What's the best format to get GNOME for my machine?

It depends on what kind of computer you have, and what you want to do with GNOME. If in doubt, the officially supported way to install GNOME is from the latest set of tarballs (the files ending in ".tar.gz") from ftp://ftp.gnome.org or its mirrors. Look in the /pub/GNOME/sources directory for the various packages. The full list of FTP mirrors is at http://www.gnome.org/ftpmirrors.shtml, in an emergency, try ftp://gnomeftp.wgn.net/pub/gnome.

If you want the up to the minute, bleeding edge development version of GNOME, CVS is the way to go. There is no guarantee that the CVS version will even compile, much less work, but bug reports are quite appreciated. If this sounds like its for you, you can find more information on getting the CVS version at http://www.gnome.org/devel/whatiscvs.shtml and http://www.cinternet.net/~soren/gnome/cvs.shtml.

If you don't want to deal with compiling GNOME, and you are on a common system, there might be precompiled binary packages available for you. Currently there are packages for RedHat, SuSE 6.0, Debian and LinuxPPC systems. Until recently there were Solaris packages as well, as soon as we have good ones we will offer these as well. Find out more about the various distributions at http://www.gnome.org/start/getting.shtml.