I'm thinking it may be easier just to wipe my Debian partition, install slack there too, and go with xfce or another wm instead of KDE. Or would it be the nightmare I'm thinking it would be to rip it out of my current slack install and replace it with something else? Also, I see that even on the slackware.org site, there's still a graphic that shows Gnome as one of the available choices, although apparently it isn't available for slack 13.0. Is there any reasonable chance that it may be come available in the not-too-distant future? I would prefer that to xfce, which I've tried in other distros. I'd even prefer icewm to xfce, come to that.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

There is this, if you want Gnome:

http://gnomeslackbuild.org/

It's easy to chose between windows managers/desktops on slackware. Just run xwmconfig from the command prompt. You will be given a choice of all included with the distribution. Gnome is not one of the options offered this way but you could install Gnome as stated above.

God bless you for that. I'd never even heard of that site before. So Debian's going to go the way of the dinosaurs (for me, anyway), and I'll use that partition for a fresh install of slack minus any GDE, then try that baby out.

I've not used it myself, not all that keen on Gnome, so I've no idea how good or bad it is.

I think I'll still go ahead and try it, but the xfce included in this version of slack isn't half-bad either. It's a whole lot easier on resources than KDE is, at the very least. At least it seems like it'll make a decent replacement for Gnome if my plan to install that doesn't go very well.

Thanks again.

Okay, so I installed the Gnome Slackbuild GDE (http://gnomeslackbuild.org) and IMHO, it's still pretty buggy. For one thing, their package manager didn't install at all. Secondly, a number of apps or applets crash even after I've enabled avahi and done the other configuration tasks they speak of including the applet that lets one set nautilus preferences. Thirdly, the base install didn't include any of the system/administrative stuff although it did successfully include seemingly all of the system/preferences apps. Fourth, it only installed one visible, usable gnome panel (the top one) and that had absolutely nothing on it at all although of course I was able to add a menu, task switcher, clock, and so on manually. I'm sure it is a work-in-progress but it seems to me that it isn't quite ready for prime-time yet.

The good news is that at least it seems *not* to have screwed up xfce4, which I'm liking *very* much indeed the more I use it. Since it "updated" several of the default slack libraries, I was afraid that it might have.

Now, if I could only find a decent twitter client. Slackbuilds does have qwit for KDE and I installed that, but although it seems to load the various time-lines fine, absolutely nothing actually appears which one can see--text, images, nada. I tried a couple of those which use adobeAIR, but none of those will install.

I do like the version of grub which slackware has, though. Unlike previous versions I'm familiar with, with this one one has only to change the /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect system changes and be done with it. There is nothing else to run, no further updating to do. It's so much better than the ancient one in debian lenny that I've installed it to my mbr and am now using it to boot both operating systems.