SuSE Gnome 2.4 Not that the standard Gnome 2.2 desktop in SuSE 9 is very bad, slow or ugly or anything, but when I found the Gnome 2.4-packages at SuSE I couldn't resist installing them and try them out. I downloaded all packages from SuSE by ftp, put them all in the same folder and did all sorts of rpm commands and moved conflicting packages to and fro till everything was installed (all but one dev package, I think). SuSE Gnome 2.4 looked fine and worked very well, but I still wanted something more - I've seen Blue Curve in Red Hat... 8, I think it was, and some screen shots from a Gnome DE for Slackware, and I had a feeling that you could do so much more, and better looking, with Gnome and SuSE. XD2 So, what about Ximian Desktop? Yes, Ximian (www.ximian.com/products/desktop/download.html) looks really nice, and I like the instructions for installing it - my grandmother could do that if she still were alive! I started the installer, chose a mirror site nearby and started to download the packages. It all went very smooth and fast, but when it came to the actual installation there was a conflict, despite the initial control of the rpm database, and the installation was aborted and my system left untouched. I deinstalled the conflicting package(s) and did the Ximian installation again. This time everything went fine. I logged out and in again and... Wow! Ximian does... look... reeeally... nice! Yeah, that is the way it ought to be. But it was slow. And a lot of menu entries disappeared. And when I was to install a PDF writer in OpenOffice.org I couldn’t for my life find spadmin, not anywhere. I searched the support at the Ximian site but I couldn't find any matching answers. I tried to deinstall the Ximian version of OpenOffice.org and install the SuSE version again but that only lead to OpenOffice.org didn't work at all, at least not in Ximian (perhaps in KDE though). The update feature in Ximian is really nice and gives a thorough and professional impression (whole of Ximian does) and I guess you should use that instead of YaST, because after installing Ximian, Yast wanted me to update gdm2 again and unless I didn't do that, I wasn't able to get the rest of the updates - gdm2 is security, so I couldn't deselect it. ULB Gnome So, okay, what about James Ogley's ULB Gnome? I've used his packages for gFTP and Blufish for quite some time, and I installed almost all packages once in SuSE 8.2 and though it didn't look exactly like the screen shots at www.usr-local-bin.org, it looked very nice. First a clean installation of SuSE 9 Pro. At package selection I deselected 'KDE' and selected 'Gnome', 'Development for Gnome', 'Simple web server with Apache2' and some other things. After installation I logged in once as root, logged out again and closed down the system and turned the computer off for a while to cool it down and let everything settle. After a cup of coffee I started again and did all the recommended YaST updates, restarted and did the optional updates (MS fonts and nVidia). When upgrading the system by apt, following the apt guide at usr-local-bin (www.usr-local-bin.org/apt.php), a lot of packages were kept back for reasons I don't know, but I simply deinstalled them (Abiword, Mozilla, Epiphany, Evolution, etc.) till only three packages were held back (sane, libgsf and gstreamer-plugins). Then I installed ULB Gnome, and after that I used 'apt-get install' to get all the packages I deinstalled earlier. I did all this as root, and when I logged in on my user account, for the first time, it looked exactly like the screen shots of ULB Gnome at usr-local-bin - Wow! ULB Gnome looks reeeally nice! And it works very well too. Above all it's fast - it's definitely faster than XD2 (at least on my machine) and I think it's faster than SuSE Gnome, both 2.2 and 2.4. Some menu entries disappeared (mysqlcc, Maelstrom, audacity, xsane, opera - see attached file for almost a full list :-) but not at all as many as in XD2. And you can still use YaST for updates in ULB Gnome. Everything works very well in ULB Gnome and my language settings are not changed (as in XD2, where everything changed from Swedish to English). I like the default theme and icons in ULB Gnome, and the menus and layout in general looks and works very well. And the winner is... SuSE Gnome 2.4 was nice and worked well but wasn't that exciting. Ximian was easy to install and looked very nice, user-friendly and gave a most professional impression - it really is the way it ought to be, and it's a DE you're more than happy to show to people that are new to Linux - but it was slow, and it felt like it kind of took over the system a little too much, and it seemed to rely rather heavily on its own special solutions and ways of doing things (recognise that? :-) ULB Gnome, on the other hand, is also very good looking but faster and works very well and integrates better with SuSE - ULB Gnome really gives the impression of being an official part of SuSE, not just a DE that happens to work with SuSE as well as with some other distros. ULB Gnome is the DE I'm still using - it's stable, it's fast, it's very good looking and integrates very well with SuSE - thank you very much James! /Lars hydrogen gwc kino jazz coriander gtkam xsane gtoaster MozillaFirebird k3b BASS bcast mactor motv xawtv xboard mysqlcc Maelstrom -fullscreen xmms %U scribus %f opera %u vumeter -r CheckHardware --sound audacity CheckHardware --sound terminatorX CheckHardware --sound /usr/bin/timidity -iat CheckHardware --sound qamix /opt/OpenOffice.org/program/spadmin /usr/binjavaws %f