Plume and GNOME 2 on Debian Woody
As you may know, our preferred free desktop is GNOME, in version 2.x for now. There are many reasons for that, but even some related to thin-clients usage.
The GNOME 2.x desktop is not currently officially in Debian Woody, which is now the current OldStable, and was as such our preferred platform. There are though some carefully-crafted backports for Woody out there, on which we contributed a lot (see http://www.bxlug.be/articles/53). See also GNOME 2.x Desktop. GNOME 2.x desktop is part of Debian Sarge now, and it will soon become our preferred platform (well, in fact it is already, but in some case, Woody is just still better).
To use it as default desktop, some tweakings may be needed to Plume. Here is a (hopefully exhaustive) list:- GNOME 2.x requires at least XFree86 4.2 [1], that means it has to be running on the stations, not necessarily on the server. You need then to upgrade XFree86's version on client's rootfs with 4.2 packages using chroot. This is pretty easy, and could even be automated by the installation of the plume-base package. For now, we chose to stay clean (no extra-Woody package) officially, but most the installations running nowadays are already using XFree86 4.2.
- do not use ORBIT over TCP/IP, as it breaks at least Metacity, the default window manager for GNOME 2.x
- configure GDM to use the existing superb graphical themes
- be careful when using Galeon 1.3.x, Epiphany and Mozilla > 1.2 for Woody, they break on some proprietary plugins because of compiler versions (YMMV, though)
- deactivate the screensavers, as they eat worthlessly a lot of network bandwidth (as they try to modify constantly most of the display surface, that's why they are for in the first place)
- ...
[1] it needs the X Rendering Extension (Render), which is only available since XFree86 4.2 X server