No, it doesn't.

For me, it's no big deal because I only use abiword on my laptop. I'll just use vi more. I don't want to install gnome libraries just for one program.

I'm not complaining about it, because people will write the programs that they need. But are we losing sight of something here? More and more, I'm seeing Windows-like monolithic programs. To me, that's not what Linux is about. I'm going back the other way... learning to use sed and the GNU text utilities better, that kind of thing. I'm not an eliticist or anything, whatever skills I do have are really basic. It's just powerful and fun to chain things together at the command line, and I hope people still understand the beauty of Linux after the battle for the desktop is won.

Sorry if this turned out to be a rant.

I agree. Gnome and KDE dependencies are moving in the opposite direction of platform independence. More like a Windows style integrated desktop. Having said that, without KDE installed on Slackware, the programs I'm using with Fluxbox are fairly basic. GV, xpdf, xdvi etc, although they work better than the kde equivalents. I also like using Latex, and would consider using Lyx as a wordprocessor alternative, although that requires QT. It's a shame when a program becomes tied to a desktop environment.

I like the GNOME apps and GNOME games are the best, but the dependency tree is just so humongous that I feel that I have to install everything in GNOME. I really don't want to do that, especially cause I hate HAL and DBUS, so I end up just not using those apps. A newer GNOME-compat package would be really nice.

"A newer GNOME-compat package would be really nice."

I've spent the last two days working on that, with the objective of running AbiWord-2.4 or similar programs which need libgnomeprintui.

We're talking about 15-20 packages which are not in Slackware >=10.2.
I'm still working on it and getting some crude notes together. I'll probably post a new thread when I get further along.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure GNOME is quite nasty to package. I would like to help, but I'd probably royally mess things up due to inexperience.

Anyway, I was looking on you site and the project is actually something I've been wanting to do ever since I tried to make a usable GUIfied system on a Pentium 166. Does your site support swaret/slapt-get/slackpkg? That would be really nice, since linuxpackages.net packages are sometimes really badly packaged, and almost never handles config files correctly. Most everything I want is in there.

I have no idea if slapt-get or any of those work on my site.
My PkgBuild system actually makes it quite easy and fast to build mostly-correct packages. If you install PkgBuild you can easily build any of those sources without knowing about writing build scripts.
I've concentrated on writing a program which builds correct packages without writing much code.

A lot of the sources I 'collect' are the last version of the software, or the last version which works without GTK-2 or GNOME. So 'updating' is not realy important. Amigo PkgBuild doesn't download sources or do any dependency checking or upgrading.
I've been approached by the developer of another Slackware packaging system about collaborating on a system which includes the ability to do all that. Actually, PkgBuild is designed with that possibility in mind, and already produces dependency *information* if you want it.

PkgBuild makes it possible to rebuild your packages with a single command when you want to recompile them on a new system. Recently I started running Slackintosh on my wife's 33MHz iMac. Naturally I wanted to use the Amigo G12 desktop. So, I installed PkgBuild and changed the ARCH variable in the config file, threw in about 80 source packages and PkgBuild scripts. Then I use a small script to go into each dir and run the PkgBuild script. Some while later I had 80 binary packages, all placed in one directory, with all temp files cleaned up.

If you don't mind spending a bit of money and want a small, fast word processor that reads and writes doc files, uses hardly any memory, loads instantly and can use frames, tables, insert pictures etc have a look at Textmaker

--- http://www.softmaker.de/index_en.htm

I have used it for quite a while and find it excellent. I think I paid about £50 for it and have not regretted doing so for a moment. Closed source, but then I use Opera too. You can get a free trial download.

When I looked it up and it said softmaker - 17mb, I thought that is hardly lightweight. Then I found abiword is 28mb. I had no idea it was so large.

Textmaker is so large because of internal statically compiled libs, or module linking. But it is very nice and *only uses GTK-1.2* otherwise.

AbiWord-1.07 has a binary of about 4.5MB and total install size of 11MB -half in usr/share.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...0.7-i486-1.tgz

You should try "Ted". It's the word processor (rtf editor) included in Damn Small Linux.

Gnashley, I think what your doing is great with the gnome libs. Surely many people will find it usefull. Personally, I wouldn't be opposed to a monolithic Abiword 2.4.x either.

I build my own gnome on slack so I don't have these problems but I'm sure there are literally tens of thousands of people out there if not more who are frustrated by the dropping of gnome from slackware; Maybe not because of the missing DE but because of the libs that are needed for other apps. In that sort of situation, it seems absurd to install DLG, FR or any other Gnome just to run Abiword.

I don't use any QT/KDE app for just this reason. Sure, I have 120GB HDD but I still don't want a DE on my system just for one app...

Thanks for all the hard work you've been doing.

Thanks for your valuable suggestions and feedback. I can't promise to maintain anything, but I try to pass on the best info I've found to help others, though my notes are usually best understood if you've already looked at others docs, etc.

I think I noted a significant drop-off in activity on this forum during and after the decision to drop Gnome from Slackware. Lots of people seem to have abandoned, unfortunately. I also think that sales of official Slackware CD's were probably affected less. People who affected would fall into both classes -those who only needed some of the libs and those who used the ful DE. The full replacement DE is well provided. I try to show you the easiest way to get most of the libs.

I'm not sure what you mean by monolithic. If you mean statically compiling the needed gnome-libs into the AbiWord binary, this is possible but probably not a good idea as it would produce a very large binary.
Before completing the Gnome2 Compat stuff, I actually worked several days on hacking AbiWord-2.4.x to compile using the old non-gnome method. I got it working sort of with some additional code changes. Basically it runs normally, but segfaults if you choose print preview. Polishing and mainatining any sort of patch is entirely beyond my time limits, but would make a nice project for a dedicated user who knows or wants to learn a bit of 'lite' C and GTK programming -hint, hint...

The whole deal around the need for the gnome libraries is specifically the print preview feature which needs libgnomeprintui.