panel and control centre broken after updating GNOME packages

[Ivan Uemlianin <i a uemlianin celtic co uk>]

Three small difficulties installing Gnome related packages.  Any help or
comments appreciated.  Please let me know if I'm missing any information
you need, or if there's a better place to post these queries.

I am currently running Gnome 1.4 on SuSE 7.2.

I recently uninstalled the rpms for, and installed the source for:

             rpm        source
gdk-pixbuf  ?          0.14.0
gnome-vfs   ?          1.0.3
libxml      1.8.11-53  1.8.16
oaf         0.6.5-30   0.6.7

I did './configure --prefix="/opt/gnome" ' for each, as SuSE puts GNOME
in /opt.  Compiliation and installation went fine apart from:

Problem 1. Compiling gnome-vfs: 'make' died after reported the following
error:

 > void        /usr/bin/gtkdoc-mkhtml: index.sgml: No such file or 
directory
 > make: *** [html-build.stamp] Error 1

Which I solved by commenting out line 394 $src/doc/Makefile (in
html-build.stamp):


 > html-build.stamp: sgml.stamp $(DOC_MAIN_SGML_FILE) $(content_files)
 > @echo '*** Building HTML ***'
 > test -d $(srcdir)/html || (rm -rf $(srcdir)/html && mkdir 
$(srcdir)/html)
 > ### cd $(srcdir)/html && gtkdoc-mkhtml $(DOC_MODULE)
../$(DOC_MAIN_SGML_FILE)

This was a brutal hack for which I apologise, but I couldn't figure out
another way to do it & I thought I wouldn't miss the documentation for
the time being.


Problems 2 & 3. The new GNOME: a couple of things Don't Work any more:

2. Applets can no longer be added to panels.  The menus all work, but
all that gets added is a Gnome footprint/question mark icon, which
doesn't do anything.

3. The Gnome Control Centre has no pages.  The GUI pops up in response
to selecting it from the Gnome menu; the sections tree is down the left
hand side, but the right hand side which should contain the dialogues
remins empty whatever section I select.

Any leads appreciated.

Best wishes

Ivan Uemlianin