Heh. A Windows convert will feel right at home...
Anyway, consider Fluxbox or Xfce to work well. I have a 600 MHz, 32 MB RAM box. With Fluxbox, it works very well; with the others, it... doesn't. I am playing with Wmii at the moment. It is fun...

And if you happened to have another drive, put your swap on it for better performance. Fluxbox will really run well, and there's a thread here with some screenshots. You can dress it up all nice. This box has an AMD 64-bit 2 Ghz CPU, 1 Ghz dual channel 400 MHz RAM, and I still prefer Fluxbox. KDE is just such a resource hog, and resets things in your system without you knowing it. It reminds me of running Windows, where the more you try to do, the more it bogs down your system.

Well, the main reason I didn't give up on slackware is the same reason I want to see if I can get KDE to run on this laptop. I could make a huge swap. But with the slow CD-ROM I don't want to sit through another install.

XFCE is a dream, and I really don't need a whole damn office suite on the run. Though, can anyone explain in short how programs work between the different environments? If I were to unpack open office, can I just run it in any environment, or would there be a minimum environment requirement? I realize I need to read up on all this package garbage, but if someone could give me a snippet I'd appreciate it.

A quick step by step that MIGHT work.

1) Try starting x-windows by typing

X all by itself on the command line.

If you get the bare X desktop with mouse pointer, try moving the mouse pointer around. You can exit by pressing CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.

2) If 1) doesn't;t work you have to configure x-org and the slackware book will help you with that

3) If 1) worked you can use the wmconfig command to select XFCE as your default desktop and you should be good to go.

Ooops,

I didn't notice that last two pages. Did you use the Slackware scripts to add the user? I have a lot of authourity problems if I add a user by hand in Slack unless I am scrupulous in following the direction. The recommmended scripts works fine. Maybe you should delete you user and add them with the script?

They should work in every environment. Though you need to have KDE-libs installed to run KOffice for example. You don't have to install all KDE packages to work with it, but if you have it shouldn't hurt
Openoffice.org doesn't require a special DE or window manager, I can work with it in KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, IceWM, Xfce ... I guess it requires again some libraries, but these are met with a full Slackware install.

I just ended up with a clean install and everything works. Thanks though.

So, the reason that KDE wallet appears in XFCE but kword does is because ... ?

I'm guessing that each environment fetches the programs from the same place. So I don't know why I can't run the koffice programs in xfce, unless they are written into KDE itself.

yup ... kind of. If you can run something on KDE, you can run it on XFCE, or WindowMaker, or any other window manager you got, it only depends on finding the proper libraries.

I don't use Koffice since OpenOffice.org 2.0 came out, though it might be too heavy for your specs

Some kde progs need kdeinit to run first. I run the korganizer alarm demon and it doesnt work properly without starting kdeinit beforehand

I didn't know that one ... well I can't ever stop learning, can I?

nice sig, btw

I got it here http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~tony/cookies

But it sums up my first vi experience

Well, that sounds like a sequel! The earlier versions are less intensive?

I think the biggest change from OO 1.x to OO 2.0 is the use of the open document format. It's well worth getting if it works on your system since it's the way things are heading (bye bye ms )