It seems that several packages in 14.1 are not quite ready for prime time.

upower doesn't deal with the rearrangement of usb-hid devices in /sys/class. The problem is in the udev files in the package, not the code. The latest source on the web is OK, but the slackpkg is a couple of revisions older.

GTK-3 doesn't draw non-sensitive buttons correctly.

But the biggest problem seems to be with the new (version 14) xorg-server. There was a big push for xcb...

After fruitless attempts to get the MSI wireless dongle (comes with the Intel motherboard) to work, I bought a Hawking Wireless 150N wireless adapter. Still USB, but it has an external antenna and an amplifier. It worked better, but the problem with staying connected remained. It uses the same Ralink 2870 chip as the MSI adapter. Finally, I tried the "bleeding edge" wireless drivers in compat-wireless-2.6 (latest version). Although not all the drivers in the package will compile on my...

When XWindows was ported to 64 bit architectures, the decision was made (probably for legacy compatibility) not to add a 64 bit data format to routines that return overloaded pointers, specifically XGetWindowProperties. Pointers, which are 64 bits, are returned in 64 bit elements that are claimed to be 32 bits. There is no way to cope with this in user code, except to check which architecture you are running on. The compiler define "__x86_64" is set on Intel 64 bit compilers. wmctrl (not...

This was my first experience with 64 bit software. I did a stock install of Slackware64, and ran into the following issues:
(a) wpa_supplicant could not reauthenticate after a disconnect.
(b) wmctrl did not work correctly (could not return window list)
(a) I tried to patch wpa_cli to monitor wpa_supplicant and restart it, and discovered that when it is compiled with -O2 (as specified in its Makefile), gcc-4.5.2 compiled bad code - the return value of a function returning...

The wireless dongle that comes with the DP67BG has the USB ids for an MSI 3070. It contains a Ralink 2870 chip, which is not really very documented. Slackware64 comes with dueling drivers for it. Loading both is a bad idea. The ra2870sta driver needs to be blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. The ra2x00/ra2860 set of modules (4 in all) will be loaded. Needless to say, you need to go to the modular kernel to make all this work!

At this writing, there are problems keeping...