silly thread, silly answer.

what's the next LQ topic? Post anything you do not like about [protestantism, catholicism, budhism, islam]?

if you think slack is wrong, tell Pat. Don't start a silly revolution on LQ.

Sometimes moderators intervene when nothing is up. still, this [and similar] topics keep on polluting LQ.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
 

:):):)Just to let everyone know that I got lucky again this morning and although I am not sure how my Slack 13.1 is up and running... so thanks to all concerned for their part in giving me an operating system that's just what I need and want... LOL

ps this time I intend to try and find what the problem was... !

pps all life is a perspective when you describe things you describe yourself.

I've had 0 problems across 2 PC's and 5 installed systems.

Only thing I could wish for is a livecd kernel premade...

Slax or Wolvix, maybe?

I don't like KDE 4. That's a subjective opinion, not a comment about whether KDE 4 is good or bad. KDE 4 reminds me a lot of Windows Vista and Windows 7 (that I also don't like). The user interface has gotten prettier, but more awkward. I find myself wasting more time clicking through menus, scrolling things, and trying to figure out how to change the settings to make things easier that I do frequently. I like the KDE color scheme in Slackware 13.0 a lot better than 13.1.

I would prefer that Slackware use GRUB as the default bootloader.

I would like the "dmraid" utility to be included in Slackware, and on the installation CDs.

I would like Slackware to include some working versions of the proprietary ATI and nVidia drivers (or at least test with them to determine compatibility). Pretty much any time that I've installed Slackware, the drivers from ATI or nVidia have required a lot of effort to get working.

My top KDE annoyances are these.

There is no way to add a menu panel category to the KDE menu. I have to switch to the classic menu for that.

The KDE settings for event notifications does not allow me to select all the effects and disable sounds. It also does not allow me to use the keyboard to scroll through and disable sounds. I have to do two mouse clicks plus scroll the window to disable each sound effect individually.

Creating desktop icons is not intuitive and they don't integrate at all with other window managers such as XFCE.

Browsing to network folders is also confusing, and I'm never sure exactly what to type in the file manager to connect to shares. There seems to be an assumption that the network browser (showing computers and shares) is available, and that is not true unless computers are in the same workgroup on the same LAN.

Previous versions of KDE consistently used share syntax like this.

smb://computername/sharename

KDE 4 requires something else, and it seems to be different for Dolphin versus Konqueror.

I agree that that is a matter of taste. There is little to no Slackware influence here, because we use the default KDE colour scheme.

That will not happen anytime soon. None of the people in the Slackware team like grub very much. Grub also does not compile on slackware64 which makes the decision even harder to add it to the installer.

Now that would indeed be a good thing to add.

Not going to happen, due to restrictions in the distribution licenses.
Installing the binary nvidia or ati driver should not give you headaches however; it is not that difficult. What are your issues?

As a test, I just added a new category "Aliens" to the KDE menu, and I did not have to switch to "classic view" to achieve that. It only requires you to add an actual entry in the category menu to make it visible in the menu.

In "System Notifications", there is a tab "Player settings" where you can check "No audio output" which will disable all notification sounds.
And using TAB and arrow keys, I can configure any sound effect of any event source.

No idea about the integration with other DE's, but adding desktop icons is quite easy if you configure your "Desktop Activity" settings as a "folder view" instead of a "desktop"

I have no smb.conf file at all on this laptop, but Dolphin as well as Konqueror accept the notation smb://myserver/myshare and in my case of a server share that requires authentication, I got a nice password dialog where I could enter my credentials.

The thing is, the Linux desktop evolves, and this may require adaptation of the way you look at your computer and the way it can serve you. Things are not becoming impossible, they merely change.

Eric

Spot on ...it seems that the 64bit Nvidia driver is compiled using a newer compiler than the one used to compile 13.1... well... what the heck I want to try and compile something anyway... so I don,t mind.

I've never had a problem with the proprietary Nvidia driver downloaded from Nvidia.com

Pity. Grub works quite well and allows you to recover from screw-ups that would be fatal under lilo.

FWIW, grub-1.98 just successfully compiled on my Slackware64 13.1 setup. It isn't multi-lib. I freely admit that I haven't tested the result of the compile. :-)

Let me clarify that my recent problems have all been with the ATI drivers not nVidia. Mostly the issue is that it was not possible to install the driver without editing or patching files. It was difficult to find the correct patches and installation steps for Slackware 13.0 The newest release still requires some extra commands to build the driver for Slackware 13.1, but I did find those in a forum post.

I am currently struggling with the KDE desktop effects, and trying to get them to work with the ATI driver. This has been a source of frustration for me, though I really don't need them.

Changing the desktop settings to use Folder View did solve my problem of integrating the desktops and creating icons. Thanks for pointing out that setting. I didn't mention KDE Help but that is another area that could use some improvement. It seems to lag behind KDE functionality. It is better than it was in previous KDE versions.

It also seems that the menu is more configurable in KDE than when I last looked. I was able to define a new Application folder. Is there a way to configure the panel tabs to add a tab and an icon, or are they limited to "Favorites", "Applications", "Computer", "Recently Used" and "Leave"?

My desire to use GRUB might change after "mdadm" supports my RAID setup and I am able to make a working "initrd" with "mdadm". At the moment LILO cannot determine the correct information to work with my RAID setup. I haven't spent a lot of time trying to make LILO work, so it's possible that it can. Having LILO rewrite the boot sector every time the configuration changes is inconvenient for me, since I use the Vista "bootmgr" to chain to a file with a copy of the LILO boot sector. I've thought about writing a little 512 byte routine to chain to the actual superblock of my Linux partition to avoid that problem.

In spite of my complaints (or perhaps misunderstandings) I prefer Slackware to other distros. The Slackware user community and Slackbook are both valuable resources. Getting my two computers with RAID working has always been possible with Slackware and is getting easier with each release. Hopefully "mdadm" will add support for more RAID metadata formats if "dmraid" is not updated in the future.

I also would like 32-bit support to be a more standard part of the 64-bit Slackware release. Even if 32-bit isn't installed, it should be at least provided with the releases as a package. I am not yet ready to move to 64-bit due mainly to the issues with supporting my RAID setup. I had problems with building the ATI driver for 64-bit but I haven't tried that with the latest ATI release.

I have used Slackware for quite a while. Obviously, I like it. There are some occasional annoyances. Right now, my /tmp directory is full of cr*p and I can't find anything other than $rm -rf /tmp/* to deal with it. I guess my continuing complaint is packages accumulating in /tmp. Perhaps SBo could designate some environment variable such as SB0-TMP="~/.tmp" to make it easier for users to keep package collections/history together more easily.

I did find this:
http://packetstormsecurity.nl/linux/...min-FAQ-6.html

Any thoughts on a good script to clean up the /tmp directory?

Thanks

Being a non-savvy linux user as I would like to be, each release could have gotchas if one isn't up on the release notes, which in some cases could be totally esoteric to me, and past habits are hard to break. For example was the movement to plugdev, then hal, to no xorg.conf, and in 13.1 from /dev/hdc -> /dev/sr0, all of which have had big implications in relearning Slackware functionality. Rather than updating the kernel, I've relied installing new versions from scratch as I've always had problems in updating kernels. I've always liked Slackware's quickness compared to gui-based distributions, but the last straw in my main pc was getting cdrom, usb and wireless (using wicd) to work. Linux Mint (actually a version of ubuntu) worked without a hitch, although I've been trying to get rid of sickly green themes and replacing branded browsers.

In what way did cdrom and usb did not work for you? Wireless can be somewhat painful to set up, but I don't see big changes there from 12.2 to 13.1 (admittedly, I haven't bothered to use wicd but have used the rc.inet1.conf configuration file).

No complaints from me that are slackware-specific. I, too, prefer grub but it is easy enough for me to replace lilo post-install.

My headaches with 13.1 are all caused by kernel changes. I use slackware for embedded systems and some of them rely on the VESA framebuffer for initialization and status screens. There are half a dozen more little things in the current slackware kernel version like that, and in combination they've made upgrading my embedded systems more trouble than it is worth. I'll stick to 12.2 and 13.0 for those machines and projects.

Here's one thing I don't like, the defaults.

When you install slackware it uses the huge.s kernel, and then stays with it even after install. This is the source of problems, I suggest switching to generic as the default after install, although this may also cause problems.

Other defaults are problematic, but I can't think of them right now.

Perhaps you need to check /etc/group
Is your regular user a member of the plugdev and netdev groups? For me 13.1 was a completely painless transistion as my cdrom, usb, and wireless (using wicd) worked out of the box.

Please be a little more specific: you speak about a ton of problems but do not give a single example, so one can see your sentence as only spreading FUD. BTW, how heavy is a ton of problems ;)

Furthermore, as you already know very well, Slackware users are invited to switch to -generic with an initrd as soon as the system is installed and that has been the case for years. So really, I don't see your point here.

You know very well too why -generic is not the default at time of install. Among other reasons most file systems are not built in it so you would go for a kernel panic in most cases.

It's boring. I can have an install running X in minutes. After that, it only takes an hour or so to get everything just the way I want it. There's no challenge.

It's one of the first tasks I do when setting up my account. I've been following other threads with cdrom issues as the symptoms appear similar to mine. In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out if I'm starting to get a failing motherboard or hard drive. However, the other linux distribution installed totally without a hitch (it almost broke my heart just how painless it was compared to what I've done in slack).

LOL

I would have said I don't like having to configure my wireless through inet1.conf (Wicd doesn't work well with my laptop), but now that NetworkManager is on SlackBuilds.org I don't really have any complaints.

Slackware 13.1 is nearly perfect.

I'm not spreading FUD, Pat V is, because that's what he said in the changes and hints:

ftp://ftp.slackware.at/slackware64-1..._AND_HINTS.TXT

If you call this FUD, take it up with him not me. You can also search this forum.

generic + initrd should boot with any filesystem, the filesystem modules being part of the initrd.

P.S. I don't like people saying I'm spreading FUD.

I discovered a couple of weeks ago that the Hitachi 250GB drive I bought from Maplins for £60 was the source of many unexplainable problems,the drive shows no errors with any of the tests I have run on it but I have disconnected it for the second time and alls well...even my XP was freezing for moments at a time,I am pretty sure that it was this drive that screwed up my partition table at the time I was writing to the other drive so much so that I could,nt recover any of the logical ones,the primary partitions on both drives survived...
Lucky for me that I don,t keep anything of any value on my box...to me its like a Rubix cube,I could do the cube in around thirty seconds... it pulls apart and you just reassemble it correctly... in fairness to Slackware it does rather well considering the constant change in developing programs utilities,Pat dos,nt write these changes but he and the others have to continually accommodate them,considering the constant flux of change Slackware is doing rather well... LOL

Yes, but why can't -generic have *one* default filesystem built into it? If you don't want to mess with an initrd, you could just use the default filesystem and -generic would work fine. Everyone's probably got their own preference on what the "Slackware default" filesystem should be, but something bland like ext3 would suffice. If that's not your personal preference, then you'll have to use an initrd.

It seems more "slack" to just build your own kernel to fit your needs if you don't want an initrd. It's not a big deal to build in a file system. I like the fact that slackware keeps things general and let's me make my own decisions. JMO of course.

Sure, there's always that option. We're encouraged not to run custom kernels anymore though - at least if we want to report bugs. And it's even more effort than setting up the initrd. Seems like just adding one filesystem to -generic would add a major convenience, and it would also remove a stumbling point for new users. The only disadvantage I can see is a non-removable driver for people not using that fs. I don't see that causing a noticeable or even measurable performance hit though. It's not like the -generic kernel is all that small anymore anyway. It's now over 2.5MB - the days of it fitting on a floppy are long past. I'd say that if anyone is really bothered by a single default filesystem driver, they can be the ones to recompile to get rid of it. JMO, also.

I understand why -generic is built that way, and mkinitrd isn't that much of a hassle. It's just one more step to set up a new installation that I think could be avoided with a very minor kernel config tweak.

I have another idea.

Slackware's installer knows what the filesystem of the boot drive is (it uses that information to set up that fstab). Therefore, it can build an initrd with just that filesystem and then set you up with the generic kernel.

When you consider that the initrd might need to support things other than filesystems, though, it gets more complicated.

Doesn't that pose a problem for people who need special RAID drives for instance?

Too much trouble to update from one version to the next. It could be simplified without causing any kinds of problems, I'm sure.

I've tried to do in-place upgrades of Mandriva, Ubuntu and Slackware. Slackware is the only one that ever worked or worked right when it was done.

Agreed. Upgrades are well documented with Slackware. If you read the upgrade how tos you can avoid pitfalls.

Slackware is basically a rolling binary release. It's based upon constantly being upgraded, so it's a natural thang.

So you would have a -generic-xfs, a -generic-ext2, a -generic-reiserfs, etc., right?

But I often use an ext2 /boot and the rest as xfs - it was bad enough when I had to load support for xfs from a floppy.

Dude, that's going backwards. Really.

About kernels shipped with Slackware
 

The situation is good enough for me as it is.

After all it's not forbidden to chroot /new_slackware_root, make an initrd, edit lilo.conf to add a -generic entry and run lilo before rebooting after having completed Slackware's installation.

@H_TeXMeX_H:
- still waiting for a few examples of the _ton_of_problems_ you mentioned about using -huge
- I was prepared to hear that not everybody likes me, don't worry and be happy

Alright, at your request I have removed "tons of" from that post. I hope you're happy now. If you're not, I don't care, because I am right, that's why it is recommended that you use the generic kernel. If you're too lazy to search, and want me to do it for you, that's your problem.

@H_TeXMeX_H: Seems like a "dialogue de sourds" as we say in French. OK, let's say it's my fault as I speak and write English poorly. Case closed on my side.

What I like about Slackware!
 

Hi,

I'm going to flip this as a lot of users seem to miss a lot by not reading the great documentation that is provided for the Slackware install. If everyone would follow the lead from the docs then a lot of problems would be alleviated. Most of the problems that I notice here on LQ would be not sticking their heads up if the OP had just read a doc such as: 'CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT' or associative text files.

Another big problem is that most users default to the huge kernel when PV & Team suggestion is to use the generic kernel for daily use with a initrd. Which if the user reads the suggested file '/boot/README.initrd' to know how to implement thus having a bootable system. I could continue with examples but it would be better for everyone that is interested to peruse the Slackware Forum.

I do like the idea or philosophy behind Slackware of open information and functionality! Not hidden nor is it difficult to learn how things are implemented. OPEN!

My point is 'RTFM' or 'RTFD' that are available to assist in the Slackware venture to hopefully have a working Slackware system without too much effort. But when you have a problem then be sure to post it with relative information to the Slackware Forum.

So I guess that my 'something that you do not like about slackware' is that a lot of new users don't prepare themselves for a new install. There are responsibilities on everyone to know what's necessary to have a good functioning system. Again 'I don't wanna hold your hand'... What's the next chord or is that chorus? I gotta read the sheet when I can find it!

:hattip:

Sigh. No, one -generic, one default filesystem. Not using the default filesystem? Build an initrd, exactly like you have to now. Using more than one filesystem? Build an initrd, exactly like you have to now.

Don't care to get fancy with the filesystems? One filesystem for everything fine? Then you wouldn't have to fool with mkinitrd.

Add the following line to /etc/rc.d/rc.6:

Make sure you put it in before the filesystem unmounts. Works for me.

As for whoever was complaining about Nvidia drivers, the packages at Slackbuilds.org work fine. I installed Slackware for the very first time early last week and had 3D acceleration working within 30 minutes of booting up.

Complaints about Slackware? I have one. I don't like the full install. Yes, I know, disc space is cheap and I have a lot of it... but I like simple, clean menus that aren't chock-full of applications I don't use.
Other than that i think Slack is pretty much flawless... and I've only been using it for a little over a week.

Hi,

You have the option to tag it. Or do a minimal and add to suit your install. I agree that a full install may cause the lose of time but a recommended install type for a new user. Plus the Slackware distribution is used world wide to multiple user types. So some people wants are totally different than others. I think PV & Team do a wonderful balanced install and a good methodology to allow user selections.

:hattip:

Welcome to our forum! :)
I'm happy to hear you like Slackware. I was a Debian user before (nice distro). Now that Slackware is up and running you could use pkgtool to remove the applications that you never use.

# pkgtool

2handband;
there are so many options with Slackware, the most simplistic (perfect) distro ever.
Tagfiles

thats the key to any minimal reproducable slack install
tagfiles

http://www.bilbos-stekkie.com/tagger/tagfiles.html

http://www.flaterco.com/kb/slackware.html

http://www.slackbook.org/html/packag...-tagfiles.html

http://chelskov.org/node/4

http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/tools/tagfiles/

http://mysticalgr.awardspace.com/?p=353&page=2

EDIT: LOL why did it doublepost?

2handband;
there are so many options with Slackware, the most simplistic (perfect) distro ever.
Tagfiles

thats the key to any minimal reproducable slack install
tagfiles

http://www.bilbos-stekkie.com/tagger/tagfiles.html

http://www.flaterco.com/kb/slackware.html

http://www.slackbook.org/html/packag...-tagfiles.html

http://chelskov.org/node/4

http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/tools/tagfiles/

http://mysticalgr.awardspace.com/?p=353&page=2

That's what I've been doing. Next time I do a Slackware install (I'm going to slowly migrate the rest of the computers in the house from Debian to Slack) I'll cherry-pick through the packages... I had no idea it was going to install so much stuff. I've got this one cleaned out pretty good at this point; I've probably got some orphaned libraries lying around but whatever. Glad to be here!

Actually, the installer already should know what filesystems you intend to use for your partitions. It asks you fairly early in the process.

How many disk drive controllers are you going to build into the generic image? The installer doesn't know about that.

I think you'll end up with what we already have: a kernel with everything in it so that you can do an initial install and a generic kernel with the bare minimum to boot with which you use an initrd.

Unless someone can write a script that would troll through /sys to figure out what minimum set of modules should be loaded by initrd to allow you to boot into runlevel 3.

The script /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh does just that.

Eric

I use the huge kernel for a first boot on a clean install, then I compile a custom kernel before all else. Today, I compiled 2.6.34 and that replaced 2.6.32. Compiling kernels is getting very complex with each new release, and I am no kernel expert.

Also today, I experimented with an initrd on the stock generic kernel. It worked just fine, but it was a bit slower to boot than my kernel. That said, we are only talking about ~10 seconds. Later, when I have more time, I am going to give the above script a run and see what happens. Curiosity killed the cat!

The generic kernel is about 2.4mb and my kernel is about 1.9mb. Not a big difference anymore.

Cool. Does the installer ask if you want to run this? (I haven't done a full install in quite a while.)

For that matter, why isn't this in root's standard path? It Would Be Nice (TM) if tab-completion of "mkinitrd" offered "mkinitrd_command_generator.sh" as a possible completion.

Okay, another issue... it was a mistake to package Firefox 3.6. It's crash-prone. I'm going to remove it and install 3.5.

No, but internally, the team had this working end of 2008 already. It's just never gone public.

Not everything needs to be that obvious. Reading documentation in the Slackware DVD's root-directory is what reveals the existence of this script.

Eric