dropline GNOME 3.38 - testing
 

Heya, I wont write much here, but today gnome 3.38 was released and we have ready some testing packages for Slackware64-current.

See the instructions on the droplinegnome.org web site on how to get it installed
and post the issues here in this thread.

Basically this is the direct upgrade from what was 3.36 and therefore you need
to install firstly 3.36 packages and then upgrade them to 3.38.

There are still some missing pieces but in case we will get it done step by step.

Enjoy and dont forget to report back.

Rgds
Saxa

Hey Saxa, thanks for the hard work
is it possible to test it directly with 3.38 instead of going with 3.36 first?

Hi Willy, sure, you can but you need to find out what is not included in the 3.38 packages and you need it from the 3.36 repo.
By going further in time we will have updates of the base stuff and therefore those will go into the 3.38 repo, also I am waiting
a bit Slackware current to get all the latest stuff. But yes, surely you can, it is juste easier to install first 3.36 and then
upgrade with the 3.38 packages.

Rgds
Saxa

i usually test it using a clean installation and start by using the build order for 3.38. See what's missing and adding it to the build order

Sure, you can use that, the compile-order file in DBS should be ok. Although since I had DLG 3.36 running when I was building the
packages for 3.38 it could be that I missed something.

Anyway, the packages needed should be all listed in the compile-order, but be careful as some of the stuff is still
missing in Slackware and some packages were and will be renamed too, example is libhandy which have to be installed
in both versions 0.0.13 and 1.0.0. So in 3.36 repo you have libhandy named as libhandy for 0.0.13 version but in
3.38 it is named libhandy0 to be able to install both. Same will be with tracker, which I have still to rename the
old one to tracker2 as it seems it can be installed in paralel with tracker3.

I hope that we get the missing pieces of 3.38 in slackware shortly, for now the only package really needed which I had
to upgrade from Slackware current was the gsettings-desktop-schemas. dconf, glib, at-spi-* can all stay the ones shipped
with current.

Rgds
Saxa

BTW Willy would be good to hear back from you how the thingy work on a super clean install as my system surely is not the cleanest one and some packages could happen that picked up some strange deps.... who knows :D

why not try it on virtual machines?

I have no time to get a virtual machine up , since I am doing it during my job and working hours.

I tested on a clean VM with latest -current update and it failed to logged in to desktop without any helpful message
it just said crashed with one button to logout

screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/GXxKstt

after waiting, i got a message, no system tray detected

The message about a system tray is bogus because gnome-3 doesn't have a system tray, so I think you can ignore that. I notice that the list of files for dropline's gnome-3.36/3.38 does not include elogind. Do you have that installed? If not you will certainly get this kind of failure. Also, applying ldd to /usr/libexec/gnome-session-binary may tell you if there are any missing dependencies needed to start a gnome session. (I have gnome-3.38 working but I don't use dropline gnome.)

Yes Willy, Chris is right, ignore the system tray message. If you want to make it go you can add an system tray extension to gnome3.
About what is missing to make it run, would be good to have a session started with startx logged into a file and check whats on,
I am not sure if my packages work with wayland as I have not been able to run it, but Chris has got it.

Try startx > mylog.txt 2>&1

+==============================================================================
| Upgrading gnome-desktop-3.36.6-x86_64-1dl package using ./gnome-desktop-3.38.0-x86_64-1dl.txz
+==============================================================================
Pre-installing package gnome-desktop-3.38.0-x86_64-1dl...
/bin/bash: line 7: syntax error near unexpected token `fi'
/bin/bash: line 7: `fi'
Removing package: gnome-desktop-3.36.6-x86_64-1dl-upgraded-2020-09-20,18:05:35
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/AUTHORS
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/COPYING
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/COPYING-DOCS
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/COPYING.LIB
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/ChangeLog
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/ChangeLog-20020212
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/ChangeLog.pre-git
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/HACKING
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/NEWS
--> Deleting /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/README
--> Deleting /usr/lib64/libgnome-desktop-3.so.19.0.6
--> Deleting empty directory /usr/doc/gnome-desktop-3.36.6/
Verifying package gnome-desktop-3.38.0-x86_64-1dl.txz.
Installing package gnome-desktop-3.38.0-x86_64-1dl.txz:

This is coming out from the wrongly generated doinst.sh file most probably, I will check whats on thanks.

it seems chrisVV is correct about missing elogind in gnome-shell and gnome-initial-setup

Oh of course, this is a requirement, there is no way to get it run without. I though you maybe left out gsettings-desktop-schemas as it is already in slackware, but the slackware one is too old.

What your webpage says is that users must:

So I think you need either to add an elogind package to your packages repository (the best approach), or to tell users to make a package up themselves, possibly by providing a Slackbuild.

In the previous post for dlg 3.36 is written that the elogind packages are required for installing 3.36 and that they are in the unsupported dir in the repo. I am not sure if I make that clear enough.

Since this is all testing stuff the instruction can be in some way not complete, as I suppose that people who mess with that things are able to get it up.

Also in the 3.38 post is written to install firstly 3.36 and then do the upgrade with the packages from the 3.38 repo. But Willy here said that he will try to go with the compile-order , so since elogind is not in the compile-order probably he has missed it.

I have not put the elogind and other stuff in the compile-order because I in some way expect it to be added into current.

Actually looking at the compile-order I see it in but its commented out.

All that will be polished and cleaned up before the final release in any case.

No, i followed your instructions on the web page.
I installed all 3.36 packages and use upgradepkg --install-new --reinstall on 3.38 to make sure i install all new packages in 3.38 and upgrade the rest

Ok, if you followed the instructions, then you should end up with the elogind installed. It is in the unsupported directory.
I put it in that directory because it is not a build with DBS.
Anyway, as said this is all testing stuff, and if you have an idea of how to make things more clear let me know. I can write a
README file or anything to make that clear.

I just understood you that you will not install according to the web page instructions and go the compile order way one by one.

Anyway, I hope you got it running and that all works as expected.

Please be aware that the is quite some programs broken up to now, as there was a glib2 upgrade in the middle and still we need to
get some other stuff like at-spi2-* , pygobject, dconf, gobject-introspection and some other packages into slackware current.

I also do not want to release anything until we have a stable slackware base. It would just be asking for such kind of troubles.

Ohh i didn't notice the unofficial directory
that's why it failed on my setup. Perhaps make a note on that in the web page

Hi Willy, it is there, but its on the post for 3.36 but I will make sure that this becomes clearer.

i can confirm that installing packages from unofficial does fix the issue i had before

Perfect Willy, many thanks. I am glad to hear all works for you. If you want to correct my writing on how to install it please do so, so I can put the correct instructions to the web site.

probably make a change on 3.36 part
make sure to install all packages in 3.36 directory including packages in the unofficial directory

Ok, I thought that this post here http://www.droplinegnome.org/#dropli...6-in-the-works
made it clear enough, but maybe I have to be more specific.

Probably the best way is to release an installer.

no, i mean in the 3.38 post since i think people will read that instead of the old 3.36

Sure, but in the 3.38 post is written to install first 3.36 and then upgrade.

Ok, we have a video and a script, thanks to SlackernetUK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rnQfjwOZds

Scripts
https://github.com/slackernetuk/slack-desk

What the 3.38 webpage actually says is "... 2. Download the packages for dropline GNOME 3.36 from here. 3. Install all those packages you downloaded. ..."

I think all you need to do to resolve this is to change the text to "... 2. Download the packages for dropline GNOME 3.36 from here, including the packages in the 'unofficial' directory. 3. Install all those packages you downloaded. ..."

In the video I made, I've removed ConsoleKit2. Is that really necessary? If yes, I will update my script?

Actually I am not sure it is necessary to remove it. In my machines I have both installed elogind and CK2.
The questions comes, does your setup work by starting gnome-session in wayland ?

rc.M of slackware64-current has this in it:
So if rc.elogind is present and executable then rc.consolekit will not execute, so you shouldn't need to remove it.

No, I just was wondering because when I wanna install Alien's ktown as a example, I have to remove ConsoleKit2 before I install ktown.

As Chris said, it should not be needed to uninstall ConsoleKit2 package.

Gnome-tweaks
 

Hi There,

I installed Dropline Gnome successfully following the instructions.
One issue I did have though was with gnome-tweaks. It would not run due
to an issue with handy. I had to reinstall library libhandy0-0.0.13-x86_64-1dl.
from the 3.38 folder. After that gnome-tweaks ran fine. So far all good and
enjoying using Gnome on Slackware again.

Regards,

John.

Hi John, thanks for reporting. The thing is that you have to have both libhandy installed. This is why I renamed it to libhandy0 since some other packages require a newer one.

I was unable to get GDM working, the X11 session manager tries to launch GDM in run level 4. I see a bunch of warnings that "-nodaemon" is not a switch to spawn gdm. On Slackware-current, in /etc/rc.d/rc.4, you will notice what I am talking about if you take a look. Booting into run level 4 with -nodaemon removed from rc.4 causes the screen to freeze. This is on Debian stable as the VM host, using KVM, Qemu, and Spice displays, with a fresh Slackware-current guest.

After starting x from run level 3, there are no errors in the console, and the GUI is very responsive. I typically use run level 3 to run "startx".

You may want to set different application defaults. The music player launcher on the application menu refuses to run rhythmbox or audacious. So, you may want to configure the application menu to have shortcuts for different applications too. Launching audacious and rhytmbox do work if ran from the application browser.

Thanks for this project! I like gnome 3 because it integrates so well with the Google Suite applications. When Slackware 15 is released I may run dropline gnome as the gui, we will see. It is very polished with only a few quirks. Maybe you could post a list of bugs/items that need testing once you get all the dependencies transitioned from 3.36 to 3.38?

Hi Mralk3, gdm is not working, right now it is only there as it is needed for gnome-shell to compile. I have not had time to work on it, although I have been able to start gnome-shell --mode=gdm --nested --wayland but its not working. Do you want to make it work ? Go ahead, and give me the patches. Would be very welcome.

For the applications it should be enough to configure them in the gnome-control-center I think, this is something to look at the time of the release.

For the time we have slackware 15 out I think we have also the installer and a way more polished thing. Thanks for testing and reporting, remember at the end this is testing stuff.

I will take a closer look and see what I can figure out to get gdm working. I don't typically use a display manager on Slackware, I run "startx" in init 3 usually.

Yeah, thats also my way of running it. In any case feel free to contribute and make modifications, configurations etc... very welcome any help.

I decided to try out gnome 3.38 since it's been forever since I've run the gnome desktop and wanted to see how it works these days.

I followed your instructions to install 3.36 (and unofficial), and then upgrade to 3.38. I skipped out on elogind, since I have that already installed from alien's ktown. The install went fine and the gnome desktop is working from 'startx'. I also set up a new user for testing so I had a clean profile.

So far I have come across a few issues, some of which I've corrected.

First thing I noticed was my touchpad scrolling was reversed so I tried to change that in the gnome-control-center, only to find no available options for touchpad there. Starting the control center from the terminal showed this error:
I ran the following to see which drivers are being used:
After a little searching I found that you can choose libinput over synaptics by copying over the libinput.conf file:
This gets the touchpad settings working in the gnome-control-center, and I was able to reverse the scrolling to what I prefer. I'm still not happy with the libinput touchpad driver; I wish it had more "inertia" when scrolling like synaptics provides but it's better than a non-functioning control panel. I'll have to learn more about it but thats another topic.

I also got the "systray error" message. This is from HPLIP, which is trying to start to a non-existent systray. HPLIP is started by /etc/xdg/autostart/hplip-systray.desktop If you make changes there then that will probably get overwritten when HPLIP gets upgraded in Slackware. I copied that to my gnome user's local config using:
and then edited the copy, telling it not to start in gnome (the last line):
I haven't seen that error since, although this will only be per user. Would have to make the change upstream to permanently fix it I guess.

Also, gnome-music is not working. Launching it from a terminal shows some error about "grilo" and "grl-tracker3", which looks to be related to python3.8. I'm not sure what that's about yet and it seems more gnome specific.

Other than that everything seems to be working so far, from what I have used. I find it strange not having a "minimize" button for windows, but I guess they want you to adapt to their workflow. Sorry if any of these are not 3.38 specific, I haven't tried gnome for quite a few years now. Thanks for still making it an option

Hi OXBF thanks for the feedback. For libinput thingy I will take a look on that later.
For the systray you cansimply install the systray extension and all should work.

Gnome-music i will check that , since this is a testing build I am updating a lot of stuff meanwhile and
trying to make all work together well. But I think I need just to rebuild it as there were some base
packages renamed, took off etc..

Saxa, I noticed you tried to fix pitivi in 3.38 testing on 10-14-20. It didn't work for me at first. Pitivi couldn't detect matplotlib and numpy. I found an old python-numpy package from alienbob was clobbering your numpy and removing the python-numpy package from alienbob fixed that. I removed you matplotlib and installed matplotlib using "pip3 install matplotlib" and then pitivi worked. "pip3 install matplotlib" pulled in a couple of deps, so that might have something to do with it. I wish I wrote down or remembered what those deps were but I dropped the ball there, sorry.

I am wondering if you will include a .md5 CHECKSUM file as well as the rest of the files needed to run slackpkg+ with out error. I have downloaded all files and used a different program to make the repo readable with slackpkg+ but I am missing the Changelog.txt file with descriptions etc. in it
I understand you are working on the mainline programs but is there a away to make these certain repo files so that slackpkg+ can pick them up during the upgrade process and not barf on the GPG and MD5 errors?

Exactly, I am working on it these days as I want to include it into the release, but it needs the deps for runnig. MAybe in the next days I hae time and finish it.

It is not a problem adding a MD5 checksums file, but the preffered way of installing will be with the dropline-installer. We never had a slackpkg+ compliant repo but if you want to work it out please go ahead and I can try to see what we need to make it go by that distribution channel too.
Changelog file is included in each package, this is a way how our DBS work, so there is no way to get an central changelog as we went away from it years ago.

I'm the maintainer of pitivi on SBo, and when I switched it to a source build, these are the dependencies I found are needed for pitivi on a standard 14.2 install:

Many of the python3 dependencies will likely be provided in -current itself, so some trimming will be required.

I also found the following optional dependencies, but SlackBuilds were not available on SBo at the time (not sure if they've been added since I last checked), but some or all might be provided with Gnome.

Many thanks bassmadrigal, as far as I know lots of that stuff should be already in current. Also for now I think kiwisolver, cycler and dateutil are missing on my machine, not sure, but will take a closer look at it when I have all set up and in place.

Here is acouple of the files that are needed for slackpkg+ repo.

Can you please post this to the DLG devel mailing list on the sf.net ?
I would like to keep that kind of info centralized, and if possible lets discuss it there, rather than here in a forum.
Also if possible please supply the tools scripts on how to generate that. I need help, so go ahead and prepare all the work.

Mailing list is: https://sourceforge.net/p/dropline-gnome/mailman/