OK, i just gave up on linux. I installed windows and i will keep using windows until they make linux slackware or anyother one mature.

This is for anyone out there that wants ideas:

Why don't you fuse KDE or any interface to the windows x and the fuse that to linux, or atleast making linux, hardware aware like WIndows. It would be a grate thing to do. And have a main site, for all the distro into one. There you have autoupdates. That involve little or no intervention. That would facilitate hardware installing. What is this $#|? in witch you have to configure a MOUSE!. Basic things should be self installing.

The End.


runlevel0, thanks for helping me. I'll keep linux in mind till its better . Also thanks for the others too.
Later. BTW i am i Delphi Programmer. I was a Linux newbie .
But i can forcast linux will become better than windows. Ppl should FOCUS on ONE linux version. Not just another way to take advantage and get money out of Linux.

For future reference, you can put commands in /etc/rc.d/rc.local that you want to execute automatically. I can't remember exactly when they execute, but I know they do sometime between when everything else has finished (but before the login prompt) and right after you log in. This assumes you log in through the text console, as is default in Slackware. You could also refer to the book (www.slackware.org/book) if you need some assistance with configuration.

On an unrelated note, Slackware 10.1 uses kernel version 2.4.29.

EDIT: Some clarification on Slackware. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Slackware is more Linux-like than about half of the other distros. On some distros, you never see a terminal window unless there was some burning need. On others, you'll never see X unless you explicitly installed it. Slackware is by no means an easy Linux distro, but on the same token it's not the hardest. Slackware lets you do basic things if you so desired (hell, you can set runlevel 4 and if you're lucky you'll never see a terminal). Slackware, as you know, also starts by default in runlevel 3, which means multiuser in the terminal. This should've been an indicator that you'd actually have to do a bit of work to get things working. Now I'll address your main questions.

X has been "fused," more or less, with a couple of distros. I can't tell you any offhand, but they're there.

If you want Slackware to "autodetect" hardware on startup, you could edit /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and uncomment every modprobe line. I don't know how stable this is however, but I'll assume it's fine except for hardware that has VERY similar brothers that use drivers and can be mistaken for one another.

If you desired ANY more automatic control, you'd probably have to write a shell script. Linux can't do everything for you like Windows does.

Slackware has a package browser (www.slackware.org/pb), which lets you see and get, if you need, packages from a particular release of Slackware, or even see what the most recent version of a package is.

I've installed Slackware on three systems, and all three times I've NEVER had to configure a mouse (granted, all three systems used a PS/2 mouse, but one had an AT keyboard which also worked without any configuration). You probably had a special mouse or infrequently used HID, which would require some special configuration.
Long story short, if you want a Linux distro that's completely easy and graphical, go out and buy Linspire. No, seriously. You should try it.

Chimera1234, Linux is about choice, that's why no one focus on one distribution. Most people that does something for Linux (except big commercial oriented software which is little compared to the free market) is not making direct profit from it, most of them just ask you to pay a little sum for it if you like it and you want the program to be better (donate..).

I would suggest you to try more "automagic" or popular distributions like Knoopix, Ubuntu, Fedora Core.

About the touchpad... a little search here would fill you with a lot of threads on how to activate it, you shouldn't need special drivers for it unless you want special features, and it's just a matter of reading, 99,9% of Linux software comes with a README and INSTALL file that tells you exactly what to do to install it. If you just want a .exe file that will setup all automatic for you, then, Linux is not for you. As I said above, there're distros that try to achieve this, or you can even try http://reactos.com.

There was a version of Linux with auto-update capability, you know.... RedHat 7.0. It was all well and good, until about 3 months after people started installing it, at which point it was discovered that the auto-update feature was filling up peoples' hard drives with useless downloads.

Simply a logic problem, and easily fixed. And there's a number of automatic update features you should consider looking into. The difference being that from a security standpoint, it's considered bad karma for the OS to go off and install software on its own. In OSS, that simply won't happen again. There are, however, applications that will automatically update all system software when you tell it to.

In Slackware, I believe that slapt-get and swaret both support this functionality. I personally haven't had much success with either program. But if you're interested in easy updating/installation of software, you may consider trying Debian. For that functionality, nothing beats apt-get. apt-get --update;apt-get --upgrade and go make some coffee. I use Slackware for other reasons, but you may find that Debian is more to your tastes? I wouldn't give up on Linux just yet, but I might consider trying another flavour.

As for the mouse, I honestly don't know why you're having problems getting it working. My own laptop has a Synaptics touchpad, and it worked out of the box. The edge-of-TP scrolling doesn't work, but I never used it. The scroll button doesn't work, but that's because I'm too lazy to bother trying. But as a pointing device, it worked right out of the box. If I wanted to, I suppose I could download and install a driver for it, but it really doesn't bother me that much. For most systems, a Slackware install will work right out of the box. Occasionally, you will need to update some software, or install some drivers that don't come with it by default.

Because of lack of OEM support, a whole lot of Linux drivers are actually back-engineered. While the people doing them are very talented, you're still working with best-guess technology. Usually that's good enough, particularly with older hardware, but for brand new stuff or stuff that the developpers don't have to work on, you're left waiting until somebody takes it upon themselves to fix it. Unfortunately, I don't think that'll be changing in the immediate future, but somewhere down the road it'll become mainstream enough. I honestly think that OSS projects like Linux will topple Microsoft and their ilk, but probably not for another decade.

If you are prepared to give this another go I feel sure the answer must be simple. I have been using a Dell Inspiron with synaptics touchpad for some years with various distributions with no problem at all and no need for a special driver. I recently installed the synaptics driver you tried on Slack 10.0 so I could get all the facilities of the touchpad and it worked no problem, but it is not necessary for basic use of the touchpad (in my case anyway - the touchpad simply emulates a normal serial mouse).

My son's laptop at school disables the touchpad when an external mouse is installed, so you might try simply removing the usb mouse and see what happens. If that is no good then the answer may be in your xorg.conf file, but try removing the usb mouse first. You may or may not need to log out and in again or even reboot, but try all these options first.

I am assuming you do mean that the touchpad does not work at all, rather than it not working properly. If the latter then installing that driver properly should fix it. Slackware can be a steep learning curve but well worth it, and plenty of folk here will help you. Don't give up on the future too easily.

PS Killerbob - can you explain to this thicko what your Windows-ize thing means?

It's a bit of a joke, actually. I had a computer with a serious heat dissipation problem, but funnily enough, it only reared its ugly head when I was playing games in Windows. Even games in Linux didn't have a problem. I was eventually able to solve the problem by replacing my Northbridge heatsink, and by seriously beefing up the heatsink on my video card (which wasn't weak to begin with, it's a Radeon 9600 Ultra/256MB).

But not before I wrote that signature. You're welcome to try it; it will make your Linux behave similarly to the symptoms I had when I was running Windows with that hardware problem: it'll make the computer boot directly to runlevel 6, which is reboot.

Good job I didn't try it!

For this to work you must have PS2 mouse support enabled in the kernel.