I have always been a HUGE fan of Slackware. I have installed it on my work computer (Dell Optiplex 745). I just compiled a new kernel but I was wondering if there is a way of finding out if all of my hardware is supported. We are a heavy windows environment here at work and I know with XP you can use the device manager. Is there a way to see in Slackware if all your hardware is supported?

Does everything work? Technically there's KInfoCenter in KDE, but it doesn't really tell you if everything is WORKING or not. A simple `lspci -vv` will give you most of the information you need, but again, it doesn't physically tell you if it's working. As far as I can tell, there are only a few things that you need to make sure are working. A CD/DVD drive, if you have one (read and write), hard drives, USB, IEEE1394 (if you have it), sound (using ALSA -- try playing a sound file and recording something with a mic), network, and ACPI. If something isn't working (or you want to know if it'll work) you could google the part at google.com/linux or here at LQ and see what others have said about it.

Everything appears to be working. However, when I copy a large amount of files from one partition to another on the same disc, everything else that I have up and running comes to a halt.

One more thing. I can't seem to mount my flash drive after I compiled a new kernel. I get a message that says:

Unable to load NLS charset cp437
FAT: codepage cp437 not found

Any Suggestions?

When you compiled your own kernel, did you include that codepage from within the NLS section of the kernel config? I figure that'd be where you would need to apply the needed support for that 'native language support'. Add it, then recompile the kernel.

As for the copying of large amounts of data slowing everything down, I can only say that on my dual core machine at home here, copying loads of data from the KDE desktop does at times go slowish (slower than I would expect) and the copy dialog alternates from "stalled..." to "copying..." but the system as a whole doesn't slow down at all. KDE just seems to add slowness to some seemingly fast operations.
Doing the copying from the command line always seems faster (and probably is).

At work, our computer infrastructure consists of a UNIX/Vax mainframe, SuSE/Novell networking, and a crapload of Win2000 'stupid/dumb terminals' as front-ends; the W2K terminals are little Dell Optiplex boxes (I don't know what model or what is inside them) and I can affirm that doing much of anything intensive with them is painfully slow & klunky (it is Win after all); they really are the epitomy of 'dumb terminal' so if yours are like ours, maybe try doing your copying from outside of KDE, perhaps even with a little bash script, and see if it helps?

Best of luck let us know how it all works out, and if you get the FAT codepage thing fixed.

Sasha