New tutorials for installing and configuring Slack
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It's worth mentioning that Eric seems a bit snappier about keeping the Flash and Libreoffice packages up to date than Slackbuilds.org does (not that I'm by any means critisizing their work).
Distribution: slackware64 13.37 and -current, Dragonfly BSD
Posts: 1,810
Rep:
Hi 2handband, we have liased in another thread or two so I thought I'd comment on this one. Congragulations for the work you must be giving to your site about Slackware installs and setting up. It's great not only that someone is taking the time to do this but that he is asking for opinions from his "peers". (By peers I don't mean superiors, I mean compatriots or Slackwarwe fellow users.)
As you well know the Slackware team themselves often monitor this forum and I'm sure will offer any crticisms or advice (in a nice way) that will help. As you must have noticed this forum is generally very knowledgeable and also helpful.
Anyway, top marks for the effort and keep it up! It must be great to get thanks from new Slackware users who have followed your tutorials and found Slackware to be accessible and understandable contrary to what they had thought. Personally I think you have a good style of presentation and a very approachable way of giving instructions. It's also great that you have quickly responded with amendments to the site when advice has been offered. As you are aiming at newcomers this is ideal and commendable. Top marks and well done.
Thanks for the kind words, bgeddy. I'm pretty satisfied with most of the content on the site now, and am almost ready to dive into some new material. Mostly it'll be system administration topics for awhile, and I'm trying to decide what order to do them in (although I suspect print management should probably be next). I also intend to stay on top of changes as they take place; one of the biggest problems with online Linux information is that it's almost always outdated.
It would be completely crazy for me to put something like this up for newcomers without soliciting the opinions of the community. There are many people here who are far more experienced with Linux in general and Slackware in particular than I am, and their comments and suggestions can only serve to strengthen the work. Not that their suggestions are the only ones I'm looking for; even a complete noob might catch something that I missed. I'm good, but I'm nobody's all-knowing guru. My particular gift is the ability to explain complex subject matter in language that most people can understand.
It's worth mentioning that Eric seems a bit snappier about keeping the Flash and Libreoffice packages up to date than Slackbuilds.org does (not that I'm by any means critisizing their work).
You do know that Alien_Bob participates at SlackBuilds.
You should think about presenting 'screen' to a newbie in the command line section. Valuable for newbies who are trying cli and want to learn 'screen' session management.
DESCRIPTION Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells). Each virtual terminal provides the functions of a DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ISO 6429 (ECMA 48, ANSI X3.64) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g. insert/delete line and support for multiple character sets). There is a scrollback history buffer for each virtual terminal and a copy-and-paste mechanism that allows moving text regions between windows. When screen is called, it creates a single window with a shell in it (or the specified command) and then gets out of your way so that you can use the program as you normally would. Then, at any time, you can create new (full-screen) windows with other programs in them (including more shells), kill existing windows, view a list of windows, turn output logging on and off, copy-and-paste text between windows, view the scrollback history, switch between windows in whatever manner you wish, etc. All windows run their programs completely independent of each other. Programs continue to run when their window is currently not visible and even when the whole screen session is detached from the user's terminal. When a program terminates, screenscreen exits.
Everything you type is sent to the program running in the current window. The only exception to this is the one keystroke that is used to initiate a command to the window manager. By default, each command begins with a control-a (abbreviated C-a from now on), and is followed by one other keystroke. The command character and all the key bindings can be fully customized to be anything you like, though they are always two characters in length.
(per default) kills the window that contained it. If this window was in the foreground, the display switches to the previous window; if none are left, Screen does not understand the prefix "C-" to mean control. Please use the caret notation ("^A" instead of "C-a") as arguments to e.g. the escape command or the -e option. Screen will also print out control characters in caret notation.
The standard way to create a new window is to type "C-a c". This creates a new window running a shell and switches to that window immediately, regardless of the state of the process running in the current window. Similarly, you can create a new window with a custom command in it by first binding the command to a keystroke (in your .screenrc file or at the "C-a :" command line) and then using it just like the "C-a c" command. In addition, new windows can be created by running a command like:
screen emacs prog.c from a shell prompt within a previously created window. This will not run another copy of screen, but will instead supply the command name and its arguments to the window manager (specified in the $STY environment variable) who will use it to create the new window. The above example would start the emacs editor (editing prog.c) and switch to its window.
I have a separate repository because I also provide packages, and my SlackBuild scripts do things we do not want at slackbuilds.org (such as automatically downloading source tarballs). I want to have full control over what I provide and slackbuilds.org has restrictions that are too tight for me.
I have a separate repository because I also provide packages, and my SlackBuild scripts do things we do not want at slackbuilds.org (such as automatically downloading source tarballs). I want to have full control over what I provide and slackbuilds.org has restrictions that are too tight for me.
With me mc is the first thing I install on any foreign (none Slackware) system I use - with my Slackware full install obviously it's "just there". It's an amazing tool and very powerful I highly recommend you spend the time to look further at midnight commander.
I'll make it a priority... it might be a bit less intimidating for noobs than vim. I never gave it much thought; the guy who introduced me to Linux was a vi man (he was also an Ubuntu man, but nobody's perfect!), and believe it or not I took to vi right away. I have toyed with the idea of switching the early lessons over to Nano, but have been resisting the notion. It's my experience that people who start with Nano never bother to learn any of the others, and it's my notion that everybody who uses Linux should learn vi... because than they can log onto any 'Nix machine in the world and have access to a text editor that they know how to use (we'll ignore for the moment the fact that vim is far more powerful than Nano).
Maybe MC would be a better idea, though. Have them use that in the beginning lessons, and then hit 'em with vim once we seriously dive into the command line. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
I've got MC open in a terminal now (and the man page open in another terminal) and am looking it over. It DOES seem pretty easy to use.
After giving it a LOT of thought, I added a section to the Basic Configuration page on switching to the generic kernel. I tried to be as clear as possible, but I still worry this might be a bit off-putting for beginners. Any comments or suggestions are appreciated as always:
BTW, I like Midnight Commander. A lot. I kind of regret not checking it out before. Thanks, guys! Not only have your comments made my instruction more effective, I've also learned a hell of a lot myself.
I would never comment out the old kernel section when adding a new kernel. Suppose you add a kernel or an initrd to lilo.conf and it does not work... you'll end up with a non-booting system.
Therefore, it is wiser to keep the old kernel section as a fallback. Add a new kernel section and make that the default choice for lilo, either by adding it in front of any other kernel section, or adding a line "default = your_new_label" in the global section of /etc/lilo.conf
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