Thanks in advance for even reading this. I wasn't sure if this belonged in installation or here since I can complete installation and boot KDE, but everything is broken immediately after the install.

I have been using Slackware for a little over a month now and love it. I have used these forums to help me out as I was and still am a big Linux newbie. Unfortunately I have been getting frustrated with it as of late because of issues with programs being broken.

After a fresh install Gaim, Firefox and Thunderbird were inoperative. I'm sure there's more but those are the three main programs I use and the first three I noticed. I had managed to work through the errors and get them running, but then when I ran Swaret and upgraded they broke again.

I spent hours on Google and here and in the docs, man pages and HOWTOs on the disc trying to troubleshoot, but for every issue I fixed (eg. libpangocairo-* missing sort of problems) at least one more cropped up. I just got to work and don't have the exact errors handy to post right now, but I will get them this evening if they are needed.

In a fit of frustration I installed OpenSUSE last night, but I want my Slack back. I loved it's stability and speed. Anyway, the whole reason I chose Slack as my distro was so I could learn more in depth about Linux and programming.

Apologies for the long post. I guess I'd like to know if I am doing something wrong when installing. I am installing from downloaded ISOs of Slackware 11.0. The first time, I did a newbie installation and skipped a lot of packages I didn't think I'd need, but when I reformatted I did a full installation with the same issues.

I can think only of corrupted packages on the .iso image or a bad cd-rom driver. All those apps you mention works out of the box (if you do a full install of course..).
Swaret will break the system if you point it to -current AND/OR you don't read the documentation before updating. I'd personally recommend to learn the system first.

Thanks, I will try downloading new images and actually checking the MD5 instead of being in such a hurry to just install and start breaking things I thought that might be an issue since I didn't think they would make a download available with half the OS broken out of the box.

As far as learning the system what can you recommend? I have read the book on slackware.com, a few newbie tutorials and most of the included documentation and google/linux has helped me through countless situations. I am looking at a few slack specific books on Amazon, so I guess that would be a good place to start.

Thanks for your suggestion and hopefully next time I post will be a better question from a functional slack box at my home.

http://slackbook.org/
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
Wow, thanks, this should keep me busy for a while!

i'd add that when doing a re-install make sure you re-format the partitions.

I would update things manually rather than trusting swaret (but that's me). I would also update as little as possible. For example, I don't use firefox or thunderbird off the disk. I just download and install the newest version from mozilla.

I think after that experience I am going to follow your lead. I was just feeling lazy that day. I had been able to work out all the issues on the previous install until I broke it all again with Swaret. Thanks for the helpful replies, I am currently reinstalling Slack on my desktop with two freshly burned discs which passed md5 checks.

[Edit] Installed and working great, thanks to everyone who posted.