Wanting to try Gnome, need a little advice

[Patrick Hooker <pathooker gci net>]

Hello,

Bug Day, deep fried grasshoppers??? Don't spare the chocolate sauce! <grin>
Seriously. I started using Linux about 6 mo. ago. Loaded SuSE 8.2, somehow 
didn't get gnome loaded back then. I've tried to get the gnome desktop 
running from my installation CDs over the past few days, had no success, 
appears some updates/changes I've done allong the way fouled something up. 
So, I thought I'd try and do it the right way and compile Gnome from source. 
The slight hitch is, I've never compiled C programs before. I gather the 
compiler and other necessary tools are standard on this system. I currently 
work with scripting stuff, PHP, Javascript, and ( the boss made me do it ) 
VBscript.  Long ago I did a bunch of assembler level progamming.  ( Anyone 
remember Z80 and RCA 1802, CPUs? Also a number of Intel microcontroller 
chips. )  Does anyone know of a website with instructions for compiling Gnome 
for Linux or have any suggestions? Is it striaght forward enough to do just 
from a list of instructions or do I need to do some more indepth study and 
preperation for such jobs?  I didn't see anything very specific about 
installation on the www.gnome.org website. Did I miss something?  I did 
download the Gnome 2.4.1  *tar.bz source code files. 

Thanks
Patrick(Alaska)
Currently running KDE 3.1 desktop on SuSE Linux 8.2 on a Dell computer, 
Pentium IV w/ much RAM and diskspace.