I've installed Dropline Gnome about a week ago and liked it very much, until today when everything just screwed up. I rebooted my system (didn't change any configuration setting, or anything else) and suddenly the mouse pointer was moving very slowly. I tried to change that using the graphical configuration tool for mouse, but it just won't change, I mean, I move the slider, but it stays slow, and then when I open that tool again, it's back to the slowest level. Also I noticed that programs that are currently open don't have entries in the taskbar as they usually have. And overall, the whole setup seems to be just messed up.

Has anyone else experienced this with Dropline? Does anyone have any idea why it happened and how to fix it? Can I somehow "reset" all setting to the default or something?

Help, please... I'd hate to have to drop Dropline and go back to cumbersome KDE.

i tried dropline early enough in my install
that a format and reinstall wasn't too bad
to rid myself of it.

dropline makes changes to the system, so even
if you do switch to a different de/wm you will
still experience the same problems.

iirc, there are procedures to remove it short
of wiping the drive.

Drop to runlevel 3 (i.e., the text console) and eliminate the possibility of X being at fault by taking a look at how the mouse behaves for gpm.

What you're describing basically isn't supposed to be possible (i.e., system changes occuring without administrator activity) short of hardware failure.

You might also want to refresh your memory about what you didn't install on your system with the following command (the output of which should be pasted here):

I looked at some of the other posts you have made on these forums and I think if you
go look at them yourself, the answer to your question should come right out and bite
ya. Contrary to popular belief from Pat V's lemmings, Dlg I doubt mucked your system.

My mouse is working properly in KDE, and with runlevel 3 too.

@Stik
I looked at some of your posts too. Your activity on these forums is basically, telling people who are dissatisfied with Dropline that they are idiots...? That's really very nice. Not to mention helpful and constructive.

I tried Dropline, i read and understood that it would change some packages, which is fair enough.

what it didnt say was that it would screw up menus in kde (this was on a fresh install) that was quite annoying as it was on a shared pc, and other users would use kde.

I quite like Freerock, but i think i will stick with fluxbox, well worth spending the time configuring.

Does this occur under a new user?

Actually, under different users it's even worse. There's no taskbar or panel, when system loads all I get is desktop with icons. And as for mouse cursor, it moves faster that the default.

I think I'll just give up on it. I was testing dropline and planing to use it with Slack 11, but with these kind of unpleasant surprises... I don't think so.

It's your PC, you can do whatever you wish. Just please be aware that your problem is extremely isolated, and to my knowledge, has never happened to anybody but you.

I'm sorry to hear about your issues. I've had the opposite experience with Dropline 2.14.3, I find it rock-steady, totally stable on Slackware 10.2, running the 2.6.13 kernel. I think it is possible that another problem has happened that may be the result of your difficulty. I will be downloading Dropline 2.16.0 for Slackware 11.
A clean install may solve your issues. Good luck.

Dropline is not the only GNOME distribution for Slackware and KDE is not the only other choice besides GNOME.

I don't run GNOME but one of the main dropline guys checks in on this forum and from what I've seen his support is excellent and he puts up with a lot of crap he shouldn't have to. If you like Dropline then either contact them on their site (maybe they have a forum also) or ping him here on linuxquestions and give them a chance to get you straightened out before jumping ship. If you don't like GNOME, and you don't want KDE, there are a lot of really nice window managers that are light and easy to use.

xfce is really nice and has a more user friendly configuration if you don't have much experience tweaking things in Linux. If you like something very light and don't mind editing config files (and it's really easy after a few hours of looking things over) then look at fluxbox and blackbox/openbox. If you have experience on Linux you can set up flux/black/openbox in about 15 minutes.

The other thing you could try is to sign on as root and run xorgsetup (if you haven't done much customization of xorg.conf). This usually does a pretty good job.

I agree that you might want to head over to http://www.droplinegnome.net/ and ask about it on their forums. It sounds to me like it might not necessarily be a DLG caused problem. Even if it isn't, their developers and community are awesome and will take the time to help you troubleshoot even a simple Slackware problem (gave me pointers on UDEV when I was a newbie there). They'll also know better than anyone if what happened could have been caused by DLG, and why.

DLG has always been amazingly stable and polished for me. I hope you can nail down this issue and figure out what happened before moving on from it, it really is a great GNOME system.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I know about other DEs and WMs, I've tried a lot of them, but GNOME was what I liked most. That's why I was so disappointed when it crashed. But I will give it another try.

This is because that version of KDE was broken and didn't actually adhere to the FreeDesktop.org spec they were supposed to be adhering to. This has always been KDE's screwup, not GNOME's or Dropline's (or FRG's or GWare's).

It sounds like your gconf cache has become corrupted beyond belief somehow. Unfortunately, things like this are going to happen to people now and again until Slackware's packager gets support for uninstallation scripts.