gnome anyone?

[nishtya]

Hi there. I am a staunch fan and faithful user of kanotix right now, but close enough to knoppix that I still hang here (think kissing cousin, a wee bit more debian, that's all

Have been on a regular update/upgradefest here. I run a 2.4.x kernel, do have a knoppix cd that I have played with 2.6 on. Disappointed (in 2.6, not knoppix).

Anyhow, I am also a kde fanatic. If you gonna go GUI you might as well pull out all the stops But have been thinking about gnome lately. (yes, have run icewm and kind of liked it - also toying with the windowmaker). I was considering apt-getting the whole gnome lot. Thing is, I have seen a lot of posts in other linux forums that gnome may be a teensy bit possessive, some folks anyway have found it trying to take over the whole shebang.

Any experience among you in this area willing to lay some of your wisdom on me? I want to play with Gnome, NOT let it take over. KDE has behaved itself pretty well, I can put in an app or two without a major freakout and the only takeover it ever tried was KOffice over Open office (actually did like KO better, started faster) Anyhow, please give me the benefit of your thoughts and of your experience going about trying out gnome on a debian based install knoppix or kanotix. Much appreciated.

[mzilikazi]

Normally I prefer XFCE4 but I remastered Kanotix w/ Gnome just for yucks & grins. The install went flawlessly (of course it did - we ARE talking Debian SID here ) and works just fine. My only complaints about Gnome are:

1) No desktop wheeling!! bad! bad Gnome!! (That was a complete show stopper as I can't live w/out it).
2) Kind of slow. (About the same speed of KDE but definitely slower than XFCE4).
3) The background set method. You can't just browse a directory you have to teach the background mgr (or whatever it's called) where each individual background is (unless I missed that option).
4) No clipboard utility! boo!! (again I may have missed it).

If those things aren't of concern for you then you may like it. It looks very uniform, is very configurable, has some nice tools and Nautilus is an OK file manager although I always compare everything to rox-filer which simply blows all file-managers away hands down.

I don't think I know what you mean by "take over"

[champagnemojo]

It's safe to try it as long as you've got the space and all...which I'm sure you do. Just choose kdm as your log-in manager when it's configuring gdm (unless you wanna try gdm...which you could always go and change back later...but I don't like gdm myself). Otherwise, other than it putting a ton of extra stuff into your KDE menus, I've never had it take anything over. And I like some of it's programs. So try it...you may like it. I just find KDE to be much more feature-packed...which isn't always a good thing...but is for me.

And I know what you mean about kissing cousin, cuz I'm now running an install of debian/sarge. But I like this forum...I don't wanna leave.

[champagnemojo]

mzilikazi, I tried xfce4 after seeing you suggest it alot. I have to say that it looks really nice. My only complaint was that I couldn't get the hang of the file manager. I can't remember exactly what my issue was...I just remember it seemed very different from Konqueror and Nautilus. Maybe I just need to play with it more though. It was very fast though.

[nishtya]

aaww champagne what you want to go to testing for? It the tween. Doesn't get things near as soon as sid and nowhere near as stable woody, so WHY?

As for taking over, I meant gnome apps trying to steal associations or control *which is really not very common in linux. Like I said, only thing was koffice taking over docs and such but I have heard people on the other linux forums with much much bigger problems than that.

I have toyed with the lighter weight window managers flux and ice are really pleasing to the eye though I didn't see the big perfomance boost so many have spoken of (I have an older XP 1800 and just a half a gig of ram, 32 mb video too). But I was looking for more of a full fledged integrated GUI so did want to give gnome a whirl. I just don't want to be ripping it out of the guts of my install if you know what I mean. I like KDE, it has its quirks and it does gobble the resources but it is a nice integrated pkg. Why I wanted to try gnome, the other integration specialist the few gnome/gtk apps I use now are a wee bit gimpy, generally because I don't have all the gtk libraries needed for all the widgets. But they do work well and it does have a nice "suite" like KDE. Might just give it a whirl this weekend.

One thing, anybody have any hints on how I can mirror (totally) my current install on the other half of a 40 gig disk and try this gnome experiment there. Something painless for somebody who is never going to get certification as a Linux engineer :P

[nishtya]

PS, mzil...NO CLIPBOARD UTILITY? that suck mightlily. Have to think about this though I really can't imagine it could be. Wheeling desktops, I don't care about..I only have one so wheeling wouldn't be much fun

[champagnemojo]

Dang it...it's bad when you don't even know the proper name for what you're running nish. I suppose I'm really running sid, because I used the sarge installer but then upgraded everything to unstable. Don't tell anyone. :P

I've never had gnome take anything over that I can remember though. I really don't think you'll leave KDE for gnome though...there really isn't any noticeable speed-up for most things.

I once used partimage to make an image of a knoppix install a while back. It was really easy to create the image (which was stored in two gzipped files). And then I installed it back into another partition, which was also easy. I know there are other options...but that's the only one I've ever used, and I would use it again.

[mzilikazi]

PS, mzil...NO CLIPBOARD UTILITY? that suck mightlily. Have to think about this though I really can't imagine it could be. Wheeling desktops, I don't care about..I only have one so wheeling wouldn't be much fun

You may very well like Gnome. I have to say it is as good a desktop as any I've tried. I suppose it comes down to personal preferences.

As for xffm (xfce4 file manager) it's not so good. Fortunately we have ROX.

[mzilikazi]

champagnemojo You ARE running SID!

[nishtya]

Well, my previous experience with gdm is from morphix and gnoppix live CDs. Both I didn't care for for others reasons rather than gdm. Morphix I was stumped about how to get online with a dialup (apparently the live CD "suggests" broadband, this is no good because I really can't try out distro without going online). Gnoppix crashed and crashed some more when I tried a hd install. I found that odd because it was basically just my Knoppix with gnome and knoppix went fine.

Maybe this weekend I will suck down gnome packages on my spare machine (on a blazing 33.6 dialup) and have a go with it on the spare next weekend (when it is through downloading )

Champagne - I mix up the code names all the time, too. I rather just call them stable, testing and unstable I have partimage and would like to try, the description I think said for reiser and ext2 - I use ext3 (which is just ext2 with journaling, no? ) don't suppose I can hurt anything trying