Slackware 11 success

[Peter <sw98234 hotmail com>]

OK, so I'm stubborn. I was able to get garnome and Slackware to work with
the exception of the programs ekiga, yelp, and epiphany. Since I don't
primarily use gnome, just some of it's applications, this is not a
problem. I think if I compiled in the firefox development libraries
provided with garnome, yelp and epiphany would work anyway.

Nonetheless, there were a few workarounds which were necessary which I
would like to outline here.

1) Setup garnome so that affected programs don't abend.
move desktop/ekiga, desktop/epiphany, desktop/yelp to dotted files or to
another directory.

e.g. mv yelp .yelp

2) Slackware needs some additional programs not provided.

XML::Simple 
http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-Simple/

You can run CPAN or download and compile the source.

Pyrex
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python/Pyrex/

Install with Python

Hermes
(I don't see why this is needed, but it's easy to make and install)
http://clanlib.org/hermes/

3) At this point, you are ready to compile garnome. I did make
paranoid-install in desktop. Remember to recompute the checksum for pwlib.

Cross your fingers. If all goes according to plan, the compile should run
its course.

4) Daemons don't load properly without a little setup. The following
groups and usernames need defining:

a) groups: netdev, avahi, haldaemon
(as root, groupadd ....)
b) users: dbus, avahi, haldaemon
(users need to belong to groups as above)

useradd dbus -g netdev
useradd avahi -g avahi
useradd haldaemon -g haldaemon

NOTE*** the default username for dbus from garnome is messagebus. This
should be changed in Slackware. I chose to edit the
$GARNOME/etc/dbus-1/system.conf under where it says Run as special user.

5) Create a startup script. NOTE the README file example is slightly
incorrect. I put this into rc.local. Some users may wish to put them into
individual rc scripts.

GARNOME=/opt/gnome/2.16.0 # my area

rm -rf $GARNOME/var/run/dbus/pid  # readme example incorrect*
rm -rf $GARNOME/var/run/avahi-daemon/pid
rm -rf $GARNOME/var/run/haldaemon.pid

$GARNOME/bin/dbus-daemon --system
$GARNOME/sbin/avahi-daemon -D
$GARNOME/sbin/avahi-dnsconfd -D
$GARNOME/sbin/hald

* README has rm -rf $GARNOME/var/run/messagebus.pid which is not a valid
file and an error would be reported AFAIK.

6) starting a user session.

The startup script runs fine as provided. I source it and comment out the
gnome session line since I don't use gnome primarily. 

peter mars:~$ source garnome.sh

then I start kde, or any other wm.

7) Problems:

Only problem I see so far is that Evolution cannot find it's button images
when launched from outside of gnome. Even when local dbus is run, gconfd-2
loaded, it cannot find it's button images. When launched inside of gnome,
it is fine. I tried linking directories from ~/.local/share/icons, but
have not found the solution yet.

HTH others.
-- 
Peter