Installing Gnome on Slackware
 

Hello everyone,

Since Gnome is no longer provided as one of the packages on the Slackware install CD, I would like to install it now. However, I have never before installed a package, and don't know how to do it. I know that Gnome for older versions of Slackware is available in the packages archive of the Slackware website, but I don't know how packages work or how I should arrange them. Am I supposed to download every file individually and do something with them? If not, what should I do? Thank you,

-Felix

EDIT: PS - How does Enlightenment compare in terms of resource usage?

Coincidentally, I installed Gnome to Slackware about 1 and a half hours ago. The site I went to is http://gsb.freerock.org/ and the whole download/install is automated and very easy. If you don't have lynx installed, do it now and then download and install Gnome.

Dropline is also often put about, but as Pat says: it makes too many changes to your system to install itself.

Also, you may want to look at http://www.gware.org/index.php as an alternative.

Thank you for that info... unfortunately I am still unsure as to how to go about actually performing the installation, since the computer I am putting it on has no internet connection - the one I am on now is a Windows XP box. Would downloading the FRG iso and burning it to CD work? If so, it shouldn't be burned as an iso but simply as data that I later copy onto the linux computer - is this correct?

Looks that way - burn the iso as you would a distro iso and install from the cd.

It will install fine. But for some reason all these Slack Gnomes have to replace slackware packages with different versions and the last time I did that Slack lost the ability to compile anything. It really sucks.

Eh? That's not normal. Which GNOME desktop were you using that caused you to be unable to compile anything? If that were the case, then they would be unable to compile GNOME.

Dropline seems to be the main culprit for doing this. I had a similar, though less drastic, experience.

I am one of the dropline GNOME developers. If you can recall any details, please let me know what they are. We have a fairly large userbase, but I've never heard of reports of this. Do you recall the applications that were giving you some trouble? I'd like to assist in figuring this out in order to prevent any potential future problems for anyone else.

Hey it seems very strange to me ?
Are you sure you have not uninstalled gcc ?

Rgds
Saxa

I was exaggerating a tad. I'm sure some apps would still compile. It just got a lot harder.

I'm talking about compile errors. The ones nobody can ever help you with :p I think it's because a lot of apps have only been tested on plain, well tested, distros. The uber new libs Gnome needs mess that up.

Can't be sure though. All I know is, as long as I don't replace slack packs I'm fine.

There is indeed a lot that has to be replaced on stock Slackware systems in order to get GNOME to build properly with 100% of its features. Of course, you never will have a "stock Slackware" system after installing any third-party GNOME desktop. GNOME is outrageously modular, and depends upon tons of base system libraries to be up-to-date and properly built.

We do some pretty extensive checking with Dropline to ensure that there are no broken libraries or links. E.g.; everything on Slackware 10.2 should work fine after installing DLG. To my knowledge, everything seems to be backwards compatible with old libraries (e.g. the GTK+/Glib2 2.6.x replacements that GNOME 2.12.x requires should work with older programs), but you never can tell. :)

To date, I've never had anything fail to build - except when there were some changes to pkg-config a while back. That was corrected by us within a few days. I would assume that the other GNOME desktops have done the same, but I'm not certain. If anyone has any specifics though, I'd appreciate the info to squash some bugs. :)

I seem to recall that the most immediate change I noticed was that my KDE menu lost many of it's KDE items, but didn't have them overwritten with Gnome settings. Beyond that, I'm afraid I don't remember.

Thanks for the info. If it's the issue that I suspect, then that one is actually due to the fact the KDE in Slackware doesn't yet support the new Freedesktop menu specifications. Freerock and co. talk about it here:

http://gsb.freerock.org/faqs/

It's a common issue though, that we hear about fairly often, so we link to that FAQ in our forums.

It wasn't a huge problem, the box was being rebuilt shortly afterwards anyway.