as far as building gnome from tarballs it's a pain in the arse and it may kill you. The best part is when you think you are all done and it's all broke and acting funky. Here is a great project called garnome it's scripts that build gnome from tarballs for you, it's brilliant.
http://cipherfunk.org/garnome/
 
here is the gnome build dependencies list.
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.8/notes/rninstallation.html
 
alot of makes and ./configures
 

i didnt have much time to search earlier working on two papers anyhow found this site seems pretty good
http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/
and im going to try that script

i got an issue with signing with the packages and am unsure of how to fixt this
 
this is what i get when i type
sudo apt-get install synaptic
 
Checking GPG signatures...
Unsigned /var/cache/apt/archives/xmlcharent_0.3-250.4_noarch.rpm: sha1 md5 OK
Unsigned /var/cache/apt/archives/docbook%5f4_4.3-0.1_noarch.rpm: sha1 md5 OK
Unknown signature /var/cache/apt/archives/synaptic_0.55-0.0.suse091.rb.0_i586.rpm: (SHA1) DSA sha1 md5 (GPG) NOT OK (MISSING KEYS: GPG#8c9b4b0d)
E: Error(s) while checking package signatures:
2 unsigned package(s)
1 package(s) with unknown signatures
0 package(s) with illegal/corrupted signatures
 
i did gpg but am unsure if i did it right any help would be appreciated

Hi soulNOTHING, Im running into this problem right now. With RH/Fedora you could turn this off, there is a risk but I did it a long time with RH/Fedora and had no problems. Did you ever get this solved? I'm trying to install bittorrent-gui...
 

Code:

dapper@dan:~ # apt-get -f install bittorrent-guiReading Package Lists... DoneBuilding Dependency Tree... DoneThe following extra packages will be installed:  bittorrent python-wxGTK wxGTK-glThe following NEW packages will be installed:  bittorrent bittorrent-gui python-wxGTK wxGTK-gl0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 removed and 292 not upgraded.Need to get 0B/3430kB of archives.After unpacking 16.6MB of additional disk space will be used.Do you want to continue? [Y/n] yChecking GPG signatures...Unknown signature /var/cache/apt/archives/bittorrent_3.4.1-2_noarch.rpm: (SHA1) DSA sha1 md5 (GPG) NOT OK (MISSING KEYS: GPG#bfbf94b3)Unknown signature /var/cache/apt/archives/bittorrent-gui_3.4.1-2_noarch.rpm: (SHA1) DSA sha1 md5 (GPG) NOT OK (MISSING KEYS: GPG#bfbf94b3)E: Error(s) while checking package signatures:0 unsigned package(s)2 package(s) with unknown signatures0 package(s) with illegal/corrupted signaturesdapper@dan:~ #

 
:x

Hi,
looking for some of my own answers when i read this post. I was able to get apt, and synaptic to work in SuSE 9.1.
 
I installed apt via YaST from an RPM i grabbed off (unfortunately you will have to resolve all the dependencies manually this one last time...)I had no luck with apt-get'ing synaptic, even when ignoring the GPG signiture check <apt-get -o GPG::Check=false install synaptic> package installed, but was broken.
Uninstalled RPM, then I downloaded and compiled the source, and using the errors from the MULTIPLE ./configure attempts filled in the missing peices.
Hope this helps, and isn't the MOST retarded way to do this. I am learning as I go
 
Oh. My issue: anybody know how to tell synaptic to ignore missing signitures like you can with apt-get?