Slackware 14 on VirtualBox, minimal XCFE/LXDE install
 

Hi,

I am trying to install Slackware 14 on VirtualBox from within Lubuntu, because of the decreased performance running on VirtualBox I don't want to go the usual newbie route of installing everything.

So I need help deciding which packages I need and don't need. Does anyone have a link to a resource which explains which how to get a basic install running XFCE (LXDE preferred but I gather it's not recommended)

Thanks

You won't get decreased performance with installing everything. Slackware is not like Ubuntu (which enables all installed services by default), it will ask you at install time what to enable. So the easiest way without any performance hit is the default installation (which is by the way not necessarily the newbie route, I always make the default install, except on my EeePC 701, which has not enough storage space for that).

Thanks for the reply.

Well I should have said I actually did an install using the default option, I managed to build a set of garage shelves (about 5 hours work) before it finished installing. Then when it came to restarting VirtualBox freaked out and said it was going to take three hours to save my changes so I just discarded it as something was obviously going horribly wrong.

Every time I would check on the installation progress it would be installing something random, multiple pdf viewers, support for languages I have never heard of, hundreds of development tools I am not likely to every use etc. etc.

Thinking about it, maybe this is an issue with VirtualBox rather than Slackware. I grabbed the version from the repositories, I should probably get the version on the VirtualBox website.

Try Salix, it's a trimmed down offshoot of Slackware using one application per task.

http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/Home

It sounds more like a problem with hard drive access speed to me -- so it would take an age to install anything and to save the machine state to disk. Is your hard drive performing OK in everyday use? What are the specifications of the host machine?

Asus X55C, Intel Core i3-2350M 2.3GHz, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 500 gig Hitachi something or other hdd.

Only had it a few months but not had any performance issues before, pretty quick running Lubuntu for everyday stuff.

Cool, I will give this a go, thanks.

Well, you ought not to have problems with that setup, your problem just reminded me of running VMs from a slow drive.

Hmmmmmm, I am hesitant to try again. My plan was to get my head around Slackware on the VirtualBox then ditch Lubuntu once I felt confident enough. Do you think Salix will properly prepare me for the world of Slackware? I see it has automated dependency resolution which is a bit of a departure from Slackware proper.

Salix will give you some insight into running Slackware. But the World Of Slackware isn't as dark, difficult, and dangerous as some people claim. :)

Or maybe I will install Arch ;)

Well it was for me when I tried it two years ago, I remember spending ages getting my network connection working, USB drive wouldn't mount, couldn't create desktop shortcuts....the simplest of tasks and I was off reading how-to's and pestering people on forums for hours on end. It wasn't fun.

I can imagine getting wireless and certain graphics hardware might be difficult under Slackware (I've not used wireless and I use the nVIDIA driver form their site when I run Slackware) but other than that it's the same as any other distro to get things going. If you choose KDE or XFCE you shouldn't notice much, if any, difference between it any any other distro.
If you do a full install then a lot of packages are very simple to install too. I've not done my own dependency resolution though so I can't say whether that's difficult or not.
I tend to use Debian because I'm always installing different WMs, DEs and other software so it's easier to just install resolved packages from the repositories. But if I wanted a stable, clean, straightforward install and/or wasn't so lazy I'd be using Slackware.

Admittedly I am technologically challenged, but I am keen to learn.

Well, maybe it wouldn't hurt to give it one more go.

It takes about 20 minutes for a full install of slackware 14 on my core2 duo 2.66 dell, so I would suggest that you should be able to do it in 15 minutes or less on that machine. If you have problems with the video or wireless then go ahead and update/upgrade to current and you will probably have those solved. Always do a full install and then you can remove anything that you do not like.

Just to clarify why I mentioned wireless and graphics drivers. For the wireless I have on my netbook under Debian, for example, I have to add non-free repositories then simply "apt-get install firmware-ralink" whereas under Slackware it would take a little longer as seen here.
I would not avoid Slackware because of the few extra minutes it may take to install something which only needs doing once though -- I only mention the above so that AdiLQ123 is prepared for a little work and realises it's not as much as you'd think.

If you will note when the "as seen here" article was written, this has been corrected in slackware 14, you no longer
have to do that. When you do the install just tell it to use networkmanager, all drivers will be installed and you will just
click networkmanager insert ssid and passcode and click connect.

Good to see Slackware installs getting even smoother. :D