Hi kikinovak,

You do good work. I've seen your MLED product using 3 desktop environments now, and you make the case that any of them are capable of providing a viable professional desktop experience.

I think people need to get over the idea that the "perfect desktop" uses a single toolkit (Qt or GTK). It would be foolish to exclude a best-in-class app because it used a different toolkit. And as we know, GTK apps can integrate nicely into KDE.

I understand you desire to deviate as little as possible from the official packages of a given Slackware release, but AlienBOB has created packages for KDE 4.13.3 for Slackware 14.1, and it would almost be a shame not to make use of them. The bug fixes would be nice, and the improved search facilities would probably save on resource usage (akonadi replaced by baloo).

Just my 2 cents.

I find KDE 4.10.5 to be better than 4.13.3

Supporting all this in the long run only remains viable if I stick as much as possible with the stock Slackware packages. If I decide to replace one, then there must be a good reason for that. For the moment I prefer to stick with 4.10.5 which works very nice, and I'll keep the improvements of later KDE 4.x versions for the next release.

As it looks, Slackware's two main desktops will be maintained finally. I'm writing this from a local school, where I have to install the whole network over the weekend. Four desktops will be KDE-based, ten other machines are older and will receive an Xfce-based desktop. The two servers also get Slackware, of course. I have all these extra packages locally, but next week I'll try and find the time to put all these in separate repos: one desktop-agnostic base repo, one KDE-specific, and one Xfce-specific.

Cheers,

Niki

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation NV44 [GeForce 6200 TurboCache] (rev a1)

And it has a lot more RAM than I thought (3GB WTF). I will give the KDE spin a try.

With this card, the proprietary driver works very nice.

http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:har...aphics_drivers

A suggestion about an audio player.

Sometimes there's no need for the complete audio library manager with everything, including the kitchen sink, because it's just too heavy. I'm talking about Clementine. Don't get me wrong, it's the best music manager around, but on my laptop with Core 2 Duo @ 2.1 GHz and 2 Gb RAM it eats quite a lot of resources. Considering I also run Pidgin, Skype and Thunderbird in the background, such thing as surfing the web with Firefox (or any other browser: the web needs a lot of resources nowadays) becomes painfully slow. Not to mention other resource-hungry things like LibreOffice.

So my suggestion is Qmmp. It's basically Audacious for Qt, which I think is a better idea since KDE is now the main desktop. It's much easier on resources and more convenient if you need to play a track or two from the file manager. So what about complementing/replacing Clementine with Qmmp?

Thunderbird is also a heavy thing to keep in the background. While don't suggest to do anything with it, I do need to check my mail regularly. What mail checker would be good for using in MLED?

I've been a regular Audacious user since the project exists. I have my own version, rebuilt against a full set of multimedia libraries. Maybe an exception to the one-app-per-task rule would be a good idea. Something like "Simple Audio Player" vs. "Full-featured audio player".

On the other hand, I suggest you wait for a bit more than a week until I complete and upload my split repo setup. Right now I'm at work at the local school. I'm installing them a mix of Xfce and KDE desktops authenticating centrally on a local server (Slackware of course). I'm fiddling right now with the configuration details so the respective user profiles don't shoot each other in the foot on two different desktops. On netbooks I personally prefer my own blend of Xfce to KDE. It took some time to make my mind up, but i have now the firm resolution to maintain both desktops. Some time ago I upgraded the hardware in my office, so working on all these repositories and compiling many packages is much easier now. I'll keep you posted.

Just upgraded my laptop to your KDE desktop. Usually KDE makes the fan in my laptop spin like crazy and run my processor a little on the warm side, but this makes it run nicely. Of course I also like your XFCE desktop as well. Good work as usual!

A little update on the work in progress.

Everything is now being moved to the split repos. I've spent a few days cleaning scripts up and moving stuff around. What do you think of the new repo presentation?

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/

Don't use this for the next two or three days. Unfortunately my upload bandwidth is rather poor, and there's gigabytes of stuff to be uploaded on the server. I'll keep you posted.

Looks nice. Also looks like it may be easier for you to maintain this way.

Exactly. I put a lot of work in the initial layout, but once everything's in place, maintaining this will be a breeze. I guess this weekend I'll have transferred all existing packages. Next step will be to update all the documentation, and then we can test this thing and correct all the bugs.

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If I remember correctly, you said that you customized the look and feel of some apps to match the style of the desktop (i.e. QT and GTK style).

How will this be managed with the new layout? Basically what is the style of apps in repository desktop-base?

My feeling is that you'll have to stick with the default style of each application.

Or it could be that I didn't understand the customization thing in the first place

Applications common to both KDE and Xfce integrate nicely into each respective desktop environment. When used in KDE, LibreOffice, Inkscape or Scribus have the same look than native KDE applications. And when used in Xfce, they also blend in nicely and seamlessly.

I think the repo will be in a usable state this weekend. Well, you *can* use it right now, but there's still some rough edges that I'm currently sanding down. Feel free to try it out, but it might eat your hamster.

And then, count a couple more days for me to update all the documentation on the site.

Cheers,

Niki

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Very nice work. Thanks for the build order as well.

You're welcome. I try to automate things as much as possible, while still staying true to the KISS principle. So once I've built a dozen packages on 32-bit, I can fire up a 64-bit VM and grab some coffee while the master script builds everything automagically.

My TODO list is still almost three pages long. If you want to keep an eye on the progress, read the various ChangeLog files in the repos.