Hello to all, thanks to Eugen we have been able to release the first Alpha release of the dropline GNOME 3.10 desktop for Slackware 14.1.

More info on how to get it and install it is here:
www.droplinegnome.org

This is an important release for us as its the first one to use the PackageKit tool , which have also support now , again thanks to Eugen, for Slackware packages.

The install is easy, of course it is not fine tuned yet, but we will improve it step by step.

# installpkg PackageKit
# pkcon refresh force (this refreshes the repo)
# pkcon install dropline (this command downloads and installs the dropline packages)

# vi /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
and uncomment export LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8 and comment out the export LOCALE=en_US

Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year 2014 !

Im looking forward for this, gonna give a try in a VM.

Edit: Its been hours, the downloading packages process is at 36%, is that normal?, i mean what is the avg download speed?

I think it took me less than hours but I didn't measure the time but I will do it and compare with the old installer. It downloads only till 50%, in the second stage the packages will be installed. I will look in PackageKit again, if I can display separate progress bars for downloading and installing.

And maybe you need to install other video drivers. GDM won't start without 3D acceleration; for example I needed to install nvidia drivers, it didn't work with nouveau drivers.

The whole gnome is about 600mb, about 300 packages.

Well, its been like an hour by now still at 36%, it would be really nice to see each package progress and download speed, so i know is still working. or something else happened.
Anyway good work everybody, gonna leave the process there, see what happens.

You can see downloaded package in /var/cache/PackageKit/downloads.

I doubt that PackageKit supports output for each packages but it would be a nice feature - I agree - it is how slackpkg works. Maybe I will discuss it with the PK team later.

Maybe one of the big packages is being downloaded, for example gnome-getting-started-docs is 82M. Download process isn't very precise now but it was very fast to implement, it will be enhanced in the near future.

And thanks for testing. I'm already using the desktop for weeks on my working pc (I started before alpha), it is pretty stable, though there are some problems. I already posted some bugs on bugs.droplinegnome.org.

If i stop the process and start again, would skip the already downloaded packages? can i stop the process at all?

Yes but it could be dangerous because one package won't be completely downloaded and will be also skipped. It is another thing I have to implement: check if downloaded package is corrupted or not.

If you want stop, you have to kill the daemon: killall packagekitd. Just ctrl-c won't help. In the bug tracker that Sasa and I mentioned before you can also leave bug reports and feature requests for the PK backend, you can see there what I plan to do.

well i killed the process, deleted all files in the downloads folder, and started the installer again, gonna leave it there all night and report status later.

EDIT: another thing, if the pxz files have like a number before the name, i can now the order of download, so i can remove the last one and start again if something happens. just a suggestion.

I got also an idea. The files should be just downloaded into a temporary folder and then be written to /var/cache/PackageKit/downloads. Or just use a "temporary name" as you say and after the downloading rename it to the real package name. I don't know why I didn't do it from the beginning, I just wanted to reduce I/O operations to the drive.

Well i would be glad to help in anything, being a software developer myself. But i dont really know the "method" that you guys are using to develop the installer, so im just gonna test it and report bugs whenever i can.

PackageKit is a universal package manager for different linux distributions (or an interface between the system package management and front-end tools, like pkcon, gnome-packagekit or Apper for kde), so to allow the communication between the distribution and PK there are so called backends, that send information to the PK and do distribution related job. I'm developing such backend for slackware. There was already one, slapt-get, but it isn't maintained anymore and will be removed from the next PK version. So it isn't just installer but can work also with other repositories. I will improve it a bit more and make it available for the slackware community, not only for our dropline gnome.
If you have an interest, you can find the code in git: https://gitorious.org/packagekit/packagekit/. Slackware related code is in backends/katja ("Katja" is the name of the backend). The backend is written in C (GObject).
Of course I appreciate any help.

@cisneros, maybe there were also some troubles with dreamhost.com since this is our testing release we host it only on dreamhost.com after we release the stable version we will put it on the sf.net as there is a better mirroring system across the world.

Just as a note, to pull off updates from the server which we do you have to issue the following commands:

# pkcon refresh force <- refresh the repo
# pkcon get-updates <- show the updates
# pkcon install dropline <- install the updates

Just as a note.

Report any problems.

Hi,

I really want to test new Dropline for Slackware. But it's seem fail to start X with blinking small terminal box. Not really clear what happened as I only can see like "cannot load ??--x-font-xxx".

Thus, I want to manage all things from beginning by entering command:
- pkcon refresh force
- pkcon get-updates
- pkcon install dropline

It's likely download all PKGs from beginning even same PKG with same version.
Every times we hit pkcon refresh or pkcon install, it's remove all PKGs in cache/PackageKit/downloads;

Is there some way to prevent download PKGs that already exists?
I still have backup of dropline PKGs in another folder. That's because of my connection is limited, base on mobile data.

Thank you for any help