Nonsense. Knowing adding/subtracting is essential for everything else in math, so you can't do it in that way. Knowing how to use Ubuntu or configure a system with GUI tools is in no way essential for running a different Linux distribution. And I doubt that most Ubuntu users will learn how to do it the common way (meaning the way that works in almost any distro), why should they, they have their GUI tools. For them, learning Linux is learning how to use Ubuntu's tools, just the same way they have done it in Windows.

Uh, folks? The distro/flame war is hardly relevant to, nor conducive of helping solve the OP's original problem. Why not save the flames and vitriol for Dalnet? JMHO.

1 members found this post helpful.

Firstly I would like to appreciate both of your passionate replies, both arguments are valid. I am of the later camp, I need Linux, I hope to develop free games to promote Linux over Windows and their Direct X Dictatorial idiocity (we have OpenGL it is perfect WTF!). I am prepared for the steep hill of learning, I must study C++ too (I've only had minimal self taught QuickBasic so far) and 3D mathematics eventually (Quarternions, Matrices, Linear Algebra etc - my maths ability is poor), but I am motivated.

I tried nano, and read the xorgsetup manual, and opened the xorg.conf file but not sure what to edit.
But same error came up:
This is the blue screen I see:
http://images.trademe.co.nz/photoser...63671_full.jpg
This is the error (next thing I see):
http://images.trademe.co.nz/photoser...63720_full.jpg
that xwmsetup allowed me to select xfce which loaded perfectly, I don't need the fancier KDE at least for now.
Thanks

Your X is working, otherwise you wouldn't see the KDE splash screen. Your system is obviously missing some dependencies, did you really have made the recommended full install? From the screenshot it looks lik SQLite is missing, which causes KDE to stop the startup.
Use xwmconfig to set the default DE to Fluxbox and see if it starts.

1 members found this post helpful.

Uh... I may have skipped a few "needless" packages such as printing and pearl, ruby, sql. I only have a 20gb hdd and wish to streamline as much as possible , If I could switch between programs on the console with cut & pasting I'd forgo X even :s

Glad X works aye? That could just be my problem 8)
Well is it easy to add things back?

I really only need C++ (compiler, debugger etc)
an easy simple text editor (yes could also use this for C++)
and a file manager that can cope utilise usb mem cards.
And finally a painting program.
I do have a list of these somewhere, will post tomorrow and you can tell me which works under which Desktop Environment.

Perhaps you have recommendations?
This is not my main computer - so I won't be needing music players etc - I still have a few Windows games to finish playing (purely for research purposes) before I convert that to Linux too.
I do know about Wine but native is always best, and now I have a chance to familiarize myself with Linux before the Final conversion to Pure Computing Power.

Hello,

as a rule of thumb, always install all packages from series a (slackware will warn you, if you deselect a package here) and
all packages from series l. If you want to use your system for software development, you should install almost all of series d too (you may leave out some programming languages you are sure you don't need, e.g. gfortran or gnat, the gnu ada compiler). You should include scripting languages as perl or ruby as those are sometimes used behind the scenes in scripts.
It may be a good idea to include the printing packages such as cups, since you might be interested in printing out source code (I for myself use enscript for formatting the source code in this case).
As a painting program I would suggest gimp or for 2D vector graphics xfig. Even if you don't use it, you should install most of the kde series (I always leave out koffice, since I use libreoffice if an office package is needed). In this way you can use most of the kde applications as k3b for burning or maybe interesting for you, kdevelop, even if you use xfce as your desktop environment.
If you want to do numerical math, you should have a look at octave, which is a matlab clone (you can get the source code and a script to build your own package from slackbuild.org, have a look at the dependencies mentioned there, you will need gfortran from series d in this case) or at maxima, which is a computer algebra system and also available from slackbuild.org. Concerning a file manager I'm not the one to give any recommendation, since I mostly use an x-term for file operations.

No, I'm not.
Emacs and vi are pieces of software as gnumeric or bash are.

I'm not talking about using software. Following this argumentation you could say that someone who knows to use Gimp on Windows will know to use it on Linux. True, but he doesn't know Linux just because he knows sth which runs on top of it.


Yes, but if you learned to handle your system without yum, or apt-get, it will drive you crazy to see that package x needs package y which is sadly blocked by package z .
I don't know what is easier.
To tell your system to just shut up and install whatever you want (and maybe sort out later what's missing)
or to end up with a package manager which can't solve the problems for you (and your on your own again)
Many times those blocks are not essential to the system and a piece of software would run fine without one of it's dependencies.
From what I experienced in many Linux lessons I gave or took is that people who got used to the "automagical" dep resolvings in most Distros are just lost when they need to go and compile those packages maybe on their own to compile it without all those deps .
I simply don't like it that those Ubuntu style distros (and communities) keep telling people not to touch this "compiling stuff" because it's only for the "advanced" user.

Well not a snotty answer, but in this case you are right. When I passed my driving license years ago in the country which builds all this stick-shift VW diesel, it was still the normal case to learn driving on cars with manual gear boxes.
The Automatic ones were only for people who had real big problems with the manual ones (Which were less than 10% at that time)

It's true that it changed a bit today, but if you pass your lecense on an automatic gear box car in Europe , you are not allowed to drive a manual one.
You have to pass an extra test and spend more money.
So for me it's a good example anyway, because why would you spend extra money and time to reach a level when you could have done it directly?

I'll say also that you are missing sqllite, from what I tell in the screen shot.
But maybe if you add it, you'll see more missing packages at last for kde.

I guess you can do an almost full install even whith a 20GB disk (I use 20GB for Slack in VMs and that's mostly ok)
but you could leave out the K KDE KDEI and, depending on your needs, many packages in AP E XAP and D .
But I agree what has already been said about installing eveything from A L D , the N series is for the network stuff, so you'll need some but not all.

But I guess you should really add sqllite, as it is used as a backend from a bunch of software

If you need additional packages, not included in stock slackware, you should have a look on slackbuilds.org http://slackbuilds.org and on sbopkg http://sbopkg.org/ which is the software to use slackbuild easily.
From there you get a lot of stuff for development like SciTe , autogen, bluefish etc

Try a different window manager/desktop. The fullest-featured next to KDE is XFCE, and AFAIK it doesn't require a database engine.

I think even with 20G the benefit of a full install outweighs the space you might save by leaving some things out. That said the most expendable part IMHO would be the KDE series.

Thanks I will check those out.
Thanks I will check those out.
I wrote down all the unselected installs:
(These are my notes so names may not be detailed)
>A<
Cups
Floppy
Jfsultils
mt-st
mtx
syslinux
>Applications<
foomatic...
Ghost...
Ghost...
guten...
hplip
mysql
ntfsm think I left this one in
sqlite
>D<
perl
python
ruby
>L<
libgpot
pcups
>N<
Alpine

Not sure which of these is KDE only (except for Kolour obviously, and XFE is also not obviously), perhaps you could tell me and/or recommend your preferences - note I'm friendly to steep learning curves.
Here are some programs I was going to check out:
Pinta, Kolourpaint KDE, Gimp, gpaint(no undo?), xpaint, rgbpaint, mtpaint.

File managers:
gentoo, mc(tried it), XFE(X File Explorer), rxvt, rox, Thunar.

Tried emacs, but will have to read that massive help file!
Used nano which seemed very nice an simple, if you have any other text editor recommendations?

With emacs I wasn't used to the ctrl+commands, then grasped the concept in nano. I printed out some console commands such as ls, but it never said anything about "ls /" and it worked as "ls" when I had a console-only install.
Perhaps there are some manuals somewhere I ought to read

You better go back and install perl, python, and sqlite. Perl and python is very likely used by programs, even if you don't use it to code scripts. Sqlite is used by KDE.

I also noticed you deselected packages for printing, but those could be still used even if you don't have a printer.

...

I am somewhat disappointed. We give you an advice, you state that you have followed that advice but still have problems. Then it turns out that you have those problems because you have not followed that advice.
That is not how it works, I would say. We are here, spending our free time, to help people that have a problem with their Linux system. I am not here to help people that are ignoring the advice, stating that they have followed the advice and wasting my time with problems that would be fixed if they actually had followed that advice.
Seeing that you still don't seem to grasp the dependency thing (you can't skip "needless" packages without knowing if they are in fact needless, check the dependencies first) may be a distribution with dependency resolving would be better for you, may be Salix or something similar.

the3dfxdude is absolutely right about perl,python and sqllite.

I also think the guten... / ghost ... will be needed as last if you want to use samba.

You may check the deps for some essential packages, as for example when you want to use Thunar to browse files on other computers, you'll need samba which uses cups which may use the ghost... or guten... packages.

If you want to avoid installing too many packages, you could try to stay either with gtk+ based stuff or with Qt based.

Where I guess xfce mainly uses Gtk+ and Kde of course Qt .

To check required packages you have several more or less good possibilities.
In the Slackware install sets there is always a tagfile like this : ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/s...re64/a/tagfile

These files tell you what is : 1. added by default, 2. required or 3. optional from every series .

Also for some packages (sadly not all) there are slack-required files .
A great source for this is the italian slackware community.
Just browse their repository and you'll find files like this : http://repository.slacky.eu/slackwar...slack-required

Another source is the sbopkg-slackware-queues project : http://gitorious.org/sbopkg-slackwar...rees/sbo-13.37

And as a last resort there is always Linuxfromscratch

A lot to read, but I guess like this you could be able to check in detail what you need or leave away

I just noticed the sub-forum "Slackware Install"
So sorry for not posting there.

Yep sorry for the missleading sentence, when I said needless in quotation marks I was saying - stupidly I thought they were needless.
There are a few reasons I was trying to leave out some stuff:

1. I needed to install through the extremely verbose package selection menu - so I was able to pause for a few minutes at menu selection screens to let my laptop cool down - as on All the previous installs it overheaded during extraction and crashed (took me some time and much frustration to figure this out). Losing windows and not being able to install, along with ppl telling me it was because my cd's were corrupted because md5sum NEVER came back with a correct result despite multiple downloads via different internet connection locations and many cd burns - resulted in much frustration and I wanted to cut some time on the install - which took 3 hours.

2. I will not network, internet, or print with this laptop. It is a cheap one (all I can afford) just for learning to program basic single player games. In the future I will get a better model and work on making my games internet-able. This is why I was leaving out networking things such as sql.

Sorry I should have explained my reasons more clearly, it was not my intention to frustrate or misslead. I do appreciate ALL of your help.

That tagfile is good, I found this link which explains it a little better for NOOBS like me (some might be reading this):
http://www.bilbos-stekkie.com/tagger/tagfiles.html

Not really sure about those other links.
As for Linuxfromscratch - I won't really be needing that as you can read my reasons for neglecting some packages above in my reply to TobiSGD.