Using the vicious-build-scripts

The vicious-build-scripts is one of the easiest ways to build GNOME 2.0 in a completely seperate environment. You can find them in CVS under the [unsurprisingly enough] vicious-build-scripts module. You will need to ensure that you have wget [available from http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html]. Some scripts may require zsh for your shell.

To install the scripts, create a directory ~/bin [if not already done so] and do a "make install" in the vicious-build-scripts directory. This will copy the files to the ~/bin directory. Ensure that ~/bin is in your path.

The next step is to load up the GNOME 2.0 environment. You will need to source the file located in ~/bin/gnome-head. At this point, you might feel the need to edit the scripts to suit your needs. The 'head' setup will install GNOME 2.0 under /gnome so you will need to create this directory and make sure that you have permissions to read/write to this directory. With the 'head' setup the following locations are used -

• /gnome/head - used to store tarballs of the bootstrapping utilities eg. automake, libtool, gettext
• /gnome/head/cvs - used to store the checked out CVS modules
• /gnome/head/INSTALL - the prefix used for the GNOME 2.0 build

The next step is to run the bootstrap process. This process relies on wget to download the bootstrapping utilities used in the build. If you are using a firewall with a proxy, you will have to set this before running the bootstrap. If you have a CVS account on cvs.gnome.org, you can set the environmental variable CVSUSER for your username; if not, then it will default to 'anonymous' and use the anonymous cvs servers. To start the bootstrap process, type 'bootstrap.sh'.

The final step, having successfully run the bootstrap process, is to start the build. This is done by running 'rebuild.sh'.

There are a number of other useful things to know about the vicious-build-scripts -

• To build a single module, run 'modmake.sh module-name'
• To build a single module and clean things up first with a "make distclean", set the environmental variable CLEAN=yes, and then run 'modmake.sh module-name'
• To build a single module without checking it out, set the environmental variable NO_NETWORK=yes, and then run 'modmake.sh module-name'
• To check out a single module without building it, set the environmental variable NO_BUILD=yes, and then run 'modmake.sh module-name'
• To build several modules, set the environmental variable MODULES='foo bar qux', and then run 'rebuild.sh'
• To start the build at a particular point in the build list, set the environmental variable STARTMODULE=pango, and then run 'rebuild.sh'
• To end the build at a particular point in the build list, set the environmental variable ENDMODULE=libgnome, and then run 'rebuild.sh'
• To reduce the amount of space that GNOME 2 takes up, let the environmental variable LEAN=yes, which will do a 'make clean' after the build completes

To automatically update the vicious-build-scripts, run 'update-vicious'. This will automatically checkout the latest version and install them into ~/bin. Using the vicious-build-scripts is by no means the official way to build GNOME 2.0 but it is a fast and generally painless way to build the GNOME 2.0 platform. If you have problems, ask on #gnome irc.gnome.org.