MLED 14.0 released!
 

Hello fellow Slackers,

Happy new year to all of you.

It's been a few months in the making, and now here it is:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/14.0/

General description and detailed installation instructions:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/14.0/README_MLED.TXT

Enjoy!

Niki

Very cool, man!! Thanks for doing this, Niki. Happy New Year! :)

This looks really interesting!
Many thanks.

Hi!

The artwork is nice. The package collection is good at first sight.

A few remarks after 10 minutes of usage:

Why do you skip the nouveau/nv drivers from the 'x' series? By default there were no
X session without the nouveau driver for me. Do you suggests to use the proprietary driver
by this selection, if yes why not provide it?

The full-transparent terminal is nearly unreadable on top of anything (at least for me).

Why there is no hints for the icons in the panel at the bottom? (some icons are not trivial
at least for novices)

Are you planning to provide security updates for your package set?

fdeak

Hi kikinovak

A question:

I have a eee-701Sd with 8GB SSD. I did a full install of slackware-14.0 but it's too big, I have no room to move. I am considering vector or salix as an alternative. Approximately how much disk space will MLED take?

TIA

Hi fdeak,

1) I had some poor experience with the nouveau drivers, where some had a nasty tendeny to freeze on some machines. And yes, the user is supposed to grab and build the latest driver from NVidia (or build a package from SBo).

2) Sorry for the transparent terminal. I never open it on top of anything except the background image. But then, YMMV.

3) I disabled the hinting for the icons because the infobubbles keep hiding the icons next to them. If you don't know what an icon means, take a peek in the main application menu.

4) Yes, I'm planning to provide security updates.

I don't know how much disk space it takes. I'd say give it a try.

If you have to choose between Vector and Salix, I'd definitely go for Salix, which is a very nice distro.

The Vector installer is a mess.

Hi kikinovak,

First I forgot to say that I wish you a good luck to you with your MLED edition :-)

Altough I have no problem with my nvidia under XFCE, I respect your decision, but it would be better to write something about it in the README_MLED.TXT.



Do you plan to create an install iso for MLED? Installing with the current method is a litte bit complicated.

fdeak

Well, it's not like Vector or Salix ("for the lazy Slacker"), and creating an ISO would actually mean publishing my own distro, which this is not meant to be. Let's say the MLED project aims to provide a full-blown Xfce desktop with bells and whistles in the spirit of what the GnomeSlackBuild people did for GNOME.

I'll try to be more specific in my README, though.

Cheers,

Niki

Right, here goes.

Cheers,

Niki

Thanks for your response kikinovak

As I said before I was considering MLED on the eee PC but declined and am now installing salix-14.0-xfce. The reason is more or less as stated that I need some room to move. You don't get much with 8 gig, minus about 600M for swap.

However, I have an old R51 Thinkpad that was running current (from June last year with updates) that I decided to reformat because the XP install was about due for refreshing and I wanted to try MLED anyway.

Something went wrong with running mkfontdir in installation, I got "bus error" 4 times, which I don't know what it means but I'm guessing 4 fonts failed to install correctly, let's hope that they are ones the system and I don't use with en_AU.utf8. I can't say if this is because of MLED or Slackware installer. Anyway, I'll find out soon enough if it comes back to bite me, however I will re-run the mkfondir and mkfontscale commands on the font directories to see if it gets fixed or can be reproduced. (EDIT: did that, "Bus error" occurred again.. seems the problem is with mkfontscale in 100dpi and 75dpi ["Invalid fonts.scale in 100dpi/", then "Bus error" same for 75dpi] :( ). I wonder if it's kernel related? I use the huge.s kernel as the pentium M doesn't support PAE.

I did make a mistake with your instructions though.. I added my user on first boot. I didn't absorb that when I RTFM! Well, I had to set up wireless anyway so that's probably not so bad. It's the first time I ever used networkmanager, I like it much better than wicd. Setup was painless.

Anyway, it is all installed and updated and looking very nice!

Ok, I owe you at least the disk usage ;)
This is a clean MLED install almost to the letter with 1 user added, updated, upgraded, however I didn't clean the menus, that would be minimal saving I would expect. A bit too much for the eee pc though :p ..

Thanks very much for the hard work! :hattip:

I'm puzzled about the mkfontdir/mkfontscale error. Don't really know where this could come from. On the other hand, I don't think you have to be stuck with the huge.s kernel. I'm running Slackware + MLED on a Panasonic Toughbook with a Pentium M processor like you, and I'm using the generic SMP kernel without problems.

Running 'cleanmenu' as root gives you more explicit menu entries. Supported languages : english, german and french.

There are different versions of Pentium M CPUs. Those with a FSB frequency of 400MHz don't support PAE, those with 533MHz FSB frequency do.

Hello,

Thanks a lot for sharing your work.

I wanted to have a look and, why not, install MLED. You did very good selections of software, and fit and finish is nice on the screenshots.

But it seems the README_MLED is not available anymore...?

Sorry, it's currently being rehauled. I'm now using much stuff from Salix and SBo on top of a standard Slackware install (to avoid effort duplication), and I'm currently rewriting the documentation.

I just launched a new blog, which will contain some articles about Slackware. Here's a first page with infos on MLED.

http://www.kikinovak.net/index.php?p...rprise-Desktop

Comments, suggestions and bug reports can be left in the Comments section.

Cheers,

Niki

SalixOS would certainly be a great option for an eeePC in IMHO, however as an alternative you could use these tag files based on SalixOS install options (they obviously don't have everything from their SalixOS equivalents, since Salix has extra packages but they provide a good base to build up from with further packages from Slackware or SlackBuilds.org).

This thread might also prove useful.

P.S. This post is not meant to take anything away from the hard work that kikinovak has done. Though I have yet to try it, I have every faith that MLED will make a great desktop. I only wanted to offer alternative options.