third party Gnome 2.x
 

Hi guys, i've been trying to make a decision on which desktop environment to use and i've been using a few over the past week to try to decide which one. I liked gnome 2.x previously but have been really turned off it since it's not supported by Slack and 2.x is no longer even supported by gnome. I tried xfce, since it's gtk2 app as well and i really wanted to like it, i did; but there is just some things that make me wish i was using gnome. Anyways, i was wondering which third party gnome would be best suited for me. I'm using Slackware 13.37 and i want gnome 2.x, not 3.
Pat's old documentation recommended,
http://gsb.sf.net
http://gware.sf.net
and i checked out them sights, but the last updates seemed to have been years ago.

Gnome slackbuild is the best last I heard. Gnomeslackbuild.org

Also, fluxbox, give it a try :p

I used GSB for a while with Slackware 13.1. I must say it works fine, and it's easy to install, but the bloody thing is over 100 packages! I stopped using GNOME 2.x for the same reasons you did. GSB site is http://gnomeslackbuild.org/ as trademark91 points out.

Now in 13.37 I've settled (for now) with a combination of Xfce, compiz and cairo-dock. Who knows what I'll be running next year...

The gnomeslackbuild site says it is only for slackware 13.1 and it is gnome 2.30. Is there no gnome 2.32 for slackware 13.37 64bit?

As far as I know, there's not. GSB stopped at 2.32 in October 2010, at the time -current, that is, before Slackware 13.37.

GSB 2.30 worked for me in 13.1, GSB 2.32 didn't, so I went back to GSB 2.30 with Slackware 13.1. Nowadays they're only building and packaging GNOME 3.

I'm not using it anymore.

i'm using the 32bit Slackware by the way, (forgot to mention). I've seen http://gnomeslackbuild.org/ before, when i searching for the answer. Like george-lappies says, the websight says it's for Slackware 13.1. Would that Slackbuild work for 13.37?

I'm using Slackware 13.37 64bit with xfce but I installed a number of gnome 2 packages from gsb and although they are officially for 13.1 they seem to run fine on 13.37, slapt-get is your friend as it will sort out dependencies and you can use the --simulate switch to check what would be installed before you actually install anything.
I think the gnome 3 progreammers have just lost the plot and I can't stand KDE so this hybrid seems to work for me ( can't do without nautilus, gedit and a couple of other gnome apps! )

Which are those things? Maybe someone can offer alternatives.
edit: BTW XFCE 4.8 Robby has packages for here is a big improvement over the 4.6 version.

PS. While the GNOME shell is for me a big improvement over 2.x, i dont think i'll ever touch it again for reasons like this one

I also used to use GSB on 13.1, but since Gnome 3 is so dire (in my opinion), and since GSB only seems to have the manpower to track the latest Gnome on the latest Slackware, I switched to Robby's Xfce 4.8 build after upgrading to 13.37 and haven't looked back. Although Xfce's not as lightweight as it once was (it has many of the same core dependencies as Gnome 2 now), it's still a brilliant desktop environment.

edit: just found this project that may be of some use if you're trying to run Gnome 2.32 on 13.37: http://slackbot.sourceforge.net

I ended up looking into GSB a little more, and it seems you need Slapt-get to get it.

I tried fluxbox yesterday and i don't think it's for me. thanks though for the suggestion, it was good because i'd never tried it before and i was able to experiment with the "xwmconfig" command.

Thanks, i might use that if i don't like xfce 4.8

Hey, i wasn't aware of this new version. I would really prefer to use a different desktop to gnome, and this looks nice.
I am still new to Slackware and am still trying to learn how to configure my network properly. It's made hard when i've always relied on nm-applet in the past, lol. Anyways, i checked out your link, and i haven't installed any packages before, and was wondering, what one would do with the contents of that link lol.

slackpkg install wicd

Should give you something similar to mm-applet. Run wicd-client in a desktop environment/window manager for best results.

You could install the packages present in the packages/ directory. The extra/ directory in there contains networkmanager but i dont recommend its use to anyone so ill avoid doing so here as well. Better try wicd from the extra/ Slackware directory on the dvd as suggested above, if that fills your needs.

thanks, i've heard good things about wicd, but i wasn't aware it was on the dvd. I use mobile broadband that i've only ever got to work on nm-applet, even kde has trouble with it. how well does wicd support mobile broadband?
is there any reason for that?

It doesn't - it was originally planned for 2.0 but Pat mentioned in another LQ thread that the wicd developers have stopped maintaining it (I still don't know whether this is actually true - there was a ten-month hiatus between 1.7.0 and 1.7.1b2 so it's possible that they're still working on it, unless Pat knows something we don't :))

In my experience it's down to personal preference - you get people who like NM and people who are dead set against it. There are some good reasons for not using it: it has a lot of dependencies that you may not want to install, if you have a desktop computer with a permanent Internet connection it's overkill (just use /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf), and it's a nightmare to debug when things go wrong. On the other hand, it's good for laptops because it will do its best to keep an Internet connection at all times (via Ethernet, WLAN or 3G with ModemManager) so you don't have to reconfigure interfaces or bring them up and down. I personally use NM on my laptop and rc.inet1.conf on my desktop and all of my servers.

Im not a fan of Red Hat's technologies on the desktop area. Networkmanager is too complex and its only a desktop connection manager. It was written from up to the ground, giving too much focus on the gui and then developing a command line client which was still unfinished last i checked some months ago. It needs GNOME to fully operate, even KDE has trouble implementing it to their own desktop. Maybe they would be better off focusing on connman instead.
On the other hand, since connman is just a daemon today, since the DE's are developing clients only for networkmanager it can be considered the only solution if you need stuff like 3G. Even then for me it would be the last resort, especially when using a distribution like Slackware which doesnt include it by default.