Author: admin

We stopped coming up with nicknames for our releases a few years ago, but figured that “dropline GNOME Forever” best describes 2.20.2 simply because of the extended amount of time that was taken in developing this release. But that’s okay, because it means that we spent even more time trying to fine-tune every little detail to make this the best GNOME desktop that you’ll find on Slackware (and we’d say just about anyhere else as well). Our goal is to make a GNOME desktop that “just works”!

dropline GNOME 2.20.2 is here! Existing 2.18.3 users (for Slackware 12.0) can upgrade their systems by upgrading to the latest installer and choosing the “upgrade” option. New users can install dropline GNOME 2.20.2 on Slackware 12.0 by following the instructions on the Download page.

As usual, our forums provide a great place to discuss new releases or talk about GNOME and Slackware. All users are welcome (and encouraged) to register.

-The dropline GNOME Development Team

With just a few outstanding issues at-hand, we’re still working on finding ways to work around Slackware-specific issues without resorting to having to replace a few Slackware packages that are preventing a “complete” release. That said, the 2.18.3 release is quite stable and ready for the majority of users. Most of the remaining issues *have* solutions, but they all involve replacing Slackware packages to solve them (NetworkManager, for instance, would still need a DHCP rebuild). Note that this is what people have asked for, so this is what is holding up a final release, and we don’t think that it’s fair to call something “complete” when we still feel that there are small things to take care of. It’s just that these bugs have held us up for weeks now, and users are getting tired of waiting for us to call this release complete.

If these minor issues are not of importance, we’d suggest that all users make the transition to 2.18.3 on Slackware 12.0.

http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/dropline-gnome/dropline-installer-2.18-i686-3dl.tgz

Outstanding Issues:
1. Metacity windows may minimize a bit slowly due a a bug in Slackware’s libX11. Solution – Update LibX11. We may be providing an extra package for those who are affected by this bug.
2. NetworkManager does not work. Solution – Rebuild Slackware’s DHCP package, or fall back to the version that we included in 2.16. We are investigation its inclusion again for 2.18. (EDIT – We’ve come up with a workaround and this is now working.)
3. A handful of icons do not display for some apps. Solution – Update Slackware’s dated hicolor-icon-theme package. Alternately, we can probably patch the affected packages to use different icons instead.
4. System-tools-backends do not work. (EDIT – Fixed! Thanks to Saxa, Juice, and Stik for their work on this!)

Additional notes may be found in the following forum thread:

http://forums.droplinegnome.org/viewtopic.php?t=5609

-The dropline GNOME Development Team

dropline GNOME 2.18.3 Beta for Slackware 12.0 is here!

http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/dropline-gnome/dropline-installer-2.18-i686-3dl.tgz

We’re excited about the recent Slackware release news, and have been working bring the next dropline GNOME desktop to Slackware 12.0 users! Slackware 12.0’s new features and numerous updates will help us to build the best dropline GNOME release yet.

The total number of packages has dropped by 23 compared to our 2.16 release. More importantly, dropline GNOME is more Slackware-friendly than ever before, now replacing only a mere *8* Slackware packages in order to obtain the best possible GNOME functionality while retaining Slackware 12.0 compatibility.

We think that what we have so far is ready for the majority of testers, but there are still a handful of bugfixes that we will be supplying over the next few days. Please feel free to submit bug reports and share your comments in our forums:

http://forums.droplinegnome.org/viewtopic.php?t=5609

-The dropline GNOME Development Team

We’re excited about the recent Slackware release news, and are working to bring the next dropline GNOME desktop to Slackware 12.0 users! Slackware 12.0’s new features and numerous updates will help us to build the best Dropline GNOME release yet.

Keep an eye on this site. In the next week, you will begin to see several updates in regard to the progress of dropline GNOME for Slackware 12.0!

dropline GNOME 2.18.1 Beta (for Slackware 11.0) is currently available for testing. New users and existing 2.16 users can install/upgrade to this release with the 2.18 Series beta installer.

Please post comments on this beta release in our 2.18 forum thread.

-The dropline GNOME Development Team

The GNOME 2.16.2 service updates have just been posted to SourceForge, and are now available for download. You can upgrade your existing 2.16 systems by running the dropline-installer and selecting the “upgrade” option from the menu. New dropline GNOME users who install via the Internet will automatically obtain the latest packages as well. To see a full list of what’s new, check out the ChangeLog here:

http://www.droplinegnome.org/?page_id=9

-The dropline GNOME Development Team

Several dedicated testers have been helping to iron out our beta release over the last few weeks, and we believe it’s time that we make an announcement on the front page that Dropline GNOME 2.16.1 Pre-Release is now available!

There have been several changes since 2.14.3. As part of our efforts to slim things down, the total number of packages has been decreased by almost 13%. This was possible by eliminating rebuilds of several packages that are now included in Slackware by default, and restructuring the multimedia framework to eliminate several libraries that we felt weren’t needed. Additionally, we’ve also made the decision to discontinue the inclusion of a custom X11 build with this release, as we’ve found that Slackware’s X11 6.9.0 build was more than suitable.

Due to the large number of changes, we suggest that all users install on clean, full-installs of Slackware 11.0 (Disk 1) for the best experience. The pre-release installer is available from the following location:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dropline-gnome/dropline-installer-2.16.0-i686-2dl.tgz?download

-The dropline GNOME Development Team

Several updates for GNOME 2.14.3 have been posted within the last week, finishing up this release in time for us to begin working on preparations for GNOME 2.16.0. Recent updates in the slackware.com ChangeLog indicate that 11.0 will be here just in time for the next GNOME release. For the time being, existing dropline GNOME 2.14.x users may upgrade with ease, by using the “upgrade” feature from within the dropline-installer.

New users may find the latest installer (for Slackware 10.2) on our download page.

-The dropline GNOME Development Team

An ISO image for our 2.14.2 (i686) release is available from the following download location:

http://droplinegnome.org/releases/dlg-2.14.2.iso
http://droplinegnome.org/releases/dlg-2.14.2.iso.md5

You may also find a list of mirrors in the following forum thread:

http://forums.droplinegnome.org/viewtopic.php?t=5108

-The dropline GNOME Development Team