A full install of drop-line gnome will get you closer to RH or Drake..... Just a suggestion.....

Jon

drop-line? explain more please. How do I do that?

Slackware, im my experience, has got to be the best, cleanest most efficient distro, but from what I hear you saying I think your best bet is to try madrake. It seems that you really want your setup to work for you with the most bells and whistles, but with slackware you really have to work to get the best configured system. In the end I think it depends on your personality, if you want a great package from the get-go its another distro- but other people find great satisfaction by co-creating a system that is tailered for their needs, their styles and their philosophy.
good luck & have fun

yeah, dropline comes with a lot of apps and applets.

Visit http://www.dropline.net/gnome

I would type the page here for you to read, but no use re-inventing the wheel, right? So visit the link above, do some reading and if you decide to try it, download it and follow the instructions. The install is pretty easy, but it does download a lot.

and jong is right, dropline may get you closer to what RH or Mandrake.

oh, and unfortunately you are prolly going to have to do some research, so reach out and touch google. You are the only one that knows what you want and saying "all the applets that go with it" doesn't convey to us what you want. As I said, Slack doesn't come with a lot of gui out of the box. You have to decide what gui you want and go find it. Patrick gave you the foundation, you got to build the rest.


Netizen

I had Redhat for a while and had to download stuff... I can do it but it was hard because of all the dependcenies.... I can work from the command line (perfer on most things) but still want the apps.
"all the applets that go with it" - I should be more specific... I mean the panel applets.. I am sure they come with a base install of gnome.

The dropline look appealing.... I just may do it.

yeah, you may like it. And its easy, other than the fact time of downloading all the stuff. But I think you will end up with mostl of what you want.

as far as denpendcies, I use slapt-get. It will download and install any dependencies you need when you install a program. You might check it out too.

http://www.linuxpackages.net/pkg_details.php?id=1546

Netizen

You mean no pulling hair out because of dependencies!!! Now that sounds appealing!
Ok ok.... It is formatting now...
The dropline sounds good. I was having way too many problems with Drake anyway.

Instead of slapt-get you can use swaret www.swaret.org. It's up to you

Yea, I think you'll like dropline on slack. Install "everything"... It will take you forever and a day on a dial up, but will be worth it. Networking is top-notch on Slack for DSL, Cable or Dial-up... It's still going to be "stripped down" compared to what your used to. Slackware is ussually what you move to when SuSE, RH and Drake start to bore you to tears...... Slackware is by far the best distro I've tried yet. It requires you to do LOTS of footwork to get everything setup and looking the way you want. For me, and the majority of Linux enthusiasts, that's why we use Linux (atleast it's why I use it). If I wanted a pre-made, pretty, fully functional OS with all the bells and whistles and the lag time and crashes that come with it, I would use Windows or at the very least one of the top 3 mainstream distros...... It is ENORMOUSLY satisfying to tweak Slackware out by hand..... If your not quite ready for that, you might want to wait a little bit..... Fedora isn't bad. I didn't have any probs with it. Alot of people hate it, but it ran really good for me. It was still the same bloated RH tho...... Up to you. If you have any problems with Slack, everyone here will help you. And yea, I had nothing but problems with Mandrake. I absolutely can not stand that distro.......

Jon

slackware's hardness is overly distorted. It's really not that hard. Know why? Cause everything is where it's supposed to be! Sure you have to maybe edit a few config files, but guess what? They aren't hidden. They aren't in any place you would never look. If samba documentation says it's config file is in /etc/samba/smb.conf, then guess what, that's where slackware puts it. Unlike redhat where if your gui tools fail your pretty much going to be spending forever looking for that config file that you need. Hell in redhat even when you edit a config file it sometimes doesn't do anything because there's another config file that you have to edit because it's like a "protect the user from themselves" scheme. Where you don't edit the main file, you edit a secondary config file. Personally I don't need to be protected, I have plenty of live cd's, bbc, damnsmall linux, morphix. That if I do screw something up, boot live cd, chroot to hd and fix it. But hey, slackware isn't for everyone.

ok question... I have Slack install... I installed everything and most of the stuff is not showing up in the Gnome menu. Also the Nic is not working.... I do ifconfig eth0 and it is just loopback. ifconfig eth0 up .... nothing. I am not the best linux user but I need this to work. It does not even come with Openoffice....? What should I do?

Try netconfig as root to set up your NIC. I downloaded OO.o and it installed just fine.

Easiest way to set up networking: at the root console prompt do netconfig

Regarding Gnome, follow the suggestions of the earlier posts and install Dropline Gnome; the package you want is dropline-installer-2.4.2-i686-1dl.tgz, which you should have downloaded from the Dropline web site.

Other Slackware packages can be found at http://linuxpackages.net (the Slackware equivalent to http://rpmfind.net or http://www.apt-get.org).

As the earlier posts have indicated, be prepared to do LOTS of reading if you want to use Slackware. Check my .sig for some free, online reference material. Also, there is the Slack Book at http://www.slackware.com, although it is not as comprehensive as the RUTE Textbook.