"After all the RPMs downloaded and installed successfully, I was left with high hopes. Now the trick was to actually be able to log in to Gnome. KDM, KDE's default greeting screen had always logged me in automatically. The first step was to turn that off. I looked in the KDE control center, under Session Management, provided my root password and turned Automatic Logons off. Then a quick logoff to be presented the KDM greeting screen. There's a session option where you can choose other display managers. I chose Gnome and logged in. What I got was some icons on the desktop and nothing else... no menus, no taskbars, just an error that gnome-panels couldn't start. Well darn. How do I get out of this mess? Luckily by right-clicking on the desktop I could open a terminal window and 'sudo reboot' my machine. Back to KDE and some more thinking.
"I'm sure I could have fiddled with it more, but not wanting to risk my system stability entirely, I gave it a rest. Besides, I didn't want Gnome 2.6 anyways, I wanted Gnome 2.8..."
