I have had a difficult time over the weekend with my new Slackware 12 installation and am thinking of reverting to 11.

My main problem was unpredictable total freezes of my PC, something I had never experienced before. I think this may have been due to a stability issue with the latest Nvidia driver. I have not had a freeze since I went back to an earlier version of Nvidia. Obviously this was not a Slackware problem but it sapped my will and patience.

My other problem at the moment is figuring out what to do with USB memory devices. I knew what to do when all I had was fstab and manual mounting. When udev came along I read up about how to write rules and get usb devices mounted in a predictable manner. Now I do not know what is going on. There is fstab, udev, dbus and Hal to consider, the documentation is poor and I cannot work out just what might happen when a device is plugged in. I think this is all a mess. Slackware 11 was working well for me and I am seriously considering abandoning 12.

If you liked the "old" way, it will still work just fine now. I tried to make that clear in the CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT document, but based on the number of people who are missing it, either I failed or a lot of people didn't bother to read it.

If you have custom udev rules to create static symlinks to certain devices, you can put them in /etc/fstab (just like always) with the "user" or "users" option, and HAL will honor whatever is in /etc/fstab. In essence, HAL is transparent if you want it to be. The only change you'll notice is that mounting and unmounting of devices using kde's media:// backend is actually *more* reliable.

I think part of my problem is that I have never liked using konqueror much. I usually use a file manager called worker which has loads of buttons which one can configure so that clicking a particular button mounts a certain device. When I get back to my Pc tonight I will try and set things up exactly as they were on Slackware 11 to see if that all works.

One odd thing I noticed last night was that dmesg was complainiing that some deviced did not have readable FAT tables (not had that problem before) but they were still mounting.

Another issue was problems in knowing whether devices have really been unmounted fully after copying over long files. It is obvious on the command line, and worker - worker freezes until the device is unmounted. I found last night that right clicking the icon and 'safely unmounting' left an icon bouncing around but it was not at all clear that the device was really safe to remove. As a result I have only coped over half a file. I hope the device does not need reformatting.

Well, that's not a HAL problem - that's a kde problem. Xfce's implementation makes it abundantly clear that it's not safe to pull the plug yet -- it hangs the window in a grayed out state until the umount is done.

Hi,

Robby, I think the big problem is that a lot of people don't read the provided documentation. Some are just over whelmed by documentation. As an old rather crude statement;

'He couldn't pour piss out of a boot, even if the instructions were on the bottom'. Is applicable in most cases!

I think the Slackware documentation is great. You guys have done a great job. Sure omissions occur but at least the team stays on top of the documentation. Thanks!

Just had another look at 'Changes and hints.txt'. It starts with the stepwise instructions for upgrading a 11.0 installation (is this file identical to upgrade.txt?) Since I was doing a fresh install why should I think these instructions relevant?

Top of CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT:
This file documents the instructions for upgrading to Slackware 12.0, the
packages added, removed, renamed, and/or split during the development cycle
from Slackware 11.0 through Slackware 12.0, and some potential "gotchas" that
users can avoid by arming themselves with a little knowledge.

From RELEASE_NOTES.TXT:
Since I've always written RELEASE_NOTES (at least in recent
releases) I feel like *something* should go here, but the fact is that
Robby about has everything covered in CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT. Thanks!

README.TXT:
For details of important changes from Slackware 11.0 to 12.0, see the file
'CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT'.

Slackware-HOWTO:
3.2 Booting the Slackware CD-ROM
If your machine has a bootable CD-ROM drive (you may need to configure
this in the system's BIOS settings) then you'll be able to directly
boot the first CD-ROM. If not, then see the README files in the bootdisks
and rootdisks directories for additional information about starting your
machine using floppy disks. The FAQ.TXT also has good information about
alternate methods of installation. Also, don't neglect to read the
CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT file...

Touche! .

Some guy on the net had a workaround that displayed a progress bar but it was for kubuntu. I could only get it to half work for slack 11's kde.

Hello

I has been installed Slackware 12 without problem, but KDE never like to me, Is too MSKDE I like this simple AND stables things, maybe a Desktop Environment for me is GNOME but I dont know the complete History the Official separation of Slackware and Gnome (some ones take me a link for a read)

KDE if not properly configuration cause a lot of instabilities. Its like MS explorer "sit" your system because try to be a part of the Shell.

Following rworkman's advice I have tried some of my various usbdevices in 12.0 with my old 11.0 fstab and udev settings. It all works. When the dialog box comes up on plugging in I click 'do nothing'.

One odd thing. Using Amarok with my mp3 player, a Sansa 280. When I click the button to connect it connects (I have amount command configured) but I get an odd error message 'Devices handled by this plugin must be mounted first. Please mount the device and click Connect again.' Despite the rror message it mounts and connects fine.

The only problems I've had are mostly solved now. The most serious was the synaptics touchpad on my laptop. The other thing was getting programs from my /opt/kde directories to the /usr directories where X and KDE are now located.

I'll admit I was concerned about HAL/DBUS interfering with my devices but I haven't noticed any at all. My devices are already organized with udev rules that create symlinks, and fstab entries for mounting. I always have ( and probably always will) use su -c "mount /dev/aabb" and the same for umount rather than adding user options to my fstab entries. Sure, KDE recognizes insertion but I just tell it to always do nothing. If HAL and DBUS bother you you can disable by making /etc/rc.d/rc.hald and rc.messagebus non-executable.

Would I downgrade my Slackware installation from 12 to 11? No, but I might replace Xorg 7.2 with the 6.9 from 11 and KDE with Ken Zalewski's packages from Linuxpackages.

arubin, I just finshed my previous post when I saw yours. Do you have any problems with your Sansa reading the id3 tags that Amarok writes? I spent all weekend trying to make tags that my Sansa c240 can read and finally did this morning with kid3.

As for your particular error, is your player in MTP or MSC mode? I keep mine in MSC mode and mount it manually before starting Amarok.

The sansa cannot read Amarok idtags. I write the tags using easytag which is a very nice program. This issue threw me for a while. I had to look at my mp3 files with a hexeditor before I realised that Amarok was writing the tags with version 2.4 which the sansa does not read.

I have the player in msc mode. Amarok can be configured off the settings menu to issue the mount commnd when you press the connect button.

My slackware 12 issue at the moment is that it doesn't look as nice as my installation of 11 but this might just be a question of recompiling freetype. Slackware 11 for me is so good that I am not at all sure that I won't stick with it.