Hey guys, busy at work I am so I thought I would write something thats been on my mind. I was using the knoppix live CD on a customer system to recover some data before I wiped their HD clean. I noticed that the KDE installed on knoppix had some more neat features rather than the KDE that comes with slack 12. Don't get me wrong, I love my slack system, it gets done what I need to get done and is solid as hell. What I was curious about is if I tried to install KDE 4 on my slack machine, should I be worried that I will fudge things up? Or should I just leave it at what it is?

On another note, I would really like to set up my "network neighborhood" I have a few windows machines, and 2 other slack machines, and when I try to view workgroup computers from my main slack machine, it says samba must be installed.

Thanks for any help guys

I found the best "Network Neighbourhood" style app for Linux was Smb4k. This is for KDE though, which I'm assuming you run. NOTE: Trying to install this on a non-KDE based Debian install will lead to A LOT of kdelib and qtlib packages being installed.

As an additional note, Gnome has this nicely built in to Nautilus, and is accessible through the "Places" menu.

You can install KDE4 entirely into whereever you like not to disturb other versions of KDE.

I tried the svn-kde4-build thingie (took me a day, but compiled properly) and put all into /opt/kde4.

Wasn't stable, though, but looked very nice.

If there are already any ready Slackware 12 packages, I don't know.

I must agree with you here that the power and control of smb4k is what has led me on many occasions to install it outside kde. Windows/samba networking in gnome is pretty well put together, another reason that I like Ubuntu and Fedora with gnome. I have also used LinNeighborhood especially on lite livecds like puppy linux. Dolphin like kde file manager integrates smb kio slaves and they work like a dream. I was having trouble discovering whats on the windows network with kde4 in so far as the workgroups and machine names were concerned but because I know the static ips I just plugged them in and I was pleasantly surprised that its much faster than gnome or kde 3.5. I just went wow its faster than command line copying over smbclient. I can just drag and drop files without having to wait for the spinning busy icons of old. Or maybe opensuse is doing something right sleeping with the enemy.