October 20th, 2005
Since the announcement that GNOME wasn’t going to be included in future versions of Slackware, GNOME lovers basically have three decisions:
Well, four if you count switching over to a different Desktop Environment. Though saying that, it is actually helpful having KDE installed for Qt applications that don’t play nicely with GNOME. By playing nicely I also mean looking aesthetically pleasing, which accounts why I always boot up KDE when I want to use Scribus.
I have had experience with both GWARE and Freerock. Some potential confusion surrounding Freerock is that GNOME Slack Build is also available to download. Though it’s pretty simple really: GSB is just the collection of scripts they use to create Freerock–the actual .tgz packages you’ll want to download and install. GWARE and Freerock are essentially the same, but I currently use Freerock as it has more features, accounting for the size difference between the two. The only problem I came across when using Freerock was that the clock applet didn’t work:
The panel encountered a problem while loading “OAFIID:GNOME_ClockApplet”.
This was easily solved by installing the extra Firefox packages that reside in a different directory to the main FRG packages. These create the necessary sym-links to allow the clock to find the dependancies it’s missing. Also be careful uninstalling particular .tgz packages as this might cause further dependancy problems. For instance Evolution is also required for the clock to work because of the calender functionality. To track any missing dependancies try:
ldd /usr/libexec/clock-applet (or as required)
Dropline GNOME has a long controversial history, providing an alternative release of GNOME for Slack users for a long time. It’s obvious Patrick Volkerding doesn’t like the way they replace core parts of Slackware like X.org. Read over the frequently unasked questions for more. Moreover, it can be said that all of the above will replace a few original Slackware .tgz packages, but that’s pretty obvious.
So why bother with it all when there’s KDE? Well for one I prefer the simplicity of GNOME, it generally looks a lot less cluttered. While there aren’t as many applications for GNOME, at least they don’t all start with K, ok that’s a little trivial, but I find it a little annoying. I also don’t like the way KDE is so closely tied with Trolltech’s Qt. Their open source licensing is ok, but if you even so much as breathe on a piece of closed source that utilises Qt, you’ll have to pay a heafty license fee. GNOME uses GTK, GTKmm etc. that have less restrictive licenses, allowing commercial developers to use the libraries without any repercussions, and this seems a better way to attract high quality commercial software into Linux. Oh, and did I mention the brilliant, practically commercial grade software GIMP and Inkscape are made with GTK/GTKmm?
January 31st, 2006 at 4:46 am
please elaborate on how to fix the clock applet in freerock gnome. ive been having trouble and cant find anything on google. any help would be greatly appreciated.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:17 am
It was a long time ago, but I think installing the Firefox libs does the trick.
I’ll have another look when at home.