Soooo....just curious what everyone thinks of 13 so far?

I'm upgrading tomorrow I think and just wondering what people really like/don't like so far. I've heard a lot about problems with k3b needing KDE3 compatible libraries to work properly but not much else in the way of criticism (good or bad). Let's hear it

I'm running KDE and my head is still spinning from all the changes.

My old desktop is stuffed into a folder display in the upper left corner of the screen.

Dolphin replaced Konqueror as the default file manager and it's different.

I never had to mess with xorg config, it just works.

I'm using the nv drivers instead of the nVidia proprietary drivers for the first time.

I had to recompile KVM but I knew that was going to happen.

I suspect I'll need to learn more about d-bus but ignorance is bliss right now.

All in all I'm very impressed with Slack 13 and with KDE 4.2.4.

1 members found this post helpful.

READ all the accompanying documentation before you start the upgrade. Robby did a great write up on how to do an upgrade.

Been using it prior to RC1, rock solid as usual.

I've just gotten 13 installed (32-bit). Can't comment on much yet (because I've literally just finished the install and logged in for the first time), except to say that the new kernel logo is very freaky (and yes, I know it's not a Slackware thing!).

Don't forget to submit reviews to the Slackware section of LQ's Distro Reviews. Helps to keep them all in one place and more easily findable.

XavierP: Nice, I haven't seen that section before.

<ontopic>
Well, I wanted to start install it on my laptop just to try it out. I don't really have time to make things work if something goes wrong on my stationary computer, so I'll have to wait with my primary computer until I know I have the time to fix it if it should go wrong.

Unfortunately my old laptop doesn't support booting from DVDs (all thoe it is a DVD player?) so I have an old slackware CD laying around that I'm using as a bootdisk. I use the setup program as well, but I mount the newest slackware image and install it that way.

After an hour of carefully selecting packages I wanted, i finally got passed bsd-games. The old setup program didn't like the new file compression, so that basically for me was an our wasted :P

So heads up, it looks to me that you can't use old slackware cds/dvds as bootdisk anymore.

You should still be able to use an old Slack floppy or USB boot disk to kick off the install though.

Actually I just installed the nVidia binary drivers. The install process created a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I discovered errors in /var/log/Xorg.0.log letting HAL and the X server configure everything.

My first clues were occasional window locks and ghost popups. When I tried glxgears and it didn't work that was confirmation. After installing NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.36-pkg1.run the desktop transparency features started working.

I like it really much!
KDE 4 is fancy and, though I had to get used to the new paradigm, the overall usability is greatly improved compared to former versions.

Meanwhile I found a few little snags, that I can very well live with. Most of it is related to encoding problems and incomplete localisation. I set UTF-8 as standard, and all the comments and hints in Slackware include warnings that this might cause problems for some programs. Unfortunately some new KDE programs are affected, which is amazing, as I thought that Qt4 would support Unicode better than previous versions.

Example: KMail
Almost everything is translated to my language, just not the names of weekdays under which messages older than a few weeks are grouped.

Example: Dolphin
It sometimes struggles to display file names containing special national characters correctly. In other cases it displays them as expected, but cannot copy the file or directory to another location. The error message then shows a scrambled replacement code for the special character.
In all these cases, the CLI (I use Konsole) helped me out, so it's not a big deal. Should be fixed, nevertheless, though, as for bulk copies it's enverving when you get an error message for one file hidden in the deepest level of a complex directory structure, and you now have to check what has been copied properly and what failed.

Apart from these minor, more or less cosmetic problems, I am VERY happy with Slackware 13. The advantages of KDE 4 weigh out them by far.

gargamel

Would you be kind enough to expand on these broad, general statements? How is "Usability greatly improved"? "Advantages of KDE 4..." What advantages are those? What does KDE 4, other than being "pretty" do, that 3.5.10 does not?
Thank you.

A lot has changed, but so far everything is working great.

I like the new "look" of KDE4. And I am impressed by my new slackware64 13 distro.
I needed a little time for the new menu stiles and some application changes in KDE4. But I like changes. I have found two difficulties.

1. kdevelop - Since I was using this application a lot I am a little confused by it. I just read on the kdevelop site this:
I was thinking about upgrade (if it will be possible) from 3.9.91 to 3.9.95 I don't know if it changes something.
I don't know if the bugs are between 3.9.91 and 3.9.95 or between 3.5.. and 3.9.91.

2. I cannot start kpackage. It tells me this:
But this is more about KDE then slackware itself.

Kpackage needs smart to work. You can get a SlackBuild here Even then it's not really supported on Slackware - see here for more information.

Quick review: Slackware 13, 64 bit, ext4 FS

KDE 4, I went back to the Classic Menu style.

Not much there in Slackbuilds for 64bit. *see below

I miss Gnome... I'm sure (I hope) the folks at GSB are working away on a Slackware 13 release.

I have not run into any problems.

-JJ

*just read the release notes on $ARCH

I have it installed twice on the same machine. I installed originally using ext4. I ran into trouble with the boot loader and my system. Grub, mepis,slack,and lilo not platying nice with each other. I can fix it but its not pretty but it works.

It is running great and I really like it. First time I did not have to configure Xorg.conf to get my mouse working. Even the horizontal scroll with the tilting mouse wheels works.

I am kind of use to kde3 but kde4 is very different for me. I had to do a bit of reading,searching and fumbling around to get some things to my liking. I am suprised how fast it is. I was not expecting it. I am very pleased and going to stick with slack for a while. I have used it before and left for ububtu. But now am back and happy.

After my boot loader troubles I decided to wipe another partition and install slack again using ext3 fs. I wanted to see if there was any noticeable difference between ext3 and ext4. With this install I had three errors during the install. All seemed well after I booted. I used it for several hours with a couple of hard freezes. Now I cannot start firefox and can only run a couple of minutes without a hard freeze. I am not sure if my disks are faulty or just a fluke. I will use it for learning to see if I can solve the problems. I know its my fault for the problems on this install. I should have aborted and started it again.

Two thumbs up for Pat and the team, great job.

Kelean.