I installed Dropline so I could compile Firestarter, I use KDE. Got a bit more than I bargained for to say the least... The menu in KDE is completly f*cked up and cedega doesnt work anymore, keep getting messages abuot missing python bindings for GTK....damn it!

Do you have python bindings for GTK installed? And did you read the FAQ on dropline(or freerock, or gware) first?

I think it's important to have things that work for a majority of users. Most of Dropline's userbase wants to have a some of the most commonly used applications at their disposal. I will say that I do not use Ekiga/Gnomemeeting, so I can see your point here. There are, however, users that do. And when h.323 becomes more popular (I already have IP based phone service), this will be an application that will have a growing userbase. To understand why we (at dropline) and the folks at FRG (I'm making an assumption that their goals are similar) include more than just the base GNOME packages, you have to first understand that their target audience are those that want a full-featured desktop that requires minimal effort to have an application that does what they need it to do. We try to stick to a "one application for each function" policy, but you will see below why this is not always possible.

I also will agree with you that there *are* things that can be stripped from Dropline. Several of us have been trying to strip things down over the past year and a half, and we've done it with some limited success. But I must say that the userbase dictates some of these decisions as well. There have been times where we've been met with opposition when "feature X" or "application Y" is being considered for removal. We'd love to strike a nice balance between "simplicity" and "usability", but for the moajority of folks - these things are not always one and the same.

You can insist all day that less applications makes things "more simplistic, and thus is more "usable", but there are many users who would disagree. For instance... You joke about HAL support in GNOME, but most people absolutely love it once they get to use it. I would personally not wish to go without HAL, because it's really a kickass system that goes beyond simple automounting of drives. Project Utopia, as a whole, is revolutionizing the UNIX desktop. I think it's fair that Linux grows to become more usable to the average joe. That's perfectly fine, because there will always be people like you who are perfectly capable of building their own distribution or desktop. Telling all users that they should type silly mount commands when they pop in a CD or USB disk is, frankly, absurd. I, like you, could certainly get away with an absolute minimalist system, but I find that it's simply a hassle when I just want to get work done. Lots of folks share this opinion as well.

I'm not trying to say that "our way" is the "right way" for everyone. I respect that you prefer an absolute minimalist environment without the bells and whistles and extra applications that you will not use. I simply think that it's unfair to refer to more complete desktop suites as being "bloated" because they aren't minimalist enough for your own personal use. I am an advocate of choice. Frankly, I think it would be good for the Slackware userbase if you released your GNOME packages to the public in order to provide those with a similar opinion an extra option to choose from.

Not exactly. I've built similar GNOME installs to your own plenty of times. They simply don't fall in line with the goals of our project, or what appears to be the goals of GNOME as a whole. If you look at something like Ubuntu, you can see clearly why it is advocated as the "flagship GNOME desktop" and gnome.org suggests it to people who are interested in using GNOME. Compare it to your own, and count the features, usability enhancements, and typical applications, and there is a clearly obvious difference.

I have no doubt that your GNOME desktop works for you, but you must realize that you've tailored it specifically for your own needs and are not attempting to make it a suite that is aimed at the majority of users.

I would like to stress that I didn't say that you don't know what you are talking about. I just feel that you've made a few gross exaggerations about GNOME as a whole, the work involved in building it into a usable suite (not just a desktop that runs but does essentially nothing), and your impressions about what the average desktop user needs and doesn't need. The "Slackware way" is a minority. If you look at the Linux userbase as a whole, you will get a good idea of what the "average user" wants, and it's not what you are building. I'm not trying to be critical of your work. I'm just saying that your view is a strict minority view.

Take a look at the GNOME FTP site and get a good idea of how many libaries and applications fall under the "GNOME umbrella". Also note how many of these things are still going into a typical Slackware install (without GNOME itself). Lots of things are able to be built without some things, but here are a few important points in response to what you've said here:

1. Some parts of GNOME are linked to libraries and applications that you apparently are not using. A very basic example would be the features of the GNOME clock applet that integrate with the Evolution calender. This, to you, may seem trivial, but it's an important feature to many (I personally love it).

2. Epiphany is *the* GNOME web browser. Not Firefox. Not Mozilla. It is part of the GNOME suite. It unfortunately requires the use of Gecko libraries as a backend, thus having the extra requirement of a Mozilla based browser. Most of the highest quality (in my opinion) GNOME desktops tend to try to stick to the entire suite of gnome.org desktop and platform applications for a complete desktop suite.

It is IMPORTANT to stress that *this* is the GNOME desktop.

ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/deskto...2.14.2/sources

It's not just GNOME proper. It's the GNOME desktop component of the whole suite. When you don't have these things, you DO NOT have "GNOME". You can call 60 packages of GNOME components whatever you want, but it's not the "GNOME desktop". If you want all of these packages, you need most of the platforms libraries, several bindings, and *lots* of lower level libraries that are not listed there.

When we build "GNOME", we build what is shown here, in addition to a handful of other applications that are intended to improve usability and meet the needs of most users.

3. Project Utopia is so important to the Linux community. It takes the UNIX desktop of old out of the stoneage and makes it a viable and usable alternative to the standard commercial desktop (Windows, OSX) for less computer-savvy users. You may think of them as being unimportant, but they are requisite components for the majority.

Lots of folks only relate DBUS to HAL directly, but HAL is only a single application where DBUS is used...

DBUS functions as a system-wide messagebus, and also can be used by individual programs to allow communication between libraries and applications. Without it, you do not gain wonderful, modern-day features like; libnotify support for popup notifications, wifi and power management applets for GNOME that take the guesswork out of connecting to access points or putting your laptop into suspend mode, communications between your web browser to news aggregators for things like RSS, notifications from HAL to your media players to indicate that a disk has been inserted and you can begin ripping or playing a CD, and plenty of other ways to apply it that are not listed here.

It's all a matter of what you want, really. I can think of hundreds of things that you probably cannot do on your personal GNOME build. And that's fine. It probably does what you want it to do. I just believe that your concept of "usable" does not fall into that concept for the majority. It seems to be misleading to me to insist that you can gain all of this with such a minimalist installation. If that were the case, then everyone would be doing it your way.

Well, FRG is compiled with "-O2 -march=i486 -mcpu=i686" (requires a 486, takes advantage of a Pentium II), which are the same CFLAGS used for the rest of Slackware. What CFLAGS are used to compile gstreamer on DLG? (I actually found this information hard to come by).

Secondly, how could you possibly tell the speed difference with gstreamer, of all things?

Earlier Zborgered specifically said that Dropline's versions of Thunderbird and Firefox run faster than Pat's.

What he said, specifically, was:

Has that been tested?

It has, but only really discussed internally. The difference fairly marginal, but there are some benefits (e.g. the way the linker works with cutting out the unused libraries with --as-needed) but such things only really improve startup times rather than real performance (due to making the linker cutting out about 1/4 of the non-requisite libraries). This does, believe it or not, provide startup times that are up to 20% faster, which is noticable on slower machines like P3 systems (like my test box). I'm interested in putting together a concise benchmark that details a number of these benchmarks that show the differences in Firefox itself and the programs that link to it. Sounds like a fun weekend project.

Performance is not the prime issue here though. I will mention a few of the reasons why it helps to have an internal Firefox build, instead of relying on Slackware's own package.

Slackware's package of Firefox is a genuine Mozilla.org i686 build that has been repacked for Slackware. Unfortunately, some of the essentials are stripped down and make it impossible to use it for apps like Epiphany, Yelp, or Liferea (I suspect that this is why FRG uses the Mozilla suite - to my knowledge, though they'll likely have to switch to Seamonkey in Slackware 11). We actually obtained written permission from Mozilla.com to utilize the trademarked images in our own builds when they first announced this policy.

Location is also important. The Slackware repackage of Firefox puts its libraries in /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.x/ . Rather than symlinking to this location as the Slackware doinst.sh does (for apps and plugins that want the libraries to be in standard /usr/lib/firefox/ locations), it is more practical (in our opinion) to keep everything isntalled to a permanent location that will not change with minor security updates.

There are also a few general tweaks and default settings that we are able to apply on default to provide a a slightly customized set of features.

Since when should the trivia of a package's build environment matter to the end user to a degree that warrants it being called into question?

I think you've done enough trolling here. Time to move on or go back under your bridge.

I wouldn't say he is trolling at all. His questions are sincere and valid, if they weren't I don't think zborgerd would have taken the time to answer them.

I'll let zborgered answer as to his own motives, but I suspect it has something to do with being unwilling to let blatant misinformation in a public forum go unchallenged.

In any case, the question of gstreamer's CFLAGS setting is relatively pointless for multiple reasons. Looking at /usr/src/dropline-build-system/SCRIPTS/gstreamer/build (which ships out inside the packages so they can be replicated, updated, patched, etc) the answer becomes relatively obvious. As the cflags() function is called with no arguments, the build script is indicating that the configure script is to be supplied the default CFLAGS that are used for all official Dropline packages... "-O2 -pipe -march=i686". This information is anything but hard to find.

...and to address the charge of trolling directly, he's managed to practically hit each and every one of the "classic" anti-dropline troll arguments, with the exception of "what do you have against my Pentium 120?!?" which was probably coming shortly after getting a response about the CFLAGS question.

I didn't think I would have to respond to this blatant personal attack after my biggest critic stood up for me, but wow...

evilDagmar, if you feel that someone is trolling, just send an instant messsage to one of the moderators and that person will be taken care of.

Well, you should have posted that as an answer to my question!

I'm sure it's obvious to most other people why I asked about Dropline's compilation options, but since you missed it, we were discussing Dropline's speed and the topic of its optimizations came up. I made this clear by quoting the message I was responding to.

Now, can we please stop talking about me?

Since when did it become required that we answer questions which are already documented in the appropriate places? You're not looking to do anything productive with the information, you're clearly just looking for an avenue for easy criticism.

ANYONE who asks a question on LinuxQuestions.org deserves a polite, uncondescending answer. If the answer is easy for you to give or you can point them in the right direction, then all the better. That is why LQ exists. I've extended this courtesy to many people during my many posts here, and I expect it in return.

When you claimed "Well, you should have posted that as an answer to my question!" I can only assume that in some way you wanted the answer sooner than you actually got it, or before you asked the question, or something. You seem to have decided to take offense for an answer not given, even though it actually was given, and in detail.

So now that we've established that you did get an answer to your question, from me, and yet you're still acting as if you've somehow been put upon. Who here has been condescending and/or rude to you and why is that my problem? The forum exists to help people, but to my knowledge no one is in any way obligated to answer anyone else's question, and it mainly operates on goodwill principles.

You should probably consider exactly how much goodwill you're managing to accumulate by being this accusatory and argumentative.

evilDagmar - wind your neck in. This is fast becoming an extremely informative, useful and, above all, polite discussion. The only troll I can see here is you. Join the discussion in the same spirit as everyone else, or leave it.

Thanks for your help liquidtenmilion, the menus are fine now! Yes I have the python bindings installed, its pygtk right?

Hi, I was wondering if someone could explain a problem I have encountered with GWare and Freerock.

Installing either of the above affects the XFCE taskbar (The one usually at the top with the minimised programs).

What happens is that the text of the program names sticks out of the side of the buttons, instead of being truncated (the usual behavior) or the button extending to fit the text. As you can imagine this looks rather messy.

I have isolated the cause of this as probably related to GTK+, because if I reinstall the stock GTK+ the problem goes away. Obviously doing this this then affects the operation of GNOME. Has anyone else encountered this behaviour and is there a better solution?

Could the problem also be XWindows related? I am using a 9600XT with the stock XOrg radeon driver.

I have searched, but I fear my google-fu is weak, for I have found nothing useful.