Slack Newbie Questions
 

It's been almost a week since I installed Slack on my Toshiba 1625CDT laptop. I am loving every minute of it!!!! I'm so pleased with this distribution that I am going to install it on my wife's 7 year old IBM Thinkpad that she uses for school. Being new to Slack I have a few questions.

1- I would like to use a custom memmory map with the kernel as it boots up. When I ran Fedora, I would simply add the instructions in the grub.conf file. With Slack I am using LILO and I am not sure what file to edit and where in that file I should add the command. (Note: The system has 320MB of RAM installed, but only detects 64MB of it WITHOUT the mem map)

2- I would like to turn off some daemons that are running including "sendmail." What file do I need to edit in order to prevent certain daemons from running on startup?

I know I have a couple more questions, but right now I am drawing a blank. If anyone can help me out with the 2 questions above, I would greatly appreciate it.

2. network daemons are generally started in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2

hope this helps.

note: i'm on an xp box at work and can't specifically check where sendmail is started.

1. not familiar with memmap in particular, but if it is an argument that you pass to the kernel at boot time then you can add the command line in /etc/lilo.conf and make it:

append = "yourargumenthere"

i use append = "hdc=ide-scsi" in mine for scsi emulation for my cdrw.

hope this helps.

Edit: typical disclaimer: ALWAYS back up your lilo.conf file when editing it

New Questions...
 

New Questions:

3- How to I allow users other than root to have the ability to mount partitions? I tried mounting a floppy disk from KDE as user "todd", but it said I must be root in order to mount the partition.

1b - Where in the lilo.conf file do I add this argument?

Here?

image = /boot/vmlinuz append="command"
root = /dev/hda1
label = Linux
read-only

I'm sorry if this is a VERY newbie question.

2b- /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2 looks like a script. What file contains the list of daemons that run on startup like sendmail, CUPS, xine, etc??

Thanks!!

For question 2, Slackware provides an easy way to turn the daemons on/off............

1) Run 'pkgtool' as root on the command line in a console. A menu will appear.

2) Highlight "Setup" and hit <Enter>.

3) In the next screen that appears, scroll down and highlight "services", hit the spacebar to select it and hit <Enter>.

4) Now you will be able to select or deselect the services you want to run at startup. Just highlight the service and use the spacebar to select or deselect them.

5) Hit <Enter> twice to exit the program, making sure "OK" (at the bottom of the menu) is highlighted each time.

What this does is to make the rc scripts in /etc/rc.d executable to run the script at boot time, or remove the executable permisions to prevent the service from starting up at boot time..................You could do the same thing by running 'chmod 644' on each startup script in /etc/rc.d for the service you don't want to run at boot time, or run 'chmod 755' on the startup scripts for the services you do want to start at boot time. Again, you must be root to change permissions on the startup scripts.

At a bare minimum, you will want to run "rc.cups" for the printer (only if you've installed cups and use it for printing) and "rc.inetd" (unless you installed xinetd and use that instead)

:)


PS: Do _not_ edit rc.inet2 for making changes on whether a certain service is started or not at boot time. The correct procedure is to change the executable permissions on the script that runs the service. rc.inet2, as well as the other main starutp scripts, will first check to see if a particular rc script is executable or not and act accordingly............

Startup scripts are in /etc/rc.d/, to simply avoid running sendmail you have to only make rc.sendmail there non-executable, chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail
same for other scripts.
All startup scripts are there, you can see them and see what they do, it's not difficult they are very well documented.
Another file to check is /etc/inetd.conf, that's inetd daemon config file, it'll startup services as needed read it, it's not difficult too understand too you just have to comment with a # the services you don't want.
Mounting floopy as non-root user is not a lilo stuff, but /etc/fstab thing. Just edit that file and in the line of the floppy change the word "owner" with "user" and it should be mounted by any user.
I dunno about the memory map stuff, i can't help u there

EDIT: forgot to say, /etc/rc.d/rc.M is in charge of calling the rest of scripts (rc.sendmail, rc.cups, etc)

Re: New Questions...
 

The "append" command is on a separate line, like so: As you can see, you can use more than one command on the "append" line.......

:)

Thanks!!
 

Wow, talk about speed.

*I post a couple more questions.
*I leash up Biscuit (our Dog).
*I take Biscuit for a walk.
*I come back in the house.
*I check the LinuxQuestions.org

POOF....someone has already replied.

Thank you Thank you Thank you!! I tried all of the suggestions above and my problems have been solved. I'm sure I will have more questions soon. :)