The gtk-2.4 install was painful since it involved replacing large chunks of my old X with modern versions which can do XRender, xft2, fontconfig and so on. It took about a day of fiddling and in retrospect that day would have been better spent simply buying a newer distro and installing that. In my opinion, installing gtk2 on an old machine is awkward enough to be developer-only.
It's plenty awkward on my "old" Slackware 8/9 system, too. I've had to track down and install 8 different packages in the process, and had to google a handful of config/make errors along the way, and I'm currently at an impasse with the gtk2 package itself.
Slackware doesn't really have a package manager, and I install everything from source ...
I know this is maybe not a helpful thing to say (idiots are always recommending distro switches), but have you considered gentoo? It's a from-source thing, with a good package manager. Just type "emerge gtk2" and everything will be rebuilt and installed for you (though it may take a fair while and a lot of bandwidth).
I tried Debian a few months ago, but was frustrated because the packages that were available were never up to date; it seemed only the major milestone versions could be installed through the system. (Gaim and Mozilla in particular were weeks or months behind the current release.) And I still had problems with the package-manager itself; it didn't work perfectly, and if there's going to be problems, I'd honestly rather just install from source and deal with THOSE problems, rather than have to figure out the workings of an additional layer of abstraction.
That said though, I haven't tried Gentoo. Perhaps it's better than Debian's apt system.
-Anthony http://nodivisions.com/ Please reply to the list, not to me, and not to me+list. _______________________________________________ gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
