Dear Slackers,

i came to a huge crossroad that I never thought I would reach; but, first a little background info!

I have been running/loving slackware (sometimes stable and in the last few years current) for almost 20yrs and in the last 10+mnths i have been experiencing some weird behaviour; (what i can remember) not in chronological order,

- shut down (both from Konsole and Application Launcher) wouldn't switch the computer off but would reboot it,
- at random it turns itself off (apparently due to graphic overheating) while working on nothing too graphically heavy such as Open Office,
- certain packages would not install when, it seems that they install fine to everyone else on this forum,
- suddenly, my pc would boot in 800x600VGA mode without keyboard (although the keyboard works correctly if I launched a Slackware live CD),
- lately my video card, out of the blue, seems to pack&retire (declared faulty also by a renown computer system repair company where I reside).

In April, I had to take a month off and go see my family bcos of health issues. On my return, 3 days ago, and while still waiting for a new nVidia graphic card, I wanted to waste time and (re)mount the 'faulty' graphic card to see what would happen.

Well, i am not joking (although if i were reading this post from someone else I probably think they would be): the computer came back to life.

Everything was working as nothing had ever happened. I managed to do a full slackware current re-install, installed a bunch of packages such as sbopkg, AOO, Inkscape, Scribus, vlc and more. I was in heaven. I even opened a new thread on this forum and asked for help. For 36hrs I had my desktop back and I didn't spend a single second wondering what could have gone wrong. I also run slackpkg update/upgrade-all to have the latest cutting-edge software (including a Kernel update), restarted the pc several times and it would start fast like the wind.

Went to bed and I did notice though that it took extremely long time to switch off (more than 2-3 mins). I didnt give it too much thought after that.

This morning, i woke up super happy to sit on my desktop again and start doing some video/work and: BAM! 800x600VGA and no keyboard. I could not believe it! Restarted it about 6-7 times. NOTHING! Open the box, remove the graphic card, flush the BIOS, re-try: NOTHING, no keyboard.

Launch Slackware CD and the keyboard is there; i can type, move the cursor, delete, etc.... boot the installed OS: NOTHING! NO KEYBOARD and in VGA mode. Re-installed Slackware, twice, changing the disk partition table each time (in case of a virus): NOTHING!

At this point the only common dot that would connect all those anomalies was the OS/Slackware Kernel.

Today is my day off (i have some spare time) and I decided to download and burn Debian on my laptop and install it on the Desktop and (maybe too soon to say it): voila!!! I have my desktop back!

OK, there are too many questions and anomalies, again, that I understand would need to be answered; for example, why it didn't work also when i did a clean re-install? I could only (and ignorantly) answer: for some weird reason the kernel gets installed at random partitions or, the kernel is not installed on the correct partition or, it finds some missing/corrupted modules or, ........

So, at this point, since I have some important work to do I have to make a decision: stick to Debian and (maybe) come back and give Slackware a try again later or, try something else!

I just don't know what else to try.

When I install slackware, it seems that the computer goes in to some kind of digital memory loop of which it won't come out easily (occasionally it does, like when it started again after 1 month of not being powered).

I really like slackware and I feel at home with it now and, I am afraid that I would have to restart the whole learning process with Debian.

Sorry about the long post, nagging about my digital misfortune however, i would be delighted to hear any opinions on what it could causes my computer to behave like this when I install slackware-current (I guess, i haven't tried to install Slackware 15 Stable... maybe I will do it later). I need a beer now.

Thanks

Have you tried to downgrade the kernel to see if that helps?

@however

Man, the Slackware-current is NOT the rolling release of Slackware, but its very Development tree.

When you have installed Slackware-current, you also virtually signed for being the Slackware's Beta-Tester and many times, Alpha-Tester. You are supposed to find the issues on the development system and report back.

IF you want a stable behavior of your system, I will strongly recommend you to install a stable release of Slackware, like is Slackware 15.0 .

I find to be really harsh to compare the behavior of development tree of Slackware with the one of a Debian release. This is nuts! Eventually be kind to compare a Debian release behavior with the Slackware 15.0 or whatever else release of Slackware.

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Hi there,

and thanks for the tip which i wpuld be very happy to try if obly i could use the keyboard. Or, is there another way to downgrade the kernel perhaps, from a live CD?

Once the system boots, i cant use anything (including the mouse)

In your place I'd go back to Slackware-15 rather than abandoning Slackware altogether. You'd probably find Debian a big culture change.

fwiw I've had a lot of problems with recent kernels too. Different symptoms from yours but, like you, I never had this sort of trouble before. The kernel was always a singularly well-tempered beast. I think the kernel team are maybe getting a bit careless.

3 members found this post helpful.

Hi there,

and thabk you for chipping in.

I wasn't trying to compare two distros. Instead of Debian could have well been MSDoS for what i care.
I was only making a point that my desktop has no faulty hardware and the problem seems to be the OS.

But, as I mentioned, later today i will give slackware 15 a chance and will report back

I have been through a lot of "careless" kernel changes but this really beats 'em all!

I have difficulties with bluetooth, kernel and sometimes with other software and/or packages. In most cases it is just a fatal user error. It is difficult, if at all possible, to keep up with all the news.

Did you try grub? You can install it from the live CD. It's seeming to fix a whole host of weird issues, and I think there's noises being made that we're eventually moving to it.

I've been having a weird issue with swap being used with at least half of my RAM still available on proton with vulkan being used since November. (about when we switched to 6.6.) I'm *reasonably* certain it's a proton issue, but ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ It's one of those issues that you can eliminate a lot of things, but just seems to crop up on current. (Like 32-bit opengl being broken for nvidia on current...it's probably not our bug, but the change to binutils 2.42 seemed to have triggered it.)

1 members found this post helpful.

What you say would be OK if Slackware stable releases were a bit more frequent.
Now Slackware64-15.0 has kernel 5.15.19. An interesting article on kernel security here. LTS kernel version history here.
See here the differences between 15 and current.
Older versions of packages are the reason why I don't use Debian and even Ubuntu for servers.
But for a stable and safe version of Desktop, I still recommend Ubuntu/Debian. Recently I worked a bit on small corrections/clarifications/tests for checksec, I didn't succeed in Slackware (too many packages to install) and I had to do it in Ubuntu where everything was solved quickly.

On my main productions systems I use Slackware 15.0, 32-bit and 64-bit. I installed the pm-utils package from Slackware 14.2. The package is a collection of scripts, so nothing to recompile. I do not remember what tripped my trigger with elogind, but installing pm-utils and returning to the previous days of using /etc/acpi resolved issues for me.

I also edited /etc/elogind/logind.conf to not control most of the acpi functions. Just change the key options to 'ignore'.

Slackware Current requires almost daily attention with the change log. I have a Current VM to track what is coming down the road with 15.1, but I lack the fortitude to use Current as a production system. Using Current requires a bit more dedication that using a stable Slackware release.

The other issues sound like being Nvidia related. While Nvidia works fine for many people, I swore them off years ago. Just too much hassle for me. That said, the standard nouveau driver should function acceptably to avoid loss of video resolution and peripherals. Might need to temporarily remove the proprietary Nvidia package and ensure nouveau is not blacklisted. That would at least allow for troubleshooting other issues.

One trick to bypass various video framebuffer issues is use the nomodeset boot parameter. That too should at least allow for troubleshooting issues.

Another possibility is hardware starting to fail. PSUs, RAM sticks, motherboard capacitors, etc.

With respect to Slackware vs. Debian, I have been using Slackware for about 23 years. I have used Debian off and on throughout that period, mostly when required for employment. I have learned through the years that Pat has more than half a clue. Happily for me, he does not follow fads and remains focused to provide a "Unix like" system as much as practical. He is relentless about releasing stable systems. That creates a significant amount of trust for me. That means when something breaks for me in Slackware I focus on what I did because I know the system is stable and reliable.

My fence post observation with Debian the past few years is the developers and users have strayed since they all adopted systemd. Debian just isn't the same system as some years ago. And I detest the way dependencies are managed in the apt system. Pat has refrained from the dependency debate since the beginning and I am glad. Just my n=1 two-penny opinion.

Good luck with your computer.

5.15.145 actually (if you apply the patches, which you should).

2 members found this post helpful.

Some thoughts.

Bad VGA mode and missing keyboard sound like a kernel running without matching modules. Do you boot using UEFI? I could imagine that after each reinstall of Slackware your UEFI still always boots the same old kernel from the EFI partition, different to which kernel and modules you have installed on your root filesystem. You could use video recording of the boot to reveal the kernel version. You could boot from an install disk and chroot to the installed root fs and there you could run 'efibootmgr -v' to see what UEFI boots. grub could be more reliable than elilo, and it would boot the kernel from the root filesystem instead of from the EFI partition.

2 members found this post helpful.

Another way to stay with Slackware would be to use one of the derivatives, they usually have more up to date software than 'stable'.

It's difficult to start using another distro after using one for a long time, this is why I personally stay with an 'apt' distro, in the main.

however,

I've had the pleasure of running Slackware for 20 years, since 10.0 (2004). I understand that you're considering leaving Slackware. At the moment I'm running Slackware64-15.0 and Slackware64-current. Perhaps Slackware 15.0 would be more to your liking(stable and secure)?
I also run Debian 12.5.0, Void, and OpenBSD 7.5. Debian is straight forward to install and maintain(it does have systemd which many people detest). Void is a non-systemd distro that has a pleasing minimalist design that uses the runit init system(I like it a lot).
Happy choosing!

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