Gnome 2.22 Upgrade Guide

1.  Changes

Automounting of removable media

Automounting has seen a few significant changes for Gnome 2.22. It is now handled by Nautilus instead of gnome-base/gnome-volume-manager. However, gnome-volume-manager is still used to detect new hardware such as cameras.

Because of this change, there is now an automount use flag on gnome-volume-manager for users who wish to keep the old behavior. Users who previously started gnome-volume-manager with non-Gnome desktops are strongly advised to enable this use flag. Gnome users on the other hand are strongly advised to make sure that this use flag is not turned on, as it will cause problems with Nautilus.

Seahorse key manager

Starting with 2.22, Seahorse (app-crypt/seahorse) is the official key and password manager, replacing GNOME Keyring Manager (gnome-extra/gnome-keyring-manager). It handles both GPG and SSH keys, and can also be used to manage the passwords saved in your GNOME keyring.

If you are happy with Seahorse after completing the GNOME upgrade, you may consider uninstalling gnome-keyring-manager.

PAM and GNOME Keyring integration

Starting with GNOME 2.20, GNOME Keyring (gnome-base/gnome-keyring) started providing a PAM module (pam_gnome_keyring.so) to automatically unlock your keyring as you log in to your session, thereby saving you the trouble from typing two passwords.

In GNOME 2.22, this feature is now even more easily configurable, thanks to sys-auth/pambase that has a gnome-keyring USE flag. With this flag enabled, the PAM configuration files in /etc/pam.d/ will automatically have pam_keyring.so inserted in the right places. Just remember to use dispatch-conf or your similar tool of choice after installing pambase to update those files.

Other changes

Please see the GNOME 2.22 Release Notes for what else new is in this major release of GNOME.

2.  Troubleshooting

Upgrading to Python 2.5

Before upgrading to GNOME 2.22, please make sure you only have dev-lang/python-2.5* and that your system is fully updated.

# emerge -av dev-lang/python:2.5
# python-updater
# emerge -C dev-lang/python:2.4

Blocked packages

With GNOME 2.22 a few packages were split into two, to allow other applications to use the previously internal libraries. For example the playlist parser library found in totem is now split out of it into dev-libs/totem-pl-parser, so that rhythmbox can depend on it without depending on the whole of totem.

All this results in blockers having to be in place between the packages to avoid file collisions. To work around it, simply follow the appropriate instructions in the handbook as instructed by Portage. In particular, temporarily unmerge the conflicting package and continue as normal, getting the unmerged package back soon via the meta package or other GNOME parts depending on it.

GNOME no longer available as a session option in GDM

GDM uses the files available in /usr/share/xsessions/* to determine which desktop environments the user has installed and will be able to select from the "Sessions" menu.

The appropriate file for GNOME is now provided by gnome-base/gnome-session-2.22 instead of gnome-base/gdm, and due to this there are appropriate package blockers in place to avoid file collisions leading to this session file getting lost.

The only thing that can go bad is that gnome-session does not get upgraded to 2.22 after it was uninstalled to resolve the GDM upgrade blocker. The symptom would be the lack of a GNOME choice in the GDM "Sessions" menu, in which case please check that you have gnome-session-2.22.0 or newer installed.

Note that this problem cannot happen to gnome-base/gnome meta package users, as it will pull in the appropriate gnome-session package again.

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