shepper, the thing you describe as "Dropline Gnome" problems has nothing to do with Dropline Gnome.
Your Main issue is/was with the 2.6.# kernel, udevs and hotplug none of which are effected by DLG. Dropline Gnome a tweaked Gnome for Slackware, just a gui. Dropline Gnome will work with a 2.4.# level kernel and the latest DLG will work with a 2.4.26 kernel (stock) with Slack 9.1.
udevs is a pain in a the rear if you have a custom system. It works well for a "stock" box. It does require some tweaking as Patrick and no one else for that matter other than Billy Gates knows how your computer will be put together...
I run a high hacked system with lots of extra hardware and yes it required custom udev scripts to load them all.
Dropline Gnome is FOR beginners that is why it is so simple to install. Gnome is a pain to build, try it sometimes...

I agree entirely with Nichole_knc.

I respect the work the Dropline Developers have put into the Desktop and the fact that they inherited the decision to build in HAL. I believe that HAL requires the 2.6 kernel and know for a fact that Dropline will not install, at the present time, unless you are using a 2.6 kernel or use the --force option.

I also believe that the "playing field" has changed dramatically in the past month as Gnome is being phased out of future Slackware releases.
I am still impressed from the forums about many newbies are trying Slackware.

I am not sure that a beginner is going to be very adept at upgrading a Kernel, writing custom udev rules, hacking the libusbscanner script

I suspose they can scan as root (the warning that comes up about scanning as root is pretty impressive) and they can find the hack to circumvent the udev rules for their palm. But what I really think is that they will just use kde or some other distro entirelly.

When I first installed Dropline I liked it very much. Before Slack I ran Mandrake. Though there was nothing really wrong with Mandrake they wouldn't update the damn Gnome packages. So I switched to Dropline because I heard good things about it. But with the newest version I might aswel compile the damn thing myself. The main reasons I switched to Ubuntu:

- No easy way to download Dropline. - The installer for some reason won't use a local SoureForge mirror it always defaults to a slowass "takes forever to download" mirror. Why the hell they didn't just make an iso and torrent it is beyond me....
- Unfinished. - Half the stuff barely works or is configured really bad by default (Most noticable: Pam (<-- man ik hate it), automounting, device naming scheme (My mounted partition "shared" shows up as: "33G HARD DRIVE: 33G MEDIA"))
- Upgrading Slack breaks Dropline - And there's little you can do about it except maybe install KDE
- No easy way to update just the packages I have installed, it will install everything in the list only so I can start removing again.

Well ok there's more. If they'd just maintain their product I'd still be using it.

i AM RUNNING DROPLINE ON A P-III 450 AND I DO NOT HAVE MUCH TROUBLE WITH LAG. ITS WAY BETTER THAN WINDBLOWS

I've been using dropline for 2 years and am completely satisfied. If XMMS is your main complaint than over time you will probably be as satisfied with dropline as the rest of us are.

xmms sucks big time too. it doesnt load files recursively from dirs. beep media player does this, looks nicer and much neater.

This is an old thread, and the last few versions of DLG do not delete XMMS any longer. Previously, it had been a package that was part of our package index. This is no longer the case. You will find that Slackware's own XMMS package is completely untouched, though there is no menu entry since it is not compliant with the Freedesktop menu specifications and does not show up in GNOME.

this is an old thread, but I ran across it and would like to clarify..

they do


dropline is probably the most polished gnome for slackware, if not for any distro

I have never had dropline break anything in slackware, if you have an odd configuration you may need to add exludes information.

you have the option of what packages to update

and no i dont "work" for DLG

soule

We have direct downloads available as well, for those that cannot use BitTorrent. For a short time, after taking over the project, we did not release an ISO. This was only with the first release by the new Dropline team. All future releases have had ISO images for at least every major version and the even-numbered bugfix-releases.

Thanks! We put a lot of time into it and want to offer the best free desktop available.

The installer allows you to completely select all of the packages, and there is even a blacklist feature... That way, it will never bother you about a specific package (if you add it to /etc/dropline/blacklist). The installer is mostly just a way to ensure that all of the packages get installed in a proper order. PV gets around a lot of this by hardcoding many configuration files into the packages, but we prefer to have the packages run the correct programs (by doinst.sh) to generate configurations upon installation; e.g. librsvg has to generate gdk-pixbuf handlers with each install. Librsvg must only be installed at the right time (after all deps are met), or else this will fail. Other apps need to update mime databases upon installation, etc. For this reason, we have the installer. It's simply a front-end to pkgtool, but it makes certain to install everything in the right order (instead of pkgtool's insistance upon installing alphabetically).

There are good and bad reasons for doing it either way (the bad usually only comes from what individual users sometimes try to do during installation), but we feel that a GNOME install is only as good as the configuration behind it. Lots of GNOME-related problems are due to stale or improper configurations. Thus, we take a "build once" approach to many of these packages, instead of having to "build twice and forcibly insert configuration data from the first build." Saves us all time and effort.

Of course, another benefit of having the installer is that it allows for easy web-based updates, and an alert applet that tells you when new packages are available.

Maybe not, but I'm glad that you like our desktop.