Slack on a Dell Laptop
 

I am currently running Redhat 7.3 on my Dell Inspiron 8000. By this point I do just about all my configurations by hand, and the RPM packaging is really starting to get to me (I'd much rather compile source at this point).

So I am looking to switch to Slackware 8.1, but am just concerned about getting all the hardware running as Redhat has done a pretty good job configuring it all.

My major area's of concern are:

• My modular drives- I have a modular DVD and floppy drive - back in the day when I used mandrake I was never quite able to get it to read my modular drives
• Sound - I've heard getting sound configured has always been a bit tricky
• Video - not too concerned here, I figure the same alterations I had to make to my XF86Config-4 file in Redhat & Mandrake should work for slack as well
• PCMIA - I don't really have any PCMIA cards, but in the event I do I'd like to have it work
• And all the other little laptop things, like my battery, the fixed cd-rw, and my NIC combo card (which I never got the modem working in any distro anyway)

I am just a little bit hesitant to switch for the reason that I haven't gotten any pointers for getting everything to work right with Slack - I couldn't find any real documentation with Slack on my laptop. Any advise is appreciated.

If your laptop is running well on Redhat it SHOULD be able to run just fine with Slackware. Ofcoarse you're going to have to do a bit of configuring that redhat probably did automaticly. You should try it, if questions arise post them here, and if it doesnt work out with Slack then you can go back to Redhat. You never know tell you try...

The thing you're going to have to remember is that when something seems not to work with Slack that did with Xdistro, its just a configuration issue. Slack 8.1's default kernel comes with support for Dell's motherboard oddities, its actually a configuration point in the top level of processor type and features, so that might have been you problem under Mandrake, 8.1? 8.0? back around 2.4.9 and 2.4.3 repectively. That may have been the problem with the modular drives.

Slack still uses pcmcia-cs, which is getting rather dated, but pcmcia hasn't changed much in the past two years.

You'll probably be able to swap in the XF86Config file from the RH install, as long as it was a version of XFree since the switch to 4.x.x, RH after 7.0.

Sound isn't really as tricky as not done for you at all. If you have any troubles, post here and it'll get solved.

The CD-RW, just remember to put in the ide-scsi line when prompted in the install.

The NIC combo/card is going to be Xircom or 3com, easily supported.

Cheers,

Finegan