GNOME 2.20.3 for Slackware

Steve writes "Originally based on the Freerock GNOME project, GNOME.SlackBuild (GSB) brings the latest GNOME Desktop, 2.20.3, to Slackware Linux. It provides both a binary distribution and a complete GNOME source build system. The GSB project has been revitalized by a new development team that has, over the past several months of hard work, re-engineered the GSB source build system and brought the project back to the forefront of the GNOME packaging projects for Slackware. This project also supports and provides binary packages for x86_64 ports of Slackware, such as Slamd64. Follow the link for information about the project, screenshots, and downloads."

awesome!

[ILuvRamen]

now all they gotta do is put KDE 4 on Knoppix and I'll have a Linux meltdown (the happy kind). Or better yet, they could put GNOME on it lol. But seriously, I'm glad people are finally, actually updating their distros with newer stuff. More people should do that.

Re:

[corychristison]

That's why I use Gentoo.
Yes. Compiling on older hardware sucks (I'm on an Athlon XP 2500+) but it shouldn't take any more than a day at most on this processor.
I had it installed and running in an afternoon on my girlfriends Mac mini.

Re:

[xenocide2]

But seriously, I'm glad people are finally, actually updating their distros with newer stuff. More people should do that.

Well, uh, Ubuntu's been running 2.20 since October. It's mostly a matter of timing releases; I think Shuttleworth tried to get KDE to make that sort of commitment at the last KDE meeting, but I think proposing it when everyone knew KDE 4 wasn't the sort of thing you can do on a six month schedule was a mistake. Now there's a bit of ill will from the KDE devs about Ubuntu leaning hard to make Ubuntu's job easier.

It's an interesting approach to the end of distro wars, where a set of slowly re-arranging relea

Re:

[JohnFluxx]

I was also at the KDE meeting, and clearly I have a different interpretation than you.
Mark Shuttleworth proposed 6 month time based releases. The community hummed, not entirely convinced. Discussion has continued back and forth on the mailing lists about it, and most people seem to be mostly in favour of it.
It's looking very likely that we will indeed have a 6 month release. (Personally I am for it).
There is certainly no ill will against Ubuntu because of this.

Re:

[xenocide2]

I wasn't in attendance, but I saw the recorded video, and someone else who claimed to be there stated that he Garnered some ill will over it. I'm glad to hear that may well not be true.

Re:

[immcintosh]

Yet another reason I prefer to use a distro that doesn't use a scheduled release cycle [archlinux.org], and doesn't need to. Or this [gentoo.org] for those of you with more free time on your hands than is strictly healthy :P

Re:

[xenocide2]

You and I may prefer to run something like Debian testing, but I think for servers, computer labs / offices I'd appreciate the stable cycle. Professionally, it makes sense to run the same distro at both home and office, at which point the lack of a stable and usable testing version strikes such things as Arch and Gentoo off. I've seen Gentoo in places, and it bites them regularly. What Gentoo does have is a massive amount of documentation on how to build packages, which attracts some people who expect to ha

Re:

[immcintosh]

Gentoo definitely has that problem, but with Arch there is a separate testing repository that must be manually enabled. Packages only make it into the main Arch repositories after having gone through sufficient testing. Although its main repository is definitely smaller than some, its quite stable. To be honest, I've found the latest release of Ubuntu to be more troublesome than I've ever found an equivalent Arch install to be. For other distrios that move new packages straight out into the wild though, yea

Re:

[calebt3]

you could argue they haven't even hit 2.0 yet

This coming from a faulty beta. Ironic.

This isn't really news.

[bunbuntheminilop]

Has this new item got something to do with kde4 being released recently?

Re:

[paulatz]

Actually this is the least interesting news I have ever read on Slashdot: Slackware users already knew, rest of the world will never care.

Re:

[wamerocity]

...and by turnish I meant turning... not sure how sh becomes ng.. but... yeah..

We have a -1 WTF

[SanityInAnarchy]

It's called "-1 Troll"

Anyway, I find I'm more annoyed by pleple who make stupid spelling errors seem to forget that comma exists type like drunk frget words... Not only are these people turning Slashdot into Myspace.com, there's actually no moderation for "-1 Learn English".

And there's also no moderation for "-1 Wrong", which really should be "-1 Factually Incorrect", although it may be difficult to train mods on the difference between that and "-1 Disagree", which doesn't exist (for good reason).

Well, at least if there's stuff you actually don't want to see, people have found ways to filter it. For instance, there's the Profanity Blacklist [slashdot.org] (which unfortunately blocks me, but I'm not censoring myself).

Re:

[tezbobobo]

I'm prepared to put up with the GNAA and 'up your butt' if freedom of speech is kept. Ideally, there could be a greasemonkey script to block out those comments.

thank god for small miracles

[debatem1]

we should all just be happy that somebody, somewhere, got something working on slackware

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[MaskedSlacker]

Which is where the rest of us point and laugh at his small e-genitalia.

Re:

[IrquiM]

Getting something to work on slackware is easy compared to any of the ubuntu releases!

just need to know how to use the "man" function :) or be able to do a power search in google

Re:

[Bandman]

unless it's something useful like effective package management or PAM.

Don't mind me. I'm a bitter old user of Slackware for 10 years who jumped ship when it became apparent that I couldn't continue to use Slackware in a large enterprise environment. It makes me sad.

Re:thank god for small miracles

[ledow]

./configure
make
sudo make install

What's hard? The fact that you don't have someone who's already done that for you? Then try LinuxPackages.net for just about any Slackware-compiled software you need. The fact that there's no dependency-resolution? Either a) get one of the many programs that does it for you or b) run the program, see what it's missing, download that, install that, rinse and repeat. Incidentally, method B was how I've built dozens, if not hundreds of Slackware installs from scratch and takes up less than about 10% of total build time over the life of the machine - and once you're past the "I've got most things now" barrier, you hardly touch dependant software at all except to update.

I use Slackware for anything from a blackbox router to a full desktop (not just for me, I might add). It's running transparent cache/proxy/filters in a 1000-student school I worked in, it's running a security system including CCTV motion capture, it's running web hosts in dedicated facilities, it's running on several (600Mhz or thereabouts) laptops in a full desktop enviroment with wireless connection.

How long does it take to set any of them up? An hour or two to install Slackware (mostly because of the old hardware), a few minutes on a broadband connection to download the "extras" like codecs, libdvdcss, madwifi etc. for the desktops and it's only the stuff that Slackware isn't "allowed" to bundle anyway. Everything else just compiles. No messing about. So I don't see why the troll is necessary. Things just build when you build them.

The problem was - GNOME was dropped because it was becoming an increasing nightmare to compile and package it for Slackware - not because of a Slackware shortcoming. The beauty of Slackware is that virtually EVERYTHING that the base install includes is patch-free and just original source with a handful of configure parameters to put things in the right place. The kernel is pure, the software is pure, the boot scripts are plain, easy, modular and readable. It's almost an "LFS" install done right. No fancy patches to add third-party functionality and cope with different schemes that break original-author-support (Red Hat's patches to cdrecord and the like spring to mind, although I can't stand the man), patched-to-the-hilt kernels that just cause problems for bug-fixing, etc.

Stop spending your money on companies that try to "recreate" every bit of software only to have it break in the next version and them having to pay people to re-do their work over and over again (because the original authors want nothing to do with those proprietry extensions that add little). Start using a distro that sucks in code from the authors in the way they intended it and makes everything "just work".

Re:

[Aladrin]

B is exactly what he's complaining about, and why I switched from Slackware to Kubuntu.

When I was first learning, Slackware was great because it made you do so many things by hand and really get to learn about Linux. Now that I just want to get my job done, Kubuntu is my choice because I don't have to fiddle with things most of the time... And in the odd case that I need something that isn't pre-packaged, I can still 'make install'.

Re:

[AndrewBuck]

It's kind of funny that you say that (slackware then kubuntu), as so many people are suggesting exactly the opposite (learn the basics on Ubuntu and then migrate to other more fiddly distros). Although Ubuntu is a good place to start for a lot of the non-geek crowd I think you've got the right approach for the geeks.

When I switched to Linux about 3 years ago my first install was on a laptop and I had no real assistance from anyone else. I spent a full week fiddling with it trying to get it to work (even r

Re:

[cbart387]

Agreed. Why would I want to manually install 10 libraries (where they themselves might have dependencies that need met) when I can let the system do it. If I was on a system that made me do that I would write a script to automatically update the dependencies. But then I'm duplicating the work of 'yum' and 'apt-get' and whatever else is out there. So why not use a system that has all these things built in? It doesn't make sense to me to make things intentionally hard. Packages that I want to custom mak

Re:

[NReitzel]

Well, I'm not disagreeing in general with your comments, however...

Just a month ago, I spent three days gathering up enough pieces of Gnome 2.20.2 to make a clean compile on Slackware. There's nothing magic about it, but it is a daunting task for someone familiar with the software and may in fact be unachievable for someone who is a newbie.

It's nice to have a development team in place to sweat the details.

Re:

[debatem1]

it was a joke guys. lighten up.

Re:

[eternaloptimist]

this is a great post! i never knew u could do so many different things w/ slackware. actually, right now i'm about to install a linux distribution to my computer, & i'm trying to decide which 1 to use. i bought a linux magazine the other day & it came w/ a dvd that has the newest distribs of ubuntu & suse on it. also, i took a class in red hat in the spring of last year. it's a cool distrib, but i like to try out new things. i mainly use my computer for music, games & to study the Bible

Re:

[debatem1]

the answer will always be 'depends'. It depends on personal preference- i prefer ubuntu for ease of use and gentoo for more stripped-down installations, although many would disagree with me. if you are listening to music, any of them will do, while if you are producing music you might want to go with something like musix or another distro specialized for high quality audio. games are going to be a problem in linux- they always are- but many of them work under Wine, a windows compatibility layer which I use

Focus of Slackware?

[Bootarn]

What is Slackware? Really?
I've used Slackware for about five years, and it's getting me confused to whether it's focusing on the server market or the workstation market. It only has thoroughly tested packages, which is good for servers, But why is it even including (an old version of) GNOME, then?
It's a true mystery, but congrats anyway to the GNOME packagers for getting though the shared object hell that often occurs on Slackware systems (IMHO).

Re:

[Skater]

Slackware doesn't include Gnome any more, and hasn't for several versions. This is an independent third-party creating it for Slackware.

I use Slackware for a server, a desktop, a laptop, and a MythTV frontend. It works perfectly in all of those roles. I don't see why it has to focus on one or the other - Patrick is doing a great job with it as it is.

Re:Focus of Slackware?

[Bandman]

The point of Slackware is linux, distilled.

As another comment above mentioned, the kernel is pure. The additional programs are few, but well tested. It is a great distro to run on a server, because it's rock solid, and it's a great distro to run on the desktop because it's rock solid. In addition, the major operation of slackware hasn't changed since it's inception. Sure, there are slightly more complex network scripts, and some changes to the hier here or there, but nothing major, and that's the way Slack users like it.

I know, I was a slack user for 10 years.

I quit because of 2 reasons. Ubuntu has a superior package manager in the synaptic interface, which resolves all of the issues I've confronted it with (which are few in number), and on my servers (60-80 throughout four data centers in three states) it has become impossible to do wide-spread management and updates, not to mention that when I roll out single-sign on, Slackware doesn't do PAM without massive, major changes to its infrastructure. So I run RHEL on my servers (their web interface for managing updates is outstanding) and Ubuntu on my desktop.

I leave Slackware sitting as my very few externally facing web servers, partially for old time's sake, and partially because after 10 years, there's not a hell of a lot they can do to surprise me.

Re:

[Bootarn]

I agree. It is solid. I used slackware on my home servers for about five years. The reason I quit is because of the (according to me) superior pacage manager in Arch Linux (pacman). I also agree with you about PAM. Slackware used to lock PAM out based on security, but now PAM is rock solid as well. I'm not sure why they won't include it now. When I ran slackware on my machines, I hacked at least two of them to allow for PAM. I agree with you that this is a major change.