Hey all, spent last night installing Slackware Linux, and found the entire operation fairly painless having installed BSD and RedHat but never spent much time with either after that. At the end of the install, it asked if id like some sort of mouse feature which would allow me to copy and paste text from the commandline/shell (non x-windows) which sounded all good.

However, being that this is on a laptop, everytime my hand brushes the touchpad, the mouse cursor in the screen (little white box) goes crazy, and really throws me, so what im trying to do is disable that copy and paste feature.

I know that its put a line into a config or startup file somewhere, but have no idea where to look or even what this feature is called, i've tried reading through MAN and i've tried googling for a solid hour, but no results, so I was hoping someone here might be able to help me out, as i really dont want to sit through the entire install again.

Thanks very much

Sounds like GPM - general purpose mouse

After a quick google, that sounds like the puppy (thanks for the helping hand), now can anyone tell me which file the line that automatically starts it at boot-up will be in, so i can disable that so i dont have to do KillAll GPM all the time?

Depends on your distro. Try looking in /etc/rc.d or /etc/init.d

Its Slackware 10.1 if that helps at all.

Since you're using Slack, as root, run "chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.gpm". This will make gpm's startup script unexecutable, and won't run at boot. Hope it helps.

You seem to know alot about Slack, im slowly getting there with it, the next real mission is getting Wireless to work, once i've done that, i can make the linux laptop my primary machine. Do you have any ideas about sites that would make good reading/reference on Slack, as books are exceedingly thin on the ground. Additionally any print books that are good references when using Slack would be appreciated, there are lots for Redhat, Fedora, Suse, etc... but they seem to focus on the visual, which whilst its usefull for the odd bit and piece, im really not interested in.

I really don't know much about Slackware, or even Linux in general. I'm just your average user who has picked up a book, read a lot online, and has had to work out several problems. If you're really serious about it, you'll pass me up in no time . Read a lot on this forum, there's some good information here and really helpful/friendly people.

The online Slackware book: http://www.slackbook.org (Lots of Slack-related info here)

Making your own packages: http://www.linuxpackages.net/howto.p...erfect+Package
(This'll give you a good idea of how to go about making packages for Slack. Some things, like the naming scheme, is linuxpackages.net specific, but you'll still learn a bit)

The book titled "Running Linux" by O'Reilly contains lots of information, not specific to any distro. I think the best way to go about learning Slack is to learn Linux in general, because it's not a distro with all the fancy GUI tools that are distro-specific. Like they say, "If you want to learn Red Hat, use Red Hat. If you want to learn Linux, use Slackware."

I also think learning to program in C/C++ would be very beneficial to learning Linux. I can't really vouch for this since I haven't delved into programming yet, but it seems like it would help greatly. And...don't forget to learn your shell...probably bash.

There's so much information out there, just look around. I've barely touched on the subject. Sometimes learning one thing will lead to another, just go with it.