Dropline with Slack 12
 

I've been a faithful user of Freerock GNOME for a couple of years, using his 2.16 unstable on several machines until now.
I assume he's busy with other things, though, because there's been no visible activity for a long time.

Eventually. that leaves me with two options - Dropline or drop GNOME. (I tried compiling GNOME myself and spent many frustrating days, so that's not a viable alternative.) I'm thinking of making the change now, along with 12.0.

Questions:

1. Will the latest Dropline work with 12.0? All of the info on their site points to 11.0.

2. How well is it maintained? I looked through their site and forums, but found very little activity let alone information about 12.0 (one thread on 12RC1 and one "woohoo" on 12.0).

Thanks.

I ran DLG for a time, it is a very stable version of Gnome for Slackware. I liked it better than FRG. DLG works very well, it is designed for a 2.6x kernel so it should probably work with 12.0. Not sure though if it'll run on 12.0 ( I'd ask at their forum).
I'm really liking XFce4.4.1 on Slackware 12.0:-)

XFCE4 is my preference, too. I run it on three laptops and two desktops. I load GNOME on all of them (except one minimal install server) for the applications and as an alternate environment for testing.

I have two sons running Linux. One prefers GNOME, the other KDE. It's all about choices. :)

Does it still install PAM?

Sorry, but I can't remember if it does or not, it has been awhile since I ran DLG. Maybe they've got a package list at the DLG site?

Dropline still uses PAM.

Check out slack.eu's GnomeSlacky. They're up to Gnome 18.2 for Slack 11, and have a guide for installing it on slack-current/12. They claim to pick up where GWare left off.

Jim

correction on the link Jim. it's slacky.eu not slack.eu. and regarding the guide for installing it to slack12, can you share the link? the site is in italian so i cant understand it.

I found this on the dropline forums:

http://forums.droplinegnome.org/viewtopic.php?p=36989

Although I dislike it, but I'll probably wait until they get a stable release out for Slackware 12.

Hmm. Good info, but now I'm wondering ...

I'm not sure I like the "close enough" approach indicated by that statement. Also, clearly, "rebuilding for Slack 12" implies some incompatibilities with 11, no? I think I'll jst forge ahead with the Slack upgrade and see what, if any breakage ensues with GNOME.

I don't generally think it's a good idea to install SW 11 packages on SW 12. I noticed it too late, but for one, the KDE directory isn't /opt/kde anymore. Sure, install something in /opt/kde and it still works, but it's not a good idea in my opinion.

It's like before, you can use packages from a previous version but it's not recommended.

What I'm curious about, is when SW 12 packages are going to start appearing in linuxpackages.net.

actually they are already preparing for SW12.0. there are some packages being released for slack12 already.

Sorry about the typo. Glad you caught it.

Slacky.eu's GnomeSlacky instructions for Current (12), translated into English via Google:

http://64.233.179.104/translate_c?hl...rent%26hl%3Den

Agreed, XFce4 is excellent!:D
For some reason I really prefer Gnome on my Debian box. Having the freedom to choose whatever environment you want to use is a great thing.
FOSS rules:-)

compile gnome from source
 

There are packages I didn't manage to compile (epiphany and yelp), they seem not to like SeaMonkey and I *will not* install the old Mozilla 1.7.x. But I managed to compile a functional GNOME desktop using SlackBuilds.

-I based my build system on the official KDE Slackware build system (made a gnome.SlackBuild with a gnome.options general options file and many directories with sources and minor build scripts). I used the sources from www.gnome.org plus some dependencies from www.freedesktop.org and the python bindings packages (from the www.gnome.org server but not included in the "official" sources).

-I copied some options from the gsb.SlackBuild system

-And some more from the GARNOME build system

-And some more from Dropline.

I made a script to fix the install, which I am polishing by now. (It works, but it gives me some annoying messages while installing) My build is *almost* absolutely unintrusive (it only replaces gnome-icon-theme).

I am still checking the dropline site, just to learn how to successfully compile epiphany and yelp and everything depending on Gecko.

Sounds great!

Are you going to make your build scripts available for download somewhere?

Do your scripts automatically download all the required packages & dependancies?

thanx for asking, as a matter of fact, I am
 

Hi.

As I said, I am polishing my build scripts (specially the post-installation stuff). I make my own Slackware-based distro for my personal use, so I like to compile some things, make .tgz packages, make them into series and add them to my installer CDs. (take a look at "Cooking up some Slackware - CUSS). So far, I am figuring out how to make more efficient the part that automatically generates the default gconf entries under /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults.

As soon as I think they are (the SlackBuilds) "stable" enough, I will make them public.

No, I do NOT download the packages and dependencies automatically, BUT I do keep a list of those dependencies and the places where they can be found. Don't fear, there aren't too much.

I am planning to make two versions: one with every package built stand-alone and the second (the way I like it) with "cousin" packages merged into big packages (this is, the series they are built of from: gnome-platform, gnome-bindings, etc). I don't like having hundreds of packages wandering inside /var/log/packages.

I focused on building a MINIMAL install as close as possible to the original sources. (the way GNOME was built when it was officially built in Slackware). I think perhaps that's why it didn't cost me so much - I mean, finding extra dependencies for extra software.

I still have to figure how to correctly compile epiphany and yelp.

Thanks a lot for your interest. It is encouraging.

by the way
 

http://download.gnome.org/platform/2.18/
http://download.gnome.org/desktop/2.18/
http://download.gnome.org/bindings/2.18/
http://download.gnome.org/admin/2.18/
http://download.gnome.org/devtools/2.18/

You can find most sources there.

you mentioned that you also got some packages at freedesktop.org that was needed. may i know what those packages are?

here they are
 

You need XML::Simple to compile icon-naming-utils.

And iso-codes, but that is another story
 

As I said, it runs but it's still "beta"

folkenfane, have a look at my gnome-2.18.3 directory if it will help you with stuff like that. I've been building gnome for quite a few years and have never had a problem with my doinst.sh's..

http://jaguarlinux.com/pub/DIY/source/gnome-2.18.3/

I started to convert those build scripts to true .SlackBuilds (for use on 12.0) but I've lost some motivation. What's in that directory is for my DIY build which uses a slightly modified pkgtools. But they'll work on Slack with a global s/install\/desc/install\/slack-desc/... No use of /usr/libexec and no gziped info's but other than those 3 things, they are ready for Slack.

Also, I'm not sure there is a way around the yelp problem besides building your own firefox. Dropline does it for the same reason I imagine. The generic binaries that Pat uses straight from mozilla don't contain the necessary files to build yelp against.

I've also never had a problem with epiphany but I ussually don't build it anyway because I use Firefox.

Yeah. That's why we include our own Firefox build still even after Slackware got one officially a few releases ago. I believe that Freerock had another solution of including a few gtkembedmoz libraries, which is an option that you guys may want to consider.

As for the next stable Dropline release (since some have asked): We're working on it. Lots of changes are going on, but we will be targeting Slackware 12.0. I have hopes we can have a beta or pre-release in the next week or two. 2.18 is available for Slackware 11.0, but with the uncertain release date of 12.0, and a few unsolved issues, we never formally have taken 2.18 out of pre-release. I think that most people will find that it is quite good aside from the system-tools-backends problems.

We've posted an announcement on the homepage about the beta:

http://www.droplinegnome.org/

The new Dropline GNOME for Slackware 12.0 replaces only 8 Slackware packages in the beta build. We are trying to strip out 2 or 3 more, but then we lose features (proper HAL mounting support, gecko for the browsers (help, rss, etc), and exchange server support in Evolution, a bug-free VTE and a few other important things. It's a huge step, in my opinion. Full list here:

http://forums.droplinegnome.org/viewtopic.php?t=4739

Here is a screenie. We should be able to call 2.18.3 complete this week.

http://zborgerd.droplinegnome.org/sc...woEighteen.png

I would say that, aside from a few outstanding package rebuilds and a few fixes as noted in the forum thread, it's ready for the public and most of the bugs will be worked out tomorrow.