This section gives a brief overview of Slackware-related news.

After a long period of consideration GNOME is dropped in Slackware-Current. From the ChangeLog:

gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and
   distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's
   been under consideration for more than four years.
      

This should come as no big surprise, since this has been announced pretty long ago. A widely circulated e-mail from Patrick Volkerding that was originally posted on the Dropline GNOME forums already indicated that the removal of GNOME was under consideration:

Anyway, suffice to say the jury is still out. Since GNOME 1.4 I've felt
that GNOME is going in a direction that doesn't fit well with Slackware's
goals, and for at least as long I've considered removing it completely and
taking whatever flames I get for that decision. Right now, I think
removing it would be the best thing for Slackware as it's become a
maintainance nightmare (unlike nearly every other ./configure'ed source,
GNOME doesn't build into packages easily with DESTDIR).

Not what you wanted to hear, I'm sure, but I do believe it would be best
to let Dropline produce Slackware's GNOME and quit wasting my own time
with it. Probably 1/3 of developement time here is used maintaining
GNOME, and *most* of the bug reports I get have something to do with GNOME
(and aren't bugs I caused, or can fix). KDE, on the other hand, tends to
build using the existing build scripts with no changes at all. I can
start the build and come back to finished packages in a few hours. A
GNOME update usually takes at least a week of manual labor, and another
week of cleaning up broken things. It's been a long time (like I said,
around GNOME 1.4), since I've felt the effort was worth the return. 
      

This does not mean that GNOME users are left out in the cold. Both the GNOME.SlackBuild and the GWARE projects provide GNOME 2.10 for Slackware Linux. Both projects that provide a non-intrusive version of GNOME, which means that replacement of official Slackware Linux packages is avoided. The better known Dropline GNOME project also provides GNOME 2.10 packages for Slackware Linux. But Dropline is highly intrusive, and amongst others add PAM and their own X.org builds. Time will tell what (if any) will become the defacto GNOME for Slackware Linux.

As usual, new KDE packages are available after the new release of KDE. New features in KDE 3.4 include:

Many other features are listed in the release notes. Proponents of new Linux desktop technologies might want to add that KDE now has DBUS/HAL support for keeping dynamic device icons in media:/. It should be noted that HAL is not included in Slackware Linux. At the moment HAL is limited to Linux kernel 2.6, and pretty experimental.

Many Slackware Linux fans were probably be relieved to hear that the The Unofficial Revised Slackware Book Project is now available through the Slackware Store. Now we can now finally go out, and give our newbie friends a good introductory work to Slackware Linux. Thanks go out to Alan Hicks and his team for their great work!