I'm a bit conservative about replacing things that work with
bleeding edge versions on my main system... like last time I upgraded 
to the latest "potato" version of xdm, it broke and I had to go back to 
logging in at the console and typing startx.  Well this time I wasn't 
disappointed...  the Helix install of Gnome 1.2.1 actually works really 
well, and doesn't get apt confused either.  As it says on their web page 
you just do

lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh

and it's about as automated as it can get.  For some reason the applets
didn't install the first time, but maybe it had something to do with 
the old gnome still being running while I installed the new one.  apt-get
install gnome-applets fixed it afterwards.  It's getting so slick these
days!  gdm works, so I can forget about fixing xdm.  I figured out how
to use xbanner and gkrellm in the gdm startup.  The audio support is 
getting darn good too; esd allows xmms and desktop audio events to play 
at the same time (I know this has been true in theory for ages, but this 
is the first time it's worked for me, without having to compile bleeding-edge
code myself).  Gnome and sawfish both generate audio events.  And sawfish
actually hasn't crashed yet, which is more than I can say for the last
time I tried it.  Gnome themes work completely (before, the bitmaps never
showed up for some reason... widgets always looked the same, just with
different colors).  I can actually start gnome with gnome-session and
let it pick the window manager, instead of the other way around.  The
screen saver control panel works.  Just lots of little fixes that make
it work the way it's supposed to.

Next I'm going to try to compile galeon; getting really tired of netscape
crashing or hanging all the time.  I wish somebody would make a debian
package for that.  Or maybe I will try using alien to install the rpm's;
anybody done that here?

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
 __) | | \________________________________________________________________
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