Good news for those who don't want to install all of the GNOME desktop just to be able to run programs that use some of the basic GNOME libraries.

I've finally put together a group of packages and sources which should make it possible to run hundreds of such programs. This is not a mini-GNOME, in that it doesn't go so far as giving you functionality for gnome desktop and panel.

Instead I've broken basic GNOME comaptibility into several steps or Milestones:

1. libgnome dependency - some programs may only need these
2. libgnomeprintui dpendency
3. gtkhtml/libgtkhtml dependency

I took the latest 2.4.4 version of AbiWord as an example program since it requires libgnomeprintui. It also has a couple of other dependencies which aren't part of the GNOME-compat, at least yet. I believe there's quite a group of programs which use gtkhtml also, so I went that far as well.

I count around 120 packages on the GNOME website for each version, plus others that GNOME needs but are available elsewhere. I've narrowed that to a range of 5 to 25 packages, depending on what you need.

I've uploaded sources and PkgBuild scripts for the whole
group, plus AbiWord-2.4.4 to:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...E-COMPAT-2.10/

Binary Slackware-type packages are available here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...E-COMPAT-2.10/

These packages should work on any Slackware 10.1 or 10.2 system, maybe even earlier. Note that Slackware 10.2 will only support GNOME-2.10.

But Slackware 'current' users can build and run later versions of GNOME -2.14 at least, I think.
There are a couple of new packages required for 2.12 -can you believe it? Otherwise the order is basically the same.

Here's a link to a sparse HOWTO which helps explain:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...E_COMPAT.HOWTO

That's a document in progress, so be gentle with me...
I'm aware of a couple of things that may be missing from the list, and that some one will find them before I can fix it.

this will be useful for those who are not interested in installing complete gnome, and slackers stick with kde only

nice move, appreciated

This is great for my laptop. Thank you very much.

If you notice, I've included The latest AbiWord-2.4.4 and I'm working right now on getting gnumeric going. Looks like version-1.3.93 will be the latest for use with standard Slackware-10.2.

I've not yet uploade fribidi and libole2 which are needed for AbiWord. And gnumeric needs a later version of libgsf than standard Slackware and may need pxelibs also. Anyway, I'm trying to get gnumeric going, too.

If anyone has some favorite program that needs GNOME stuff and can tyr to compile it with these libs installed. That way we can find out what other packages might be included in the main list or optionally.

I've had this mini-GNOME idea in mind for a long time, since even before GNOME was dropped from Slack. And I may eventually and with help work out a real miniature GNOME desktop, without really populating it with many programs, but most of the libs. I suspect that another 20-40 packages are needed for this level of functionality though. Working out and deciding what's needed is the hard part. Forunately, by using my PkgBuild program the scripts only take about a minute to write! Actually, when I started on this GNOME-COMPAT stuff about 4 weeks ago, I got tired of having to spend 4-5 minutes on each script. So I took a couple of weeks and went back to work on my packaging engine to lighten things even more. I did stop short(barely) of turning PkgBuil into a completely drag-n-drop source-eating monster. I've put that off for a couple of weeks still...

PkgBuild makes it easy for anyone to rebuild these packages from source and install them -with a single command.
Users of current slackare can build even later versions of GNOME, though version 2-12 brings in XML-Simple and icon-naming utilities also. Otherwise the list is the same except for the versions. Soon we'll be to Slack-11.0 and I'll work on GNOME-2.12 or 2.14.

Your help in testing and suggesting is appreciated -I can barely run this stuff on my PII 333MHz machine. If I did much runtime testing I'd probably throw my computer off the balcony after awhile. But I do enjoy working out these things and can maintain packages easily, so pitch in and help out tetsing if you can.

From what I saw, your pkgbuild system is by far better than any other 3rd party package building system (pkgsrc aside but it does not produce slack pkg).
On a side note, it would be nice to have an "official" way of building Slack packages included in the distro, as Slackbuilds are nothing more than shell scripts with no real consistency.
Now you have to convince Pat to migrate its scripts to pkgbuild (just kidding, I know he won't even consider it).
Very good work!

Now I can actually run gnome-games!

I'm kinda considering making an iso of my favorite packages on your site with a some install scripts like the ones on the official slack CD.

What do you mean install scripts? The packages have their doinst.sh file if one was needed.