hello all

[Sam Halliday <sam neutrino phy uct ac za>]

hello everybody,

i must admit that i am a long time KDE user, and after recently upgrading to 
KDE3, i realised (finally)... i need to switch, its getting to damn bloated, 
and well, lets just say the spinning of my hard drive still 20 seconds after 
startup and the incessant crashes have reminded me somewhat of why i left M$ 
in the first place.....

to cut a long story short, I'm looking to switch to GNOME, but i need a few 
applications first of all, and i was wondering what the GNOME equivalents 
were....

1 - and most important, i use KMatplot for scientific 3d plotting and pixmap 
plotting, this is an essential program and i would require a good 
replacement... i seen a program who's name escapes me which did almost the 
same thing (Ive never tried it though) but i felt, after seeing the 
dependency list that it was also bloated. i don't have python, and i would 
like to avoid installing as i already have too many languages on my system... 
but i suspect i may need it anyway for GNOME and scientific stuff.

2 - i use Kmail for my mail, it is very nice i must admit, it allows me to run 
scripts before mail checks and has GPG integration... is there such a mailer 
for GNOME?

3 - I am a M$ passport holder on M$N Messenger, simply because thats all my 
uneducated friends know about when it comes to messenger clients... KDE has a 
nice KMerlin program for that, is there a GNOME equivalent?

4 - The is integrated spell checking with aspell on KDE, is this a feature of 
GNOME?

5 - i like CPU and network device monitors on my task bar? can i get this in 
GNOME?

6 - there is a nice floppy formatter under KDE, does GNOME have an equivalent?

I am not prepared to keep any old KDE libs around at all... so running KDE 
apps under GNOME is out of the question, I'm looking for a full switch over

thanks in advance to anyone willing to help out!!
cheers,
Sam
-- 
handshaking protocol, n:
	A process employed by hostile hardware devices to initate a
	terse but civil dialogue, which, in turn, is characterised by
	occasional misunderstanding, sulking, and name-calling.