I installed Slack 10.0 on a new computer with SATA hd and a Broadcom 5700 ethernet card.
The net card was not recognized, so I compiled in the newest kernel (I believe 2.6.13.1).
I can now boot back WinXP, the original kernel, and the new kernel as well.
When booted with new kernel, Xwindows started fine, I was able to browse Internet a bit, ...
The first problem I ran into was when I tred to ssh to a remote machine. It failed with a message "hotkey lookup failed" or something like that. I tried then to ssh to the localhost - same failure. I then tried to lookup the manpage for ssh, but the "man" lookup failed with the message "No man ... in ... or a display problem". Also "less file.txt" does nothing, but "more file.txt" displays the file correctly. Vi, emacs, jed work o.k. as far as I can tell. When out of Xwindows, i.e., in plain console, "man something" displays the first screen of the man page and then dies with the error message like in xterm.
When I boot with the old kernel, no problems with either man, less or "ssh localhost".
I am guessing that I made some wrong choices during "manuconfig" process, but have no idea what part of the config file to look at. I don't mind to compile the kernel again, but a pointer to what to look for in the config process will be greatly appreciated.

This may or may not be relevant, but here is a bit of history, just in case. When I first booted this computer with Slack 10.0 install CD, linux did not see my hard disk; /dev/hda was (and still is) the CD. In order to install Slack, I downloaded "sata.i" boot image from Slackware site, and install 1 and 2 disks, and the network disk. The idea was to try network install of Slack 10.1. As my network card was not recognized, I then installed Slack 10.0 from the CD's I have. There is a conflict in that /lib/modules/ contains modules for linux-2.4.26, and "sata.i" disk I used for installation is based on linux-2.4.29.
I started using Linux in 1996 with Slack 3.0, but it seems that I have had more trouble in getting it properly installed on this sata hd computer than in all previous years of use combined. Part of it is that, due to a luck of problems to solve, I have not been learning much in a long time

I'd suggest upgrading the entire distro to 10.1 first,
and then install hotplug and udev from current. There's
numerous problems with the old tools and newer 2.6
kernels.


Cheers,
Tink

Thank you. This sounds like the best thing to do. I might try compiling a 2.4 kernel first - curious to see if that is going to make any difference.
Milan

I remember there was a problem with 2.6 kernel and less (and other utilities too) sometime ago. There was a problem with udev if my memory doesn't fail. Try searching this forums for a fix or as suggested upgrade to 10.1.

"It should work"(tm)


Cheers,
Tink

Thank you guys. I found some posts describing some identical problems like mine with man, less, ssh. One suggestion with modifying /etc/udev/rules.d/udev.rules did not work for me, but perhaps I did not understand it correctly. It has been a long day for, so I am going to return to this problem tomorrow.
Milan

It looks like the problem is fixed. Thank you gbonvehi, your suggestion pointed me in the right direction. After disabling udev, man, ssh, less all seem to be working now.
"Disabling udev" means that I did "chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.udev", and then rebooted.