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GNOME SlackBuild (GSB)

Software Included

Note that this list is by no means an exhausitve list. Rather, it highlights some of the applications shipped with GSB.

The GNOME Desktop

GNOME 2.26.3 is the latest version of the GNOME Desktop. There have been a lot of improvements in GNOME 2.26.3, which include better desktop searching, a more organized Evolution email and calendar client, enhanced image browsing, simplified control panel, efficient power management, and powerful desktop tools, as well as a great new documentation web site. For a complete summary of what is new to the GNOME 2.26.3 Desktop, please refer to the release notes. GNOME SlackBuild is designed to bring the greatest features of GNOME to Slackware, integrating seamlessly into a standard install. It uses the standard Slackware package system, and aims to replace as few packages as possible. For a list of packages that require updating, please see the replaced packages file.


Metacity and Compiz

GNOME SlackBuild provides two different window managers for your GNOME Desktop, Metacity, which is the default GNOME Window Manager, as well as Compiz-Fusion, a Window Manager which offers a wide range of spectacular effects for a 3D accelerated desktop.

GNOMESlackBuild offers a full compiz set configured for and integrated into your GNOME desktop. Compiz-fusion is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It seeks to provide an easy and fun-to-use windowing environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to provide impressive effects, amazing speed and unrivalled usefulness. For more information, see Compiz-Fusion's home page.

GNOME officially incorporates the Metacity window manager, a fully integrated window manager that uses GTK+ for visual elements, communicates tightly with the panel and other desktop elements, and is configured straight from the GNOME preferences dialogs. It includes full keyboard navigation, including navigation to the panel and the desktop background, and it very themeable. For more information, see Metacity's home page.


Accessibility

GNOME SlackBuild provides a full accessibility set, making it easy for users with disabilities to use GNOME. GSB offers Orca, a free, open source scriptable screen reader. Using various combinations of speech, braille, and magnification, Orca helps provide access to applications and toolkits that run under the GNOME desktop. Also available is an eSpeak voice synthesiser, GNOME Mousetweaks, and Dasher, an accessible text entry application that uses pointing gestures rather than typing.


Mulitmedia

GNOME SlackBuild uses PulseAudio as a sound server, and provides a wide assortment of multimedia programs based on the GStreamer framework, so users are able to play back a wide variety of media types (sound and video files, streaming network audio/video, DVDs, CD-ROMs, and more.) There are many applications, and GSB offers a range of choice for users to choose.

Totem

Totem is the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based GStreamer. It features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume controls, DVD/CD support, visualizations, SHOUTcast and Internet radio, as well as keyboard navigation, and comes with a video thumbnailer for the Nautilus file manager, and plugins for Mozilla Firefox. For more information, see Totem's home page.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application, similar to Apple's iTunes. It is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, and based on the powerful GStreamer media framework. It includes such features as a music browser, searching and sorting, internet radio, audio visualizations, iPod, MTP and USB Music Player support, album art, CD ripping, podcasts and support for Magnatune and Jamendo. For more information, see Rhythmbox's home page.


Mono C#

Mono, the open source development platform based on the .NET framework. Mono includes compilers, an ECMA-compatible runtime engine (the Common Language Runtime, or CLR), and many libraries. The libraries include Microsoft .NET compatibility libraries (including ADO.NET, System.Windows.Forms and ASP.NET), Mono's own and third party class libraries, Gtk#, a set of .NET bindings for the gtk+ toolkit and assorted GNOME libraries. There are many great GNOME applications written in Mono, and GSB provides a few of them:

Banshee

Banshee is a fully featured Mono application aimed at the GNOME Desktop for organizing and playing your music. You can import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee's simple, powerful interface. Banshee can also rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported. Banshee also has support for podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, and much more. For more information, see Banshee's home page.

Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for GNOME. Simple and easy to use, but with potential to help you organize the ideas and information you deal with every day. You can find more details about Tomboy from it's home page.

MonoDevelop is a free GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages. The main features of MonoDevelop are code completion, class management, and project support. For more information, see MonoDevelop's home page.


Networking

NetworkManager

NetworkManager attempts to make networking invisible. When moving into areas you've been before, NetworkManager automatically connects to the last user designated network. Likewise, when back at the desk, NetworkManager will switch to the faster, more reliable wired connection. GSB provides the latest NetworkManager 0.7, including the network-manager applet for your GNOME panel, and VPN connection support with openvpn, pptp and vpnc. For more information, see NetworkManager's home page.

Evolution

Evolution provides integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring functionality to users of the GNOME desktop. It features intelligent junk mail control, foldering searching, integrated security, GNOME Desktop integration, mail filters, web calendars, collaboration server support, and multiple account management. For more information, see Evolution's home page.

Epiphany

Epiphany is the web browser for the GNOME desktop. Its goal is to be simple and easy to use. Epiphany ties together many GNOME components in order to let you focus on the Web content, instead of the browser application. Powered by the Gecko engine, Epiphany displays webpages with the same speed and accuracy as Mozilla Firefox. In addition, it provides an elegant, responsive and uncomplicated user interface that fits in perfectly with GNOME. For more information, see Epiphany's's home page.

Deluge

Deluge is a full-featured BitTorrent client for Linux. It uses libtorrent in it's backend and PyGTK for it's user interface. Deluge features a rich plugin collection (in fact, most of Deluge's functionality is available in the form of plugins). Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive, and is Free Software and licensed under the GNU General Public License. For more information, see Deluge's home page.

Ekiga

Ekiga is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME. Ekiga uses both the H.323 and SIP protocols. It supports many audio and video codecs, and is interoperable with other SIP compliant software and also with Microsoft NetMeeting. It supports proxies, registrars, instant messaging, transparent NAT, call forwarding, and call holds and transfers. For more information, see Ekiga's home page.

Liferea

Liferea is a news reader capable of aggregating syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs into a single location for easy viewing. It supports subscriptions to feeds that contain audio or video media enclosures, is very fast, easy to use, and integrates beautifully into the GNOME Desktop. For more information, see Liferea's home page.


GNOME Office Suite and OpenOffice

GNOME SlackBuild includes a full GNOME office suite, including a multiple format document viewer, a fully feature word processor, a personal database management program, document search tools, a flowcart/diagram tool, and a accurate and fast spreadsheet program.

OpenOffice.Org 3.1 Suite

In additional to a full GNOME Office suite, which includes Abiword, GNUCash, Gnumeric, and Glom, GNOME SlackBuild provides the option of an integrated OpenOffice package, including Writer, Impress, Math, and Web Writer, all built using the GTK widget set to seamlessly match your GNOME Desktop. There is also a package to install an OpenOffice.org submenu in your GNOME Applications menu. For more information see OpenOffice.org's home page.

Tracker

Tracker is a tool designed to extract information and metadata about your personal data so that it can be searched easily and quickly. By using Tracker, you no longer have to remember where you've left your files. To locate a file you only need to remember something about it, such as a word in the document or the artist of the song. This is because as well as searching for files in the traditional way, by name and location, Tracker searches files' contents For more information see Tracker's home page.

Abiword

AbiWord is a lean and fast full-featured word processor, with lots of features useful for your daily work, personal needs, or for just some good old typing fun. AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice.org documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more. It also supports page layouts, mail merge, and has an assortment of plugins. For more information, see Abiword's home page.

Gnumeric

Gnumeric is a spreadsheet application for the GNOME Desktop. Gnumeric has the ability to import and export data in several file formats, including CSV, Microsoft Excel, HTML, LaTeX, Lotus 1-2-3, OpenDocument and Quattro Pro; its native format is the Gnumeric file format, an XML file compressed with gzip. It includes all of the spreadsheet functions of the North American edition of Microsoft Excel and many functions unique to Gnumeric. For more information, see Gnumeric's home page.

Glom

Glom is a database design tool, loosely based on FileMaker Pro, but with a separate database server. Its simple framework should be enough to implement most database applications. Glom has high-level features such as relationships, lookups, related fields, related records, calculated fields, drop-down choices, searching, reports, users and groups. Glom uses the PostgreSQL database backend. Glom is open source software, released under the GPL License. For more information, see Glom's home page.

Dia

Dia is a diagram creation program, similar to Visio, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many kinds of diagrams. It has special objects to help draw relationship and UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and others. It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format, export diagrams to many formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and print diagrams, even ones that span multiple pages. For more information, see Dia's home page.

GNU Cash Financial Management

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. For more information see GNU Cash's home page.


Development Environment

GNOME SlackBuild also provides an intergrated development environment for C/C++, HTML, and Mono.

Anjuta

Anjuta is a versatile Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C and C++ on GNU/Linux. It has been written for GTK/GNOME and features a number of advanced programming facilities. These include project management, application wizards, an on-board interactive debugger, and a powerful source editor with source browsing and syntax highlighting. For more information, see Anjuta's home page.

Bluefish

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites. Bluefish is an open source development project, released under the GNU GPL licence. For more information, see 's home page.

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