After months of fixing stuff that I inadvertently broke, tweaking my Slackware system to run better and otherwise optimizing things, I've hit a point where everything works. It works all the time. What a letdown! It's been two weeks since I've had any good fun.

I'd be ecstatic if I were being paid to maintain a roomful of servers and were having things go this well, but I'm just a plain old Slackware desktop user who was really enjoying the challenge of getting things running right and occasionally cleaning up my own messes.

Does anybody know of some good learning exercises I could try? I spent a week or so playing with Linux From Scratch, and that was enjoyable. But I'd really like to keep fine-tuning Slackware, or otherwise pushing the envelope a bit.

I wouldn't mind trying Reiser 4, but that would involve starting from scratch on a new partition. I don't have the space to do that right now.

I don't know what you got installed currently, but if
you DON'T have any of the following, give it a shot ;)

gnome 2.8
evolution with ximian-connector
dvdrip
kmail with GPG-MIME and S/MIME support


:}


Cheers,
Tink

I used to have one of them, then I upgraded to 10.1 got a kernel crash halfway through and had to do a fresh install. Spent the best part of a week fixing everything, and still tweaking.

Some fun stuff I've tried:

1) Learn how to patch your kernel. Try the Con Kolivas patch.

2) Try out Dropline Gnome

2b) If you like Dropline Gnome, try downloading their dropline-build-system and learning how to make packages with it. That's pretty fun, if you like tweaking stuff to run right. Read the mailing lists, since the CVS version is not the most recent version.

3) Try seeing what packages you can "get away with" removing from your system. Gauranteed to break something eventually. Then you get to try and fix it.

4) Learn bash scripting and make some scripts for cron to run. You can do rsyncs, come up with an update notification system, clean up your harddrive, backup your system.

5) Try out win4lin and wine. Maybe there are other things out there to enable widows compatibilty. Check it all out and see if you can get something working.

6) Try setting up Slackware on an old box. That can be enough of a challenge, but if you get it done, then you can play with a network instead of just a single computer. Then, you can try out stuff like NIS. If you need an old computer, check out http://retrobox.com . The cheapest computer there I see today is $12!!! If you have money to burn, I see a Pentium II 266MHz 256 MB 3.2 GB with CD for $30!!!

7) Try compiling mplayer with all the codecs so you can watch all kinds of movies.

8) Try out a different window manager. Try getting it tweaked just how you like it.

9) Try re-installing your whole system and take extensive notes. After you're all done, configure a web server, make your notes into a web page, and share your experience with the world. People will comment on it, and you can use there comments to make even further improvements to your system.

THose are just a few ideas.

Try installing OX (http://www.open-xchange.org)

There aren't any current HOWTOs on the 'net for Slackware that seem to work with a fresh install of Slackware.

These are really good suggestions, with a lot of different kinds of ways to get myself in trouble. That seems to be the main way I learn.

I've already started working through Shilo's list, and I'll try to look at all these suggestions over the next little while.

intalling OX should make for a nice challenge indeed, it requires not only you have a functional mailserver & imap server set up but also that you have some sort of authentication system... if you get it running with kerberos & samba to make a domain controller / single sign on system, get back to me, 'cause that's what i'd like doing