What are the basic system requirements if I want to use GNOME? A computer running one of the flavours of UNIX, Linux, *BSD and so on listed above, which is also capable of running the X Window System. You can get by with 16Mb of RAM, but 32Mb is much much nicer and probably what most people would consider a minimum now. Many people like more. As for space on the hard drive: you will certainly need at least 30Mb to install core binaries. If you want to compile the sources yourself, you're looking at 200Mb. Software you want on there already: X: most people use XFree86 but some go for the commercial versions instead. You will also need: GTK+, glib, esound, ORBit, gdk-pixbuf, imlib, audiofile and libxml. All of these come with GNOME. So where do I get GNOME? Most Linux distributions ship with more or less current versions of GNOME on the CDs. If you are running Linux, you probably have it already. Note that Caldera OpenLinux does not ship GNOME: but there are rumoured to exist GNOME rpms on Caldera's contrib site. GNOME is constantly moving ahead, and even three months can see huge changes in it. Announcements of individual package updates are posted almost daily. You will find the tarballs for these on the GNOME site and its mirrors. Vendors also periodically update their packaging of GNOME, but they have a great many other packages to maintain and update too. www.ximian.com attempts to provide up-to-date packages of GNOME for almost every common platform able to run it: as of March 2001 they were providing GNOME for: Red Hat Linux 6.0, 6.1, 6.2 and 7.0 Linux Mandrake 6.1, 7.0 and 7.1 SuSE Linux 6.3, 6.4 and 7.0 Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 LinuxPPC 2000 TurboLinux 6.0 Debian GNU/Linux: Woody (runs on Potato too) Yellow Dog Linux Champion Server 1.2 Solaris 2.7 on UltraSparc For those with good internet connections, the fastest and simplest way to acquire GNOME can be to visit their download page and follow the directions there, which involves an automatic installation. This applies to people running any of the above except Debian. Debian users will want to do this instead: Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to include: deb http://spidermonkey.helixcode.com/distributions/debian unstable main Run apt-get update. If you are a new GNOME user, run apt-get install task-helix-core to get the core parts of it, or apt-get install task-helix-gnome to get all the applications. If you are upgrading a current GNOME system, use apt-get dist-upgrade. I can't or don't want to get Ximian off the net. Now what? If you can't or don't want to get Helix from the net, then the obvious fallback is the tarballs which you can collect from the GNOME FTP site or any of its mirrors. Please use the mirrors: that's why they're there. Or there is the packaging from your distributor. GNOME is available for BSD users through the ports system. Solaris does not (yet!) ship GNOME, but binaries and source-building instructions are both available on Paul Barnfather's excellent Building GNOME on Solaris page. If the problem is the net connection, the size of the download or the cost of being online that long, then I sympathise. Increasingly, when GNOME people are at Linux shows, they try to have CDs of recent GNOME releases available. If you have friends with net connections and CD burners: well, it's all free software so you are at liberty to get someone to make you a CD. You may be able to ask around and find someone who will post you one, but I don't know. I hear and see people talk about running "the latest CVS"? What's this? CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) is where all the source code for GNOME lives. Anyone can check it out and put it on their local machine, and gnome hackers can add new code in. With some hundred-odd people checking code in constantly (dozens of changes daily), there's the risk that occasionally (some might claim, commonly) things get slightly (again some might say, badly) broken. CVS has separate modules: there's gnome-core, gnome-libs, gnome-games and so on. When the code in a module is working and stable, the maintainer of that module packages it up neatly into a tarball and puts it up for FTP. Sometime s/he makes rpms and debs, too. Sometimes that's done by other people who feel like being helpful. It then gets announced as a new tarball. CVS is in a constant state of flux, and code from it is not even guaranteed to compile. (It's all source: there's no binaries in there.) Consequently, it is not at all recommended that you start with GNOME by playing with CVS code: the compilation method is different, it probably won't compile, and if it does, it may eat your favourite GNOME settings. The tarballs are made as soon as there are substantial changes and bug fixes in: if a package is perfect and needs no changes then there won't be many releases. If lots of cool things have been fixed, it's not unknown for three successive tarballs to come out in a week. All in all, there's not a lot to gain from running CVS code unless you're a developer, (or documenter, or translator) although a lot of people check out the code just to read it. All that said, if you want to try and compile and run CVS code, you're more than welcome. But consider yourself warned in advance :)