.6, but I don’t have any complaints. It works. That’s all I ask for.