So I had a Slack 14.1 - 32-bit install - working just fine, last three months - nice xterms (or aterms, or whatever, many worked), etc. Reading Alien-Bob's comments about how all 32-bit stuff can be made to work in Slack 64, I bit the bullet, uninstalled and reinstalled 64.

Ouch.

I quickly dumped KDE (ick) and started again using XFCE. But -

NO aterms, rterms, eterms, wterms, or ANYTHING but straight xfce terminals (and what they claim is an xterm), NONE of which respond in any way to color schemes in any of the profiles - .bashrc, .profile,.Xdefaults, etc etc. The color -export lines that worked in Slack 32 might as well not be written in 64.

I'm getting an impression that one has 64 bits, but very few of the common programs.

I wonder if one must really rebuild it ALL from near-nothing (using 'multilib') ? Just to get a color xterm or transparent terminal? Is this really true?

Will it work for most programs?

jrch

I don't really get what the problem is. Everything on Slackware64 works fine.

Maybe to get your 'colors' working you need to make it a 'login' terminal.

/bin/bash -l (l as in Lincoln)

Anyway, like moise, not sure what you are talking about... x64 has everything x86 has in slackware and has been running fine for... years. Only other thought is you removed more than you thought, i.e. more than kde.

Hence why removing anything from the main installation isn't recommended. Best advice, even if you don't use all of the complete installation, don't uninstall anything slackpkg doesn't add or subtract from the system.

Three Slack64 installations here, all working perfectly. Have you tried ~/.Xresources instead of ~/.Xdefaults?

Mine work fine as well, converted two systems from 32bit to 64 bit. I do have one other system that I tried 64 bit on with 2G of ram and it was really slow so I switched it back to 32 bit until it gets its turn at being upgraded. Other than that everything is mostly the same. I do have one oddball windows game that won't run in x64 that did in 32bit.

As many have stated, Slackware64 works well (I use it on my computer). There is no need to install multilib unless you have a specific program that needs it. The reasons to run multilib are getting smaller and smaller and most reasons now are due to gaming (steam client and Wine are both 32bit).

It sounds more like your switch is what caused the problem, so it might be better to explain how you did that, so we can try to find out what is causing your problems. So, how did you perform the switch? There isn't an uninstall feature with Slackware, so how did you remove the old version, and what did you do to install the new version?

These aren't included. You can use the scripts from SlackBuilds.org to build them into Slackware packages and then install them. There are also SlackBuilds.org clients such as sbopkg and slpkg that you can use to make the process even easier. I don't use any of those, I use Terminator, but AFAIK all of the above should build fine on a multilib system.