Hi,
I was wondering if this was possible. Mostly I want to understand what GNOME does exactly? Couldn't one just run applications, given the availability of GTK+, and of course X11? Of course, I'm not sure (which is why I'm asking the question), but it looks to me that GNOME just "organizes" the GUI to make it more of a desktop, and offers some tools and utilities and such. Is this correct or is there something more to it?
Thanks!
That's pretty much it, yes. You can run GTK+ apps on KDE (just like you can run Qt apps under Gnome). Gnome is the desktop "environment", individual applications can use whatever toolkit they like (though it's true that using GTK+ makes interaction with other Gnome applications easier).
GNOME is a desktop environment and a development platform. It is not necessarily required to run GTK+ apps. For example, you can be using a KDE-based distro and still be able to run GTK+ apps as long as you have the appropriate libraries installed. One caveat: some GTK+ apps use components/utilities from the GNOME desktop environment. To get your GTK+ app to run, you may have to install components from GNOME. Depending on what all is needed, you may end up installing most of the GNOME desktop environment just to meet the dependencies of your applications.
That being said, there is nothing that strictly requires GNOME in order to run GTK+ apps. As long as you have all of the libraries required by the app, you should be able to run it regardless of your desktop environment.
all you need to run gtk apps is the appropriate gtk/gnome libraries installed. Same with kde apps and kde/qt dependencies. However, some applications will rely on other services running, and won't work without them.
What are you trying to do?