Hiya,
I've just installed 12.2 inside a VM in virtualbox (host is ubuntu).
Firstly my terminal looks a bit messed up. I cant see text i'm typing until I press enter, then it shows itself. I can supply a screenshot if it helps. The actual letters that are can see are screwed up as well. Any attempt to change my resolution using the xfce GUI dumps me out to a command prompt.

Secondly, I've added a user so i dont go in as root all of the time. I chose the defaults when i ran the "adduser" command. It seemed to work until i logged in as this user. If i try and open firefox it says "cannot open browser - IO error". Also it appears I can't reboot or shutdown as this user, only log out.

I'm a complete slackware noob, but this distro really appeals to me. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance,
mute

Hi

Welcome to Slackware.

Slackware is notoriously stable, so I would guess that these problems are caused by your VM. If you have a spare partition you would be much better to do a proper install.

Have you set up your virtual network card, and started the virtual network server?

samac

Cheers for the reply mate.
Yeah i did wonder if it was all a consequence of installing it within the VM. I should be getting a machine from my brother in a few weeks which i intend to install it on properly.

I think i set up the network stuff fine (i can browse the internet when root and stuff like that. Is that what you mean?).

Anyway, installing in the VM has ironed out some problems in preparation for my real install when i get the other machine. I'm off on holiday for a week now. Thanks for your help.

It will be interesting to see if i get any problems with "adduser" with the real install. I'll no doubt keep you posted.
Thanks again for your help,

mute

Hi,

How did you setup your local install? It does sound like a VM configuration problem on your host.

For the Terminal issue, that's a known problem with Xfce's Terminal when using the vesa driver for xorg (and vesa is the default on a Slackware system). You can install virtualbox guest additions, and afterward, use "X -configure" to generate a new xorg.conf (which should select the vbox-specific xorg driver, though I don't recall its name), and all should be well. Alternatively, be sure to use "X -configure" to generate an xorg.conf after you install on real hardware, and you should be okay.

I'm not sure about the Firefox issue - that could be lots of things.

The reboot/shutdown/logout issue is exactly as expected. Welcome to "normal users have only the permissions that root decides they get" instead of "the first normal user that is set up is assumed to be $deity"

Thanks rworkman,
Got back from my hols late last night, and now i'm at my desk at work I shall try the x-configure stuff tonight when i'm home.
Thanks again,
mute

Thanks Robby for shedding light on an old problem
I had some problems with terminal & Xfce in virtual machines (both VirtualBox and Qemu).

In Qemu I managed to solve it using the "-vga cirrus" option from the CLI when starting Qemu and using the cirrus driver in xorg.conf in the VM.

Your user will be able to reboot and shutdown if you boot to runlevel 4 instead of 3, assuming your logon manager allows it (kdm does out of box). To change the default runlevel to 4 simply edit /etc/inittab. I suggest using nano, vi, or another command line editor as root to do this.

For firefox, try running it in safe mode (eg. firefox -safe-mode). Also try creating a new profile to test (firefox -ProfileManager). If the issue is not profile specific (which it probably isn't), then the issue would be with your system configuration (either your firefox install, permissions, network setup etc). Do other browsers (particularly seamonkey) work fine? If firefox is the only problem, then try reinstalling it.

Also, what groups is your user a part of? The groups command will tell you.

For Slackware, I recommend always reading the CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT for each version you use. Robby (rworkman), who gave you such an informative post above, has been writing that doc lately, and the information in there lists some possible "gotchas". You can find it on the installation cd along with some other useful docs. Since you are new to Slackware, I also recommend checking out the slackbook. Onebuck, who posted above has some helpful links in his signature (Slackware Links).

SlackBuilds.org (SBo) is a wonderful buildscript repository, which will help you make custom packages for your system. sbopkg is a tool that can help with using SBo. slackpkg (included in Slackware), and src2pkg are also useful tools. Learn how to use pkgtools (installpkg, etc) before using any of the above tools!

have fun!

Again, thanks all for the replies. I've found them really useful.
I actually solved the firefox problem by updating using "upgradepkg". Firefox opened with no problem then when i was non-root. Lots of useful things in the slackbook

One thing though. I had to browse to:
, get "mozilla-firefox-3.0.10-i686-1.tgz" and install it using the above command. Now there's a load of files in that folder. Does this mean i have to download and install ALL of these updates/patches individually?

I'll keep reading the slackbook in the meantime to see if the answers lie in there.
Once again, thanks for the help. I'm really liking slackware I've learnt more about linux in the last two weeks with slack than I have in the last few years using other distro's.

mute

Those are your security updates, so if you have that software installed (you will by default), then you should download them all and upgradepkg them all.

slackpkg can help you do this. The man page should tell you the majority of what you need to know for usage. Once set up you simply
Instead of upgrade-all you could just do something like
if you know the packages that you need to upgrade.

Another route you could take is to use Eric's rsync_slackware_patches.sh script. That script simply lets your user download the patches in an easy fasion. root can then use them.

Cheers again shadowsnipes,
It's interesting that the "slackpkg" command isn't mentioned once in the copy of slackbook i have.

After uncommneting out one of the lines from my mirrors file (a UK ftp one i think), I ran:
It seemed to download lots (expected i guess ), then asked me:
etc etc..
I chose "(O) overwrite all old files with new ones", then i got a prompt. I assume it all worked?

So do I have to run these 2 commands every week? Every 2 weeks? Or is there someway I can check for files/packages that have changed? Or have i completely got the wrong of the stick? It's all a bit confusing for me at the moment I'm afraid.
Once again, thanks for your help.

mute

The slackpkg program is a new one so it's not mentioned in the book.

To see when updates are posted you can subscribe to the mailing lists - look at Slackware mailing lists for details.

The config files are you system settings. Overwrite the ones you know you did not change, but try to merge the changes for the rest (a diff will show you the changes). Also keep in mind that you may have to restart some services for some of the updates to really take effect. The security notices mentioned in the mailing list and on the Slackware site will tell you if this is necessary. Usually it is obvious, though. If you upgrade ssh for instance, you obviously need to restart sshd.

Keep in mind that when slackpkg overwrites the config files that it leaves .orig files lying around. I usually find and auto delete these. See the upgrade HowTo in my signature for an example of this and more uses of slackpkg.

In addition to the mailing list mentioned above there is an RSS feed for the security updates.
http://dev.slackware.it/rss/slackware-security.xml
When you see an update then you can use slackpkg to get and install it. Alternatively, you could have a cron job run slackpkg everyday, but that would be overkill in my opinion, and you would still need to manually manage the config file changes.

For SBo packages I check the Changelog to see if there are security updates. Its feed is
http://slackbuilds.org/rss/ChangeLog.rss. I typically use sbopkg to update (rebuild) these packages unless I feel one needs more of my attention.

Fantastic
Thanks for all your help. I'll get stuck in with absorbing all of the information you've supplied me.

Cheers again,
mute