trying to get gnome to work
 

Hi all,

Well, i'm running suse 9.3 for a week now..... and i'm very, very new to the world of linux desktop.

i stumbled upon a slight problem here... i cant seem to get gnome on my desktop.... KDE is running and i've installed gnome from the cd's and downloaded the patches (through Y.O.U.), but i cannot see anywhere that i can select gnome as the environment...

so, anyone have a clue?

when you get the login page up, there should be an option to click at the bottom of the page, it's either "session" or "session type". You should be able to get a drop down or something.

regards

John

do you mean the login manager? or at bootup? ... if you mean at bootup, i dont get a login page..... and in login manager, everything is greyed-out.....

found it.... changed the autologin ....
can see it now, session type

many many thnx!!

gnome boots faster aswell......

Well, as you've probably already found it, it's the initial log in page immediately after the boot process has finished. If you just leave it to the system and go straight for username/password, it defaults to whatever you used last time.

As for gnome loading faster, I suspect that more stuff is "fired up" during boot/login process with the way you've got your kde set up.

Personally, I've tried to get my head round gnome 3 or 4 times, I've always ended up going back to KDE as it feels more intuitive to me, but it's "horses for courses" i.e. personal taste etc.

regards

John

well, i've configged some settings for the gnome environment (color, titlebar,etc) and now it seems that kde is going better lol ..... but can you customize kde as good as with gnome? By that i mean using your own (custom) images , like for instance litestep and hoverdesk?

Yup. kde-look is the place to go.

You should remember, the main difference (possibly the reason that the gnome project started ?????) is that kde is based on Qt, whereas gnome is based on Gtk - Qt is proprietary (sort of), while Gtk is fully open source (hence the likes of debian using it as default.

Personally, I prefer kde - even after 3 years or so of meddling with linux, I still prefer my environment to be sort of "windowsesque" (kde is, more than gnome IMO).

Plus if you have the Gtk libs and other stuff installed, but then run/use KDE, you should normally see most, if not all, of the gnome apps in the kde menu.

You say you're using SuSE 9.3 ??? if thats correct, you'll have KDE 3.4 installed, they've started doing some "extra" stuff to make things easier. E.g. if you go to the KDE control centre>Appearance & Themes>Backgrounds (and your online), you see a little button to get extra backgrounds - It gets them from KDE-look (linked above). I haven't found the same for the buttons/icons etc but I suspect that thats "in the pipeline".

Before you try that, have a look in YaST's installing software section and see whats available, listed in the KDE stuff. Names like kdeartwork will have backgrounds, buttons, icons etc etc

Oh, and also look into "superkaramba". If you use that, you can really make your desktop "spangley"! (ha! yes, I like some of the eye-candy as well).

Then dig a bit further. 'Cos if your kit is up to it, you should look into tranparency and shadows (which can be done reasonably easily with kde 3.4). My graphics card will do it, but it's rather elderly and if I enable the translucency/transparency and shadowing my monitor takes forever to do the "screen re-draw" and things (visually) slow down (yup I am looking into which would be the best upgrade graphics card :D ).

It's been my understanding that most, if not all of the stuff you can do with KDE, can also be done with gnome. I've just not found it anywhere as easy to try this with gnome - most of the kde things I've done/tried have seemed quite straight forward.

good luck

regards

John

well, many thnx for the info, didnt know kde was that customizable.... i've used shell replacers before on my windows, so thats why i want to get the most out of my desktop, never liked the look and feel of a windowesque desktop but thats to everyone another cup of tea.... i have installed and updated all of the kde & gnome features/files.... so its time to meddle about hehe....

again thnx for the info and i'm sure i'll be back here in no time lol