New to Slack 9 & have questions.
 

hello, i just got slack 9 and installed it, and i like it. up to recently i was using mandrake and have been using rh8 for a few months too. i thought i would try slackware for many reasons, basically it looks like it is less fiddly than other distros and more open. easier to figure out.

anyway, i have a few things i haven't figured out yet that i was hoping somebody might give me the answers to! :D

they are probably all quite simple things, but here goes:

in /etc/rc.keymap (or whatever is the correct file, i am not at home right now so cannot check), i have it set so that my keyboard is a UK one, and this is tru on all the tty screens, but in X, my keyboard acts exactly as if it were a US one. where should i specify that i want to use a uk one instead? is it in /etc/XF86Config?

when i do '/sbin/shutdown -h now' the machine halts cleanly, but does not power down. in mandrake and red hat this would totally switch the machine off, but not slackware.

when i mount a fat32 filesystem (capable of win95 style long filenames) slackware appears to shorten every file name to the old msdos 8.3 format, and this stays the case even if i copy to the ext3 partition, so if i have a file that i downloaded onto a floppy, called 'cmenu-2c.tar.gz' and i mount it in slackware, it will end up being called 'cmenu-~1.gz' instead, then if i rename it (after editing) and stick it on a floppy again (or a vfat zip disk), when i open it up on another machine, it will invariably be called 'CMENU-~1.GZ', which is not the best.

finally (for now) how do i get fonts not to look crap in X? in red hat i could import TTF fonts, of which i have a few, and mandrake even had a crummy GUI to do the same job, what are the generally accepted way to import fonts and generally make them look prettier in slackware? also, can i make imported fonts available to all apps (office suites, browsers) easily? and so forth.

Now i am using one of the kernels off the slackware CD, but i am planning to recompile from the 2.4.20 source very soon (probably tonight) which might well fix some of the above i suspect (most notably the vfat and shutdown issues) but i wanted to get the opinions of other people too, since my slack experience comes to a total of about 8 hours.

thanks very much in advance.

Hi

I stuck slack 9 on my laptop last week, temporary problem caused by putting / on what used to be /boot. Amazingly it worked, but stopped doing so very rapidly once I tried to download anything as / was full!!

I have noticed the same problem with keyboard settings, OK in GUI, but in an X-terminal, the map is different. Am trying to figure it.

My Laptop wouldn't power down either, I had to modprobe apmd to get it to work. If you edit /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and uncomment the apmd line, it will load at boot, and your machine will switch itself off for you.

Filename problem, I'm pretty sure the stock kernel doesn't support long DOS filenames (remember something about that in the install howto I think). Should be able to fix that when you recompile.

Fonts, never got that far, I thought that was how they were meant to look!


Give that a few minutes and see how many things I've got wrong!!!!!

Jim

There is a place to specify your keyboard in XF86Config

Filename truncation problem is probably caused by the filesystem you specified in /etc/fstab. Make sure you mount the win partition as type vfat, not msdos.

The font types are controlled by the desktop you use. Sorry, I don't have my Slack computer available at work, if you're using KDE the configuation is part of the Kmenu.

Walt

thanks for the replies, guys!
i changed the setting for the keyboard map in XF86Config and now all xterms and X applications use the right keymap. so that's good.

thanks for the tip about apmd, i will do that.

also, thanks for the tip about msdos vs vfat, i am not at home right now so i cannot check to see if it says vfat or msdos already, still you would think i'd notice something like that since i already added lines in my fstab for the zip drive and two other linux partitions, well maybe not, i'm more fluffheaded than i think, i think.

as for fonts, i have only got so far as using mozilla. I will probably be using XFce, and have used GNOME 2.2 for a day to see what i think, but i am fairly sure XFce doesn't do fonts, and anyway mozilla (which has terrible fonts) is not integrated into any desktop environment so it wouldn't pay attention to any desktop specific font changes i make. i was kind of hoping for something on the level of XWindows, like getting the x font server going or something (note: i have no knowledge of how fonts are managed from distro to distro, i am just trying to get it to "work right"!)

thanks for your comments, folks, i'll post again if there are any more problems or if i find solutions to the font issue.