So, after 2 attempts, finally have it working, or at least, as far as I know. Without ever posting here, this forum was a real help. Many of the links and things that you guys provide are helpful.

So I guess, I'm wondering what the first order of business is.

If I can explain...my other "first" distros were of course, Mandrake, Suse, and RH, all b/c they made things pretty easy for 'noobs.' Still running Mandrake 9.0 on a machine at work, as I enjoy what they've done with it in terms of fonts, kde, e.t.c. But on the laptop, all of them ran like tired dogs.

So I went with undead linux, which said it was an offshot of Slackware 7.0. I loved the way it looked (Enlightenment), and I actually learned how to compile a kernel (or at least, I learned how to follow the steps written down), thanks to it not coming with pcmcia support enabled .

However, it was too unstable for my machine. The window mgr kept crashing out.

So, here we are with Slack, and hoping this is it for the laptop. I am going to run enlightenment as my wm, b/c it seems like it can be graphics intensive w/out being as slow as KDE is (and I only mean on the laptop...my "slower" machine at work runs KDE fine). Mainly, though, I love the way it looks, so its not a "logical" decision.

After creating a user, what should I do next? I'm leaning towards trying to take out all the unneeded processes. I've searched in these forums and found out that "top" will show me what's running, and how much its taking up...is there a good site/doc for just explaining what is actually needed, based on what I need?

Secondly, should I just take the processes out of some initialization file, or should I try to uninstall the whole thing to clear up space?

For example, apache got installed. Well, at some point I may want to run apache for web testing, but probably not now. If I just want to have it not start up upon boot, which rc. file do I look for?

If I wanted to uninstall it, how would I do that? I've read about "make uninstall" for files that I've installed myself. Does this work with files that the Slack "full" install put on the machine as well?

So I guess I'm asking what services I need on the laptop.
As well, I'm asking if I just want to take a service out of what I call "startup" or boot, what's the easiest way to find where that service is started up from?

More questions (sorry, its noob excitement):



{edit--ok, forget the wireless question, hadn't searched enough...will try the results of my searches later...sorry.}

--is it OK to type "slack" instead of "slackware?"

--Mail and web clients...I love evolution and mozilla, both seem heavy...I've heard about a browser called slickstone (or something like that) that uses the same rendering as mozilla, but is more lightweight. Anybody have experience with it?

As for mail, I've seen recommendations for pine, but that seems a little too barebones for me...anything that has more of the look/feel of evolution but a bit "lighter" on the cpu?


Thanks, sorry for so many q's....

marcus

Pine is very nice. The only thing really barebones about it is that it is text only. It is an IMAP mail program by default, but you can set it up to check your POP mail. The worst part is the configuration. There is basically no way you are going to know how to do some things without checking some documentation. Pine configured the way you like it is great to use. Also handy if your Xwindows goes out.
Here is a good Pine information link if you're interested.
I use Slack a little and am not sure what you should call it. Perhaps if you check the Slackware site.

About mail-client, maybe a program called 'sylpheed' could be of interest.
I'ts a very fast client

* Quick response
* Graceful, and sophisticated interface
* Easy configuration, intuitive operation
* Abundant features

http://sylpheed.good-day.net/

About this you can run pkgtool as root and see what you have installed on your system and remove what you don't want.

Hey guys, thanks for all the replies.

I just checked out the Sylpheed recommendation, that may be exactly what I'm looking for.

and I'll try the pkgtool suggestion sometime today.

thanks again.

Oops!

Last night I installed syphleed. Well, I must have done something wrong, b/c I could only run it as root.

So I went to the bin and did a chmod 777 on syphleed, and then i couldn't run it as either.

Thought, maybe chmod 666 was the answer, so tried that.

then tried 777 again.

then did a chown 'marcus' (my user name).

well that was apparently a bad thing--my su/root password quit working at that point.

couldn't even issue a shutdown command as I couldn't get in as root.

improperly powered down (hit the switch), and then whenever I rebooted, the system was read-only, and couldn't do anything from there, at all.

Sooooo...hit this board for answers on how to solve the read-only thing, none of them helped.

so, since nothing important was on there, trashed, and did a re-install.

guess I need to do some more research before I start issuing commands willie-nillie, eh?

doh.

so, since I still want to try/use this syphleed prog (launch speed beats mozilla/evolution by a long shot), what is the proper way to install it so that any user can launch it, not just the root user?

especially, since I could install it as root, b/c my "regular" user couldn't?