hello, i just got slack 9 and installed it, and i like it. up to recently i was using mandrake and have been using rh8 for a few months too. i thought i would try slackware for many reasons, basically it looks like it is less fiddly than other distros and more open. easier to figure out.
anyway, i have a few things i haven't figured out yet that i was hoping somebody might give me the answers to!
they are probably all quite simple things, but here goes:
in /etc/rc.keymap (or whatever is the correct file, i am not at home right now so cannot check), i have it set so that my keyboard is a UK one, and this is tru on all the tty screens, but in X, my keyboard acts exactly as if it were a US one. where should i specify that i want to use a uk one instead? is it in /etc/XF86Config?
when i do '/sbin/shutdown -h now' the machine halts cleanly, but does not power down. in mandrake and red hat this would totally switch the machine off, but not slackware.
when i mount a fat32 filesystem (capable of win95 style long filenames) slackware appears to shorten every file name to the old msdos 8.3 format, and this stays the case even if i copy to the ext3 partition, so if i have a file that i downloaded onto a floppy, called 'cmenu-2c.tar.gz' and i mount it in slackware, it will end up being called 'cmenu-~1.gz' instead, then if i rename it (after editing) and stick it on a floppy again (or a vfat zip disk), when i open it up on another machine, it will invariably be called 'CMENU-~1.GZ', which is not the best.
finally (for now) how do i get fonts not to look crap in X? in red hat i could import TTF fonts, of which i have a few, and mandrake even had a crummy GUI to do the same job, what are the generally accepted way to import fonts and generally make them look prettier in slackware? also, can i make imported fonts available to all apps (office suites, browsers) easily? and so forth.
Now i am using one of the kernels off the slackware CD, but i am planning to recompile from the 2.4.20 source very soon (probably tonight) which might well fix some of the above i suspect (most notably the vfat and shutdown issues) but i wanted to get the opinions of other people too, since my slack experience comes to a total of about 8 hours.
thanks very much in advance.