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From: Longfellow on 5 Apr 2008 18:21
Bought a new printer. 10.0 couldn't handle it. Massive upgrade
necessary. Arg...

Been running 10.0 on an ASUS CUBX and Cel 500 w/ 512 meg RAM. A comfy
and mature install years old now. And now I've got it all to do over
again. The bloom of exploration and multiple distros and kernels and
all that stuff died years ago, so I'm not really into a lot of hard work
here. But having Slackware on my box is not negotiable, so...

I run a number of Gnome apps, although not the desktop itself (Fluxbox
forever...), and it is really unclear how much Gnome is required to run
them. So I'm trying to figure out if I have to install Gnome itself,
and if so, how. What I think I know:

1) No Gnome in Slack since 10.0.

2) At the point at which I was still considering keeping a current
distro on board, no consensus existed as to what to do about Gnome.

3) I note that there are an assortment of Gnome based apps in 12.0, and
so presume there are some Gnome libraries included; they can't all be
statically compiled, I would think!

4) Compiling Gnome from source appears to be unthinkable, although the
Gnome site offers a Gnome specific compiler to do the dirty work. I've
not been able to discover how well that is received by the user
community.

5) Third party sources like Dropline do things to the Slack install that
gross out the purists: PAM? I've seen references to other such
sources, but don't recall what they were, although IIRC some positive
response was included in the citations.

Now, I've got the HD space to install everything, so that's not a
concern. But I don't want a lot of bullshit hassle just to get things
to work, it'll be enough to redo all the petty configuration and I know
better than to presume I can just port the relevant files from 10.0 to
12.0.

Slack is supposed to "just work", and I want to get there with the least
amount of effort and time; yeah I'm old and crotchety but I do have a
lot of work already in progress and I need that damned printer!

And yeah I'll do what I have to do to get things back up and running,
but I'd sure appreciate of the renewal process cut me some "Slack",
dontchaknow. Whatever advice and comments you "bozos" care to dish out
is welcome :D

Thanks all,

Longfellow

From: D Herring on 5 Apr 2008 18:55
Longfellow wrote:
> I run a number of Gnome apps, although not the desktop itself (Fluxbox
> forever...), and it is really unclear how much Gnome is required to run
> them. So I'm trying to figure out if I have to install Gnome itself,
> and if so, how.

The Gnome desktop is built on the GTK libraries; GTK applications
often include Gnome integration much as Qt apps have KDE support.

You generally don't need the desktop environment to use the
applications. Those that do need Gnome probably won't run in another
desktop anyway...

Slack 12 ships gtk+ 1.2.10 and 2.10.13; current ships 1.2.10 and
2.12.9 (released March 12, 2008).

The easiest way to install the Gnome desktop is to switch distros.

- Daniel
From: Longfellow on 5 Apr 2008 20:18
On 2008-04-05, D Herring <dherring(a)at.tentpost.dot.com> wrote:
> Longfellow wrote:
>> I run a number of Gnome apps, although not the desktop itself (Fluxbox
>> forever...), and it is really unclear how much Gnome is required to run
>> them. So I'm trying to figure out if I have to install Gnome itself,
>> and if so, how.
>
> The Gnome desktop is built on the GTK libraries; GTK applications
> often include Gnome integration much as Qt apps have KDE support.

Ah yes...

> You generally don't need the desktop environment to use the
> applications. Those that do need Gnome probably won't run in another
> desktop anyway...

.... I knew that Gnome used the GTK libraries, but your observation that
any app requiring Gnome likely wouldn't run outside that environment is
what I needed to know. Thanks!

> Slack 12 ships gtk+ 1.2.10 and 2.10.13; current ships 1.2.10 and
> 2.12.9 (released March 12, 2008).

And this brings up another question: If I install 12.0 and then
contemplate keeping it current, how much trouble am I facing? The
reason is because I ran across (lately ever more increasing) problems
with out of date applications (won't run except on the current Flash, or
"your Javascript is not enabled"). I routinely decide that anything
requiring that amount of cutting edge blood ain't worth the trouble, but
that can also get inconvenient as well; hence the growing urge to
upgrade the system.

Having the upgrade to "current" as a routine process should eliminate
that, I would think. OTOH, a stable and mature system is really
(probably even more) important. Is "current" consistently stable, or is
it a source of regular, if not all that often, malfunction?

What is the consensus here, if one there be?

> The easiest way to install the Gnome desktop is to switch distros.

Not an option. I run Slackware for the same reasons as the rest of you
guys. And besides, desktops suck in any case, whether Gnome or KDE.
Hey, I run SLang apps (Mutt and slrn, and vi in xterm...); too much
"mousing" is bad for the soul...

And the upgrade question is important, where the Gnome install question
was relatively trivial. I'd really appreciate some commentary on this.

Thanks again,

Longfellow

From: Old Man on 5 Apr 2008 20:58
Longfellow wrote:

>> You generally don't need the desktop environment to use the
>> applications. Those that do need Gnome probably won't run in another
>> desktop anyway...
>
> ... I knew that Gnome used the GTK libraries, but your observation that
> any app requiring Gnome likely wouldn't run outside that environment is
> what I needed to know. Thanks!

But it's not entirely true. If you have the gnome libraries the app
requires, it will run. It will run in KDE, it will run in XFCE, it will
run in anything.

> And this brings up another question: If I install 12.0 and then
> contemplate keeping it current, how much trouble am I facing? The
> reason is because I ran across (lately ever more increasing) problems
> with out of date applications (won't run except on the current Flash, or
> "your Javascript is not enabled"). I routinely decide that anything
> requiring that amount of cutting edge blood ain't worth the trouble, but
> that can also get inconvenient as well; hence the growing urge to
> upgrade the system.
>
> Having the upgrade to "current" as a routine process should eliminate
> that, I would think. OTOH, a stable and mature system is really
> (probably even more) important. Is "current" consistently stable, or is
> it a source of regular, if not all that often, malfunction?
>
> What is the consensus here, if one there be?

Depends on what you're using the machine for. Mine is a personal desktop,
and I follow -current. It's almost always been stable enough for my
purposes, and problems do tend to get fixed pretty quickly. But, if my job
or credibility depended on everything working as expected all the time, I
would run Stable and keep it patched.

>> The easiest way to install the Gnome desktop is to switch distros.

Maybe true, at the moment. There are still a couple of Gnome / Slackware
projects, I believe. Others would know better than I.

> Not an option. I run Slackware for the same reasons as the rest of you
> guys. And besides, desktops suck in any case, whether Gnome or KDE.
> Hey, I run SLang apps (Mutt and slrn, and vi in xterm...); too much
> "mousing" is bad for the soul...
>
> And the upgrade question is important, where the Gnome install question
> was relatively trivial. I'd really appreciate some commentary on this.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Longfellow

--
Old Man

Playing with the ODE will make you go blind.
From: Dan C on 5 Apr 2008 21:23
On Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:18:22 -0500, Longfellow wrote:

> And the upgrade question is important, where the Gnome install question
> was relatively trivial. I'd really appreciate some commentary on this.

Look no further than here:

http://gnomeslackbuild.org/

This is a fork of the old Freerock Gnome project, and it works well.


--
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org

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