Installing gnome on slackware
 

How to install gnome on slackware?
I did some research but still no clue...

Take a look at Dropline Gnome.

I haven't used it recently, but, the last time I did four or five years ago, it worked nicely. I haven't tested it recently.

Willy is maintaining the MATE desktop for Slackware. MATE runs nicely on Slackware.

https://github.com/mateslackbuilds/msb

It's like putting these Attachment 22259 on a Ferrari! :p IMO

MATE is a breeze to install on Slackware- thanks to Willy!

Or cinnamon if you prefer GNOME Shell fork: https://cinnamonslackbuilds.github.io/ and https://github.com/CinnamonSlackBuilds/csb

If you want dropline gnome for Slackware64-14.2 just do the following:

Download all the packages here: http://www.droplinegnome.org/files/3.20/testing/x86-64
Remove the old packages, there are plenty of them, as I need to clean up that dir and get rid of older versions of the same package.
Then as root, cd into the dir where you have your packages you downloaded and issue:

# upgradepkg --install-new *.txz

This should give you a working gnome 3.20 desktop, which is very nice and stable as of some time ago already. This is what should
shortly become a released 3.20 dropline gnome.

If you have any problems just let me know.

Rgds
Saxa

Hello Saxa,

I tried Dropline Gnome 3.20 on top of a fresh slackware64 14.2 install.
Unfortunately, I have 2 main issues that I know how to fix.

- The first one is related to gdm.
When I start gdm, I don't get the the greeter UI to choose the user I get the standard gnome desktop as if I was connecting with a regular account.
After putting gdm in debug mode I found out that gdm is searching for the file "org.gnome.Shell.desktop". But this file is named "gnome-shell.desktop" in the gdm package. So renaming this "/usr/share/gdm/greeter/applications/gnome-shell.desktop" to "/usr/share/gdm/greeter/applications/org.gnome.Shell.desktop" fixed the first part of the issue. Now when I start gdm I got the greeter UI.
But unfortunately, the list of users is empty and when i click on the menus on the top section, the screen gets blurred :-(

- Second one maybe related to Dbus.
I succeed to start a gnome session using startx as my user and I get the usual gnome desktop. It seems to work OK, except for some applications like Terminal.
When i try to launch it from an xterm I got the below error :
Any idea of how I can fix those issues ?

I have a very fresh full install of slackware64 14.2. I just removed the KDE stuff, and installed nvidia driver instead of nouveau.

Thanks for your help, and all the good work you do on dropline gnome ! I've using it for years

Regards,
--
Olivier

Thanks for the first solution, I will see if I can put out a new gdm package with your fix in the next days ! Then will test it a bit and if I see whats wrong I will report you.

Have you set up UTF in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh ?

Kde should not need to be uninstalled, it should not matter, I had the dlg installed on my laptop for work and i always start with startx and it works ok no big issues , except the one of gdm and some other programs....
On my dev machine which is broken right now I had the gnome working with the nouveau driver, but in the past with nvidia proprietary driver was working even better. I have no idea here what to say.

You are very welcome and many thanks for put on some effort on gdm and testing it !

Excellent ! Switching to UTF locale fixed the issue with gnome terminal ! I will have never thought that the locale could generate this kind of error. By the way, I changed the locale in the xinitrc.gnome script, because I prefer to keep my locale to C (I know I'm kind of old school ;-))
As the default locale in Slackware is en_US, maybe it should be set up somewhere by the installer or a package. But I don't really know where it'll be the best.

I will try to dig further for the gdm issue too, but i'm not so sure I'll be able too.

Thanks
--
Olivier

Ok great to hear you got it working. I have forget to advise in some way that this is a must to run gnome3 have locale set to UTF-8.

Anyway I am a bit experimenting with GDM, and I see it starts ok with the solution you posted, but now I need to make it show the users and other stuff.

Also the black screen is beacuse it needs to install a default theme I think. Need to dig a bit into this. Thakns !!!

Rgds
Saxa

Hello Saxa,

I did not have time to work on gdm yet, but I made some progress in testing dropline further.

I found that gnome-music is not working, because of a missing python3 module : "gi"
After digging a little bit, I found that this module is brought by the standard slackware package "pygobject3-3.18.2-x86_64-1" but only for python2.7.

At the end because of dependencies I have installed the following packages (from slackbuilds.org) to make gnome-music working :
- https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...thon/py3cairo/
- https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...ject3-python3/
- https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...thon-requests/

I also had a problem with the cantarell fonts (cantarell-fonts-0.0.25-noarch-1dl), I needed to add a file "/etc/fonts/conf.d/31-cantarell.conf" with the below content to be able to see this font.

I also need to investigate a weird problem with the alert sound. When I go in the control panel to choose the alert sound everything is working fine and Iḿ able to hear the sound. But when I open/close/reduce a windows the sound does not play.

Apart from that, so far so good ! everything is working fine :-D.

--
Olivier

Hi Oliver, many thanks for all those reports. I know that python3 is missing a lot of stuff, there is some gnome stuff which is switching completely to python3 like gnome-music, orca, and some other packages too. The problem is that I need to recompile pygobject3 and make a kind of package that will add the python3 stuff to the correct place and all this takes a time to prepare it well and so on.

So I will see if today I can get some time to make the gdm and other updates whihc I have on my todo list. Also will try to build the i686 release up to the end and finaly release Dropline gnome 3.20.

As for the other issues, just report it here or on the dropline-gnome-devel miling list on sf.net .

PS: What is requireing this python-request package ??