Happiness
 

Just thought I'd let everybody know...

I am running on Slack and plan to stay that way!!!

I now have just about everything running on Slackware that I did on Windows. I have cd's burning, dvd's playing, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein kicking total boody! I can't tell you how happy I am.

I've been running Linux alongside Windows for almost a year. I ran Lycoris and Mandrake for a short period for each. I ran Redhat (7.2 then 8.0) for the most time. But I always wanted Slackware to work, seeing as how I'm a sub-genius and all (not officially, though). I just felt too intimidated by all of the necessary configuration.

So, this past week, I decided to give Slackware 8.1 a whirl, not really expecting it to work at all. But, within 2 days, I pretty much have the whole thing up and running. I've had to do a good bit of configuration by hand, but I realized that it's actually a GOOD thing. I know exactly how to do it if I ever need to install it again. Which I will be doing soon on my other box, so that I can have a dedicated web server for my wedding web site, so people can rsvp and the like. Never could get dvd's playing on Redhat. I have to give Redhat credit- it made me see all of the flaws in the gui-configurators all of the newer distros are using. They make it so that, if you DO have to go in and do something by hand, it's a major pain in the ass.

Slackware has been a breath of fresh air. Patrick Volkerding's comments in most of the config files are wonderful. And the error messages - I love that they actually tell you what the problem might be. It's good to see that somebody in the Linux community is making a distro infused with humor. We shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

Only a few issues left -- need support for burn-proof for my spankin' new cd burner, and I wouldn't mind it if Mplayer's dvd output looked a little better. Also, does anybody know if Unreal Tournament 2003 comes with a Linux installer? I'd love to have it.

I'll be around, so it's good to be a part of the Slackware community. Feels like home already.

Brian

It's good to hear a satisfied user. I'm also happy with Slack and will keep it around even though I try other distros too.

I can't wait for version 9 or whateva it will be to come out!

Mplayer plays DVD's very good. DVDs are high quality do theres no reason why Mplayer's output should be crappy. On my slackbox DVDs play with very good quality. Nonetheless Mplayer has a couple of commandline flags you can pass it to tweak the output quality. Read the man page.
UT2k3 has a Linux installer that comes on the 3rd CD or it can be downloaded from the net. The installatuion is very time consuming, and you need a beast of a computer to make it run at decent frame rates at high quality. Also it works only with NVIDIA cards and their drivers. (This is not a linux problem, bitch at the developers for not supporting anything else.) UT2K3 is great graphics-wise, really amazing, but the gameplay is the same as in UT, so i suggest you just stick with normal UT and put some add ons to make it cool.
For the burner, i dunno what the burn proof thing is. I have a crappy $20 burner, but it works. ;)
HTH
-NSKL

UPDATE!!!
 

Well, all of my problems are now solved. DVD qualiy is fine - I just happened to be watching a movie from 1981 at first...can't account for the grain in the initial film!

Also have cd burning up & running flawlessly. Have the new cdrtools with xcdroast. It works very well.

Also just ordered UT2003 from Tuxgames. I have played the demo, and it's sweet. I'm running an Athlon XP 1700 with an NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440 and 512 MB DDR... It flies. The newest NVIDIA kernel modules (while they taint the kernel by being proprietary) also kick up the refresth rate even higher. I got all of the extra libraries that were missing from the dropline gnome installation, and all of its programs are working fine.

And, to top it all off, I have not booted into my Windows partition once in almost a week now. This makes me super happy.

I'm gonna pay for this distro... Patrick Volkerding deserves a medal for this software!

Brian

Nice work there! :)

When I get WineX installed (Gonna give them some credit and buy it) and got Half Life + CS + DoD up and running, over i go...(oh, and when i get my netserver up with linux, otherwise i have no net connection in Linux, heh)...

It's so much fun, ain't it! You seem to be having a bawl, and learning a lot...how long have you been into Linux all together? Did you install that first distro a year ago?

My year would be just about coming up...heh :D

docGonzo2000: You migt want to try Eroaster instead of XcdRoast. It's much nicer.
-NSKL

Eroaster
 

I'd love to try it, but I'm having a lot of trouble installing eroaster. I can't seem to get the gnome-python lib installed correctly. Any ideas? (Dropline gnome on Slack 8.1)

Please see my post one directory up, new thread.