The difficulty and frustration of building GNOME from source is a major impediment for many new contributors. Installing the dependencies, getting the tools working, and compiling major components of the desktop environment is a burden that detracts from time that could be spent making patches. In order to resolve this problem, the developers from rPath have created the GNOME Developer Kit, a complete environment for testing and developing GNOME.

The GNOME Developer Kit is based on the Foresight Linux distribution and includes regularly updated packages built from the latest code in GNOME's version control system. The Developer Kit is made available as a VMware image as well as an installable ISO. The included package management system can be used to keep the system up to date as changes are made to GNOME during the development cycle.

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