Hello everybody,

I think I've actually managed to remove Dropline Gnome from (one of) my Slackware box(es). I was prepared to get into extreme difficulties since Dropline installs its packages right on top of a large number of Slackware packages. Looking around here at LQ, the consensus seems to be that if you want to remove Dropline - don't.

I had Dropline installed since I thought I needed it to get nice fonts, but after some time I've become more and more convinced that it's not worth to have a whole Gnome environment installed just to get nice fonts - I want my system as clean as possible. (Furthermore, the freetype version in the Slackware-current tree is about the same as in Dropline, so you can get the true type fonts anyway.) Another reason I wanted to rid myself of Dropline is that they switched from XFree86 to X.Org, which Slackware hasn't done - if they ever do it - and I really wanted to avoid confusing my system too much.

So I tried to remove Dropline - and of course I ended up in serious troubles. At least it seemed like it. The shadow package was removed, which is needed to be able to login anywhere - I couldn't even su! Imagine the troubles before I realized that Luckily I had made a partition install on this machine, so after some init and root options at the boot line (init=/bin/bash root=/dev/hda5, to be specific (the 5 in /dev/hda5 is of course different on different systems)), I managed to reinstall shadow since I still had the package on another harddrive.

After that I couldn't fire up KDE, so I first tried to reinstall it, but it didn't work anyway. However, when I issued startkde at the command line, I found out that I had some stale temporary files in /tmp. This was solved by emptying the /tmp dir (except for the .ICE-unix and .X11-unix directories). So now I could launch KDE - nice

Other than these two troubles I've (as yet) only had an issue with gdk, which Mozilla needs. The problem was an unresolved library, which I managed to track down with ldd. And speaking of this: there will be a load of broken dependencies by removing Dropline. My friend in this matter was swaret, which resolved most of the dependencies just perfectly.

Currently (just a few hours later) the system seems to work just fine, but I have as yet to find out which programs I have to install again - but this time I'm gonna do it from the Slackware tree!

BTW, don't blame me if it doesn't work for you - I'm posting this just to let you know that it can be done, not to give a fool proof recipe

Cheers

I envy you, my friend. I am at my wit's end trying to recover from an erroneous install of Dropline Gnome. I am keeping my fingers crossed, hoping that slackupdate will be able to replace some of the junk left behind by the Dropline Uninstall process. Thanks for the swaret tip. I'll give it a shot, too. As to the stale KDE files in /tmp, I think I accidentally flushed most of them in frantic attempt to recover some wasted harddisk space. Thanks for posting. If anyone else has similar difficulties and has found a solution other than re-install from scratch, please post. I don't want to waste the bandwith on my DSL to fix/re-install/update. Not to mention recompiling all the add-on stuff, and a new 2.6.x kernel. I have searched here and on Dropline forums looking help, and Bebo was as close as I have seen.

Hello there,

I've never heard about slackupdate - are you referring to slapt-get? Well, anyway, to my experience swaret (www.swaret.org) can really help you out in resolving dependencies.

I've heard that Dropline messes in the a bunch of config files, but I haven't seen any of this - yet. I have still two boxes to remove Dropline from, and I hope that it will be as "easy" as it was on the first box.

Good luck to you, R_Shackleford, I hope you can sort it out.

Cheers

Hello again,

I've managed to root out Dropline from my second Slackware box too. The Dropline site was down yesterday, so the dropline-installer didn't work for some reason. Instead I wrote a little script that used removepkg to remove all the Dropline packages. The packages that are installed on a Slack box are listed in /var/adm/packages/ and the Dropline packages are easily identified since they end in "-<a number>dl"; use ls *-?dl to list them.

Just as on my first box (post #1) there were lots of broken dependencies, but these are both identified and fixed with swaret --dep.

This time I encountered another KDE problem, that I haven't seen before. In the end this appears to have been a KDM configuration issue. I did get a KDM login screen, but it didn't fire up KDE. This time I couldn't track the problem down by trying to start KDE from a console (startkde), but /var/log/messages had this entry:
I had a look in /opt/kde/share/config/kdm/ and found a README, and after reading that, I ran genkdmconf --no-old. The KDM login screen now had a different look (the default one, I think), and KDE started as it should.

I also ran into the Mozilla problem that I mentioned in my first post; when launching Mozilla there is an error message referring to some "relocation error" in /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-yadayada.so. It isn't very obvious how to solve this problem since libgdk-x11 exists and ldd'ing mozilla-bin doesn't give anything useful. When reaching this point I wondered what I had done the first time, and looked at my first post for info...to no avail. Of course I should have written it down the first time I did it - sorry about that. Backtracking my thoughts, I realize that I must have ldd'ed the gdk-x11 library itself. Anyway, install glib2 and it should work.

Well, HTH.

Thanks for this information. I wound up doing a clean install on my first Dropline screw-up. I'll try what have listed here for removing Drop from my second box. As to slackupdate, try this link http://128.173.184.249/slackupdate/

Thanks a lot for this information as I have also removed dropline gnome (I just wanted it for the xorg packages which I should've downloaded and installed myself).

However, I am having an issue with Mozilla / Galeon / Firefox (netscape works fine) When I go to linuxquestions.org or a friends website daoc.tconnect.net the browsers just close right away. No error message at all in the terminal.

As well, I am getting an error when trying to run gdesklets

ImportError: No module named gconf

however gconf is installed. *shakes his fist at dropline* I HATE YOU!

I fixed my problem with gdesklets just by reinstall pyorbit , gnome-python and pygtk however the crashing with the mozilla browsers seems to be a mystery wish I had an error to go on at least

OK, from your post you seem to say that you started Mozilla from a terminal, i.e. by typing mozilla &. Is this correct? In any case, I managed to track the error by doing this. The trick is to get some kind of error message somewhere. Try issuing just mozilla, i.e. without the ampersand. Perhaps also there are some error messages in /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog, dmesg, /var/log/debug, and so on.

Did you check the dependencies with swaret? I guess you did, otherwise you wouldn't have come this far...

Hey thanks for the reply. I've checked my dependencies with swaret and that's ok. I've checked those log files you mentioned and there doesn't seem to be any errors relating to mozilla segfaulting. I installed 1.7b and it's giving me this error when loading certain sites.

bash-2.05b# /usr/lib/mozilla-1.7b/run-mozilla.sh: line 451: 1761 Segmentation fault "$prog" ${1+"$@"}

Hello again,

Some weeks ago I succeeded in removing Dropline from my third and last box, so now I'm completely Dropline free! Yay! So, what can I say, three out of three attempts successful. Seems the trick is swaret, ldd and some reinstalling, especially shadow and glib2.

Cynar, sorry for not replying. I must have forgot about it, 'cause I just saw your last post again and wondered where that came from. I hope your Mozilla problem is solved by now. From what I understand of it, it seems to be something with Mozilla itself, but of course I can't be sure about that.

Cheers