I have not had any success building a more recent version of GDE than 2.16.0 on CentOS.
I tried jhbuild, and went line by line using the how-to web page for jhbuild (http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/jhbuild.html), and I get hung up on dbus-glib-l (which does not appear to be in CentOS or available for it, at least from base, updates, extras, KB & rpmforge). Garnome is another possibility that I haven't looked at yet 'cuz jhbuild is supposed to be easy and fully automated (it might be, if everything it needs is already there, but it doesn't tell you up front what that means or how to get it or ...).
Gnome "says" we should use the GDE that ships with our distribution, but RH (CentOS) has to oldest revision available. To get a newer one, the Gnome people recommend building my own.
Has anyone tried this successfully? How?
Thanks.
mhr