Salix Forums

Hi all,

I've been doing a bit of DE hopping over the last year, since I'm not completely happy with Gnome 3. I'm not too against it either. Unlike some people, I don't feel betrayed or think it's impossible to do work in it. It's just that it's not my first choice. For the first 9 years of my Linux life, I used Red Hat, then Fedora, with some experimentation in Slackware and other distros. Something has drawn me back to Slackware, and it's now my primary OS, with some additions and modifications from the kind people who do Gnome SlackBuild people and you all at Salix. One of the things I miss about Fedora is the Cinnamon option, and I haven't been able to build Cinnamon myself. I see that you've just released Mate packages, and the word in the press is that the latest Mate won't break any Gnome 3 packages. Now, I love GSB, but they replaced a key package or two, and I suspect that has lead to some minor instability on my system. So, I wonder if anyone can tell me whether Mate will double back on the GTK2/GTK3/glibc switch that GSB did and break anything else or whether it's safe to add to my already jumbled mix. My thanks to you for all your work, especially on Sourcery and gslapt, and my thanks for any answers I receive.

Cheers,
lm

There is no reason MATE will not work if installed side by side with any other environment, including gnome.

If gnome slackbuild works, with or without MATE installed is a completely different question, as from what I have read, there has been a lot of trouble by updating seamonkey-solibs. I believe that at this point, gsb will not work, at all, because it depends on a seamonkey-solibs version that is no longer available. If you have an old package somewhere of the exact same version that it needs you might get it to work, but don't bet on it. I haven't tried it myself, all that is from reading the gsb mailing list and from info I got from the gsb irc channel.

Thanks, gapan,

I just wanted to confirm that there weren't conflicts. I'll take your word that there aren't, but if there are... what's the worst that can happen? Nothing that can't be quickly repaired.

That said, yes, I believe you're right about GSB not working at all. I've been using it as my primary desktop, but I had to do a bit of patching to get it working. Basically, parts of Gnome Shell are written in javascript. GSB is built against seamonkey-solibs for that purpose, and as you say, the version they used is no longer available (and Pat pushed yet another update to seamonkey-solibs yesterday). However, one has a few choices of js library when build Gnome Shell: seamonkey-solibs, mozjs185, or xulrunner. Once one has built mozjs (available as a SlackBuild), one rebuilds gjs and gnome-shell from GSB's scripts and it's 99% good to go (I find I can't have Nautilus handle the desktop). I was able after some hair-pulling to build xulrunner, but for some reason when I rebuilt gjs and gnome-shell against xulrunner, things became very unstable.

As I say, Cinnamon is my favorite DE, as it's a sensible mix of the new libs and the old UI, but I can't get that to build in Slackware. Since my favorite DE isn't available, I'll keep switching between KDE, Gnome Shell, Mate, and Xfce as my mood dictates.

Cheers.