Slackware Likely To Drop GNOME Support

An anonymous reader writes "After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE. Read more about their decision here. It looks like companies as well as distributions start focusing towards one solution." Patrick Volderking's quoted message doesn't announce a final decision to drop GNOME from Slackware, however -- and as the followups in that thread note, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the good job done by Dropline in packaging GNOME for Slack.

Comments

Clash of Philosophy?

[RAMMS EIN]

Perhaps GNOME doesn't fit the Slackware philosophy very well. I means, Slackware is all lean and simple, whereas the same can hardly be said of GNOME.

RedHat (Gnome), Slackware (KDE) and MSWindows98SE

[solprovider]

This is timely. I built a triple-boot PC for my father last year. He recently got DSL, so I needed to update all the network settings. (I did it this morning.)

The first issue was that Earthlink provided a DSL modem with only one network jack. He also has a laptop, so he needed another port. $60 got a Linksys WRT54G. He will (probably) buy a wireless PCMCIA network card for the laptop next Spring. I turned off the wireless capablilities, and he has a good router.

Then I changed the network settings for MSWindows98SE on the PC and the laptop. Only 3 reboots each. (It could have been less if I remembered to configure DNS the first time.)

Then I changed RedHat9. There is a GUI for the network settings. Changed the settings. "/etc/init.d/network restart". Perfect. (But why did it tell me to restart the network? It knew it needed to be done. Just do it.)

Then I looked for the network settings in Slackware. I could not find any admin tool to even display the settings. Finally found the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf, and changed them in vi in a terminal (which would not accept BACKSPACE or DEL as valid keys for erasing; I used "dl".) Then I restarted rc.inet1. The IP Address did not change, so I rebooted.

I then tried to figure out how to map the MSWindows share on the laptop for the Linuxes. They refused to see it before I had to head home.

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The RedHat is probably 9.0. The Slackware is either 9 or 10. The newer Slackware was more difficult to configure than the old RedHat.

[I previously had difficulty because I changed Slackware to boot to the GUI by changing the runlevel. Then I had to copy the startup scripts to the new runlevel. People have already suggested that was the wrong way to do it, although no one has told me how to boot to the GUI without changing the runlevel.]

As far as using them, my father likes KDE slightly better than Gnome, likely because he was trained on MSWindows, and KDE was much closer to MSWindows on the versions he is using. He browses the internet from all 3 OSes (Mozilla on Windows and RedHat, and Konq on Slack), and rips and burns CDs using the Linuxes. He thinks it is fun to experiment with several OSes.

[Off-topic: I also installed Opera on Windows. He tried it once; it opened to Opera's homepage: "There was too much to read", so he gave up and went back to Mozilla.]

He does not have to administer the systems. KDE has been more difficult when it requires intervention.

EXCEPT: KDE detects new monitors much better than RedHat. When I delivered the PC, I had to use Slackware to change RedHat's monitor settings, and I just copied the settings from Slackware. (MSWindows98SE cannot see the Linux partitions.)

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Yes, I know I am writing about obsolete versions. RedHat is completely obsolete, as Fedora is the current line, and the Slackware install is also over a year old. But most people are using whatever version they had handy. I only download the latest versions when I am installing a new system. Upgrading takes time and causes headaches; why bother?