Curiosity got the better of me and I tried Fluxbox. I am *very* happy with the results but I heard/read that uninstalling Dropline may create problems due to the changes it makes to the system when installed.

I am running a home-grown kernel (2.6.something) and my wi-fi etc works great (from a script in my /root directory that I run manually when I start the system) but I don't want to break those things.

I have installed a bunch of stuff in the year that I have owned this laptop, usually in /usr/local so is the Dropline uninstall going to hose my system?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

I have not encountered any major issues with uninstalling dropline--if I follow the instructions on their forum.

But personally, I keep dropline installed even though I don't use the gnome desktop because I still use some gnome based applications such as deskbar, bluefish, gramps, et cetera. Dropline is the easiest way I've found to have all the gnome dependencies there.

(I put the gnome deskbar in the fluxbox slit with wmswallow:
wmswallow -geometry 64x25 "Deskbar Applet" /usr/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar-applet --window --cuemiac &

Should be fine if you do it this way:

http://forums.droplinegnome.org/viewtopic.php?t=5262

My experience is removing Dropline can nuke KDE...and I mean completely. I did so, and that forced a re-installation of Slackware. Fortunately, I had been planning on that re-installation anyway.

I would advise anyone who is considering installing Dropline to do so with caution. It caused some run problems with my machine. If you do decide to go there, don't install the internet programming. It fouled my installation of Firefox. It also messed with a few other programs.

Tread carefully!

Blessed be!
Pappy

The only other concern is if you have installed any other software with gnome dependencies since you installed DLG. Those programs may cease to function.

Unless you are really short of disk space, I'd just leave DLG on your system, even if you don't use it. It won't hurt performance, and DLG packages are very high quality. Since you like to install "a bunch of stuff", you'll probably find the extra gnome/gtk stuff useful.

Brian

Doesn't dropline replace some major slackware packages. If you remove it you will have to reinstall the packages it replaced.

Yes, it does. The first effect I noticed was that the default KDE cursor setup turned decidedly Gnome-ish. And yes, you will...or, you can take my tack, and look upon it as a chance to install (or reinstall) Slack-12.

I also found Dropine a little squirrelly doing certain things, like choosing a screensaver. When I say squirrelly, I mean dropping out of the X-server session, and back to a console session. Also, the screensaver in KDE goes from the standard all on, to the Gnom-ish slow fade to black before the screensaver starts

The whole dropping out of X is why I decided to say good-bye to it. That and the fact that I have become used to the lovely functionality of KDE, and didn't like Gnome's lack thereof.

Blessed be!
Pappy

Thanks for the replies all.

I decided (in a moment of total stupidity) to try the Dropline uninstaller. Big mistake!

I know I should have followed the good advice given, but hell, I was bored and drunk.

The result was that any and all browsers (except Lynx) stopped working, as did Thunderbird and a bunch of other stuff. The dropline-installer would not re-install anything and basically the system was toast. All fluxbox configurations also stopped working and the internet connection dropped constantly.

After trying to fix the borked stuff I figured out that dropline packages were in /var/cache/dropline-installer and used pkgtool to reinstall everything.

When I get around to upgrading to Slack 12 dropline will NOT be installed again, too many modifications to the system for my liking.

It looks fairly straightforward, if only you had followed the link in the post above.

http://forums.droplinegnome.org/viewtopic.php?t=5262

Basically all of these packages are replaced by dropline.

shadow-4.0.18.1-i686-4dl.tgz replaces slackware pack.
libidl-0.8.8-i686-2dl.tgz replaces slackware pack.
gnome-icon-theme-2.18.0-noarch-4dl.tgz replaces slackware pack.
vte-0.16.6-i686-2dl.tgz replaces slackware pack.
librsvg-2.16.1-i686-4dl.tgz replaces slackware pack.
mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.5-i686-2dl.tgz replaces slackware pack.
mozilla-thunderbird-2.0.0.4-i686-2dl.tgz replaces slackware pack.
openldap-client-2.3.36-i686-1dl.tgz replaces slackware pack.

So having downloaded these from a slackware mirror, run the dropline uninstaller, and then install the above packages.

I've no idea how you managed to pull that one off. Perhaps doing a `removepkg *` in /var/log/packages was a bad idea.

There's detailed instructions online about what you have to do to cleanly uninstall Dropline, and they're not very complex. If you didn't follow them, that's your fault.

Actually, I used the console based Dropline installation program. I think things would have been better had I NOT installed the internet crap. It fouled up Firefox. The uninstall was even worse. Firefox went away completely.

But, like I said, it wasn't really that big of a problem. I had been planning on upgrading that machine to Slack-12 for a bit, and the Dropline nuking incident provided the "round to-it" for which I had been searching. Slack 11 still worked enough for me to salvage the important stuff before I ran setup.

So, no harm, no foul. I wouldn't put Dropline back on my system, but I have to admit I'm not that hot for the Gnome desktop. If I were, I'd put it back on with the internet program proviso firmly in mind.

I much prefer KDE. I also like Xfce, and sometimes it's kind of cool to switch to FVWM just to remember the first version of Slackware I ever owned.

I don't know if fault should even be brought into the discussion. While I admit I didn't remove Dropline properly, I sure set it up right. Even in its functional state, it caused some anomalies in my KDE. Removing it rendered KDE unusable, and Firefox gone.

Anyway, I was the only affected party...well, besides the computer in question. The fresh install of Slack-12 went swimmingly, and it's back on top...so no harm, no foul, no fault.

Blessed be!
Pappy

OKay, that's good. Believe me I was more than a little pissed when I found out about the "no hosts are resolving" issue. The glibc man pages indicate that with the configuration tokens that are default, an error from any nss module should cause it to skip using that module, which turns out not to be the case. An error from a module will cause it to skip that one, but an error of the module simply not being there (as with the case when you yank out the mDNS modules) just makes it stop going through the list of things to use to resolve a name. Yuck.

The good news is that there's going to be a bunch of reworking of the installer before 2.22 that will maybe let us do away with a number of problems(*), including going a different route (providing nothing devastating shows up) than using `upgradepkg`(**) that will hopefully get us uninstall script support without breaking backwards compatibility.

* - including but not limited to, accumulation of obscene amounts of gconf data over time, stale help entries in the rarian database, being able to in theory undo any configuration changes like nsswitch.conf, and lastly, the thing will hopefully understand that some packages have fallbacks in core Slackware that should be reinstalled after replacements have been removed. Don't ask me when or where to get this--believe me I'll make it known once I've gotten it to run through once. (Pretty much all that's done right now is about half the configuration dialogs and some flowcharting of internal operation.)

** - upgradepkg is hideously slow because it installs the new package, then removes the old package, then installs the new package a second time.