I wish there was a way to buy from the store using paypal. I dont think paypal is an option for buying goods, just donating.

PS. The mayan calendar tee is amazing!

What about Pat selling support contracts? So, you pay the fee to get to call Mr Slackware in person. Would he do that?

Please don't tie up the Chief Operations Officer time when he's arranged for a support structure (Slackware team members through LQ) to handle and filter problems with Slackware.

Just my opinion ...

Okay, Alien Bob said to put it here about 14.0, so here goes...

First off, I've only been using Slackware for about 8 or 9 months. Started on 13.37 and for twelve years before that I was a faithful SuSE/openSUSE user.

This, 14.0, is also one I bought, to help support Pat and anyone else involved. It's extremely hard on me to do so, but I feel good that I'm helping in some way.

I've got two hdd's. One is 160GB the other an old 40GB. I'll name them sda and sdb respectively. I also only have a 32 bit system.

I slapped the shiny new DVD in the drive preparing to do fresh installs of both hdd's preserving only my /home partitions and wipe the other partitions clean and start anew, as I always have for the past 12 years.

I got started on sdb with fdisk and things seemed to go okay. I then went to sda and did the same and it too semed to be okay, except for when I went to boot...got a blank screen. Nothing at all was happening.

Fdisk again, since it can't hurt so long as my /home partitions are safe. Same thing happened (I use lilo by the way, as it's easy and works and is far simpler to use than grub, IMO).

Okay, getting a little frustrated, but that's when one learns.

Tried all different combinations, including setting sdb as first hdd in BIOS...still nothing working well. Then I get something I'd never seen or heard of before - hdd is too full to install. How it got that way after formatting and not getting even part way through another try at installing is beyond me.

So, I figure that it's time to just bite the bullet and do a fresh, clean installation on the whole hdd (sda, since I can't seem to get sdb to hold an installation). I figure I've got a backup of /home on a dual-layer DVD and should be good to go.

That's what I did, just installed as if no worries in the world about saving anything. Seemed to work just fine, other than a few times trying to boot all I got was the LO a million times on the screen, but I was able to boot with the installation DVD and eventually fixed that (unfortunately I can't remember what I did to do so...sorry folks!).

Great! I'm now in 14.0! Unfortunately I live way out in the woods and only have access to and can afford only dial-up. No problem, I figure I'll install a small linuxant usb modem driver (dgcmodem) that worked a charm on 13.37...but it won't install on 14.0. Got messages saying it didn't install correctly, messages during boot that say the same thing but somehow or another after a couple of reboots the modem is working anyway now. Weird, but I'm happy.

Next, I notice that when I start Dolphin, it takes 3 or four seconds to 'fill in' from being simply a grey square. Even after installing the nvidia driver (I use the one from nvidia as it's what's worked for me over the years and I already had it saved on the dl dvd and don't have the patience to download whole new kernel *and* nvidia driver as it would take days, literally, to download). Sometimes it fires up without a hesitation, sometimes it takes a couple seconds to 'fill in'.

First things first - get system settings straightened out. Always a bit of a time-taking process, but I enjoy it because I have control (one of the reasons I switched to Linux - overnight - so many years ago!).

Once the settings are generally done, I get to install all the 'stuff' I want off my saved /home on the dl dvd. Unfortunately I didn't check it to see if everything had burned correctly and for some reason much of the stuff on the dvd is 0 bytes and unusable (I'd been having trouble burning big files on 13.37 but k3b would usually stop or not burn at all, whereas this dvd seemed to do just fine in burning and k3b never even farted - sigh). Oh well, not too much lost and nothing of great importance, just stuff that takes a loooooooong time for me to get in dial-up, heh.

Naturally many of the apps, libs, and whatever that built and installed fine on 13.37 doesn't work on 14.0, so I get the pleasure of the time-consuming work of re-downloading all those things once again, but what the heck, many of them are upgrades anyway.

Up to then, a couple of days, things have been working well. Had to get libdvdcss to make movies work, but that's a given. Still a few small glitches though:

kwrite somehow screwed up my rc.6 and rc.local and the apcupsd *.conf files when I edited them after installing apcupsd. Now my system won't shut down correctly and just freezes at one spot and has to go through a file-system check at boot (luckily I've used reiserfs for the past 10 years and it's been fantastic at keeping my hdd's safe from these kinds of things). Apcupsd also complains that it can't start because of 'configuration file errors', even though they're setup correctly according to the website.

System settings window crashes about every third time I use it after I click either the 'close' button or the 'x' button in upper-right corner. (I use KDE, btw)

The panel/taskbar thing was a PITA to set up, but that's a KDE thing (I really, really miss KDE3!!).

The powerdevil thing/stuff wants to take over doing things with my screen and dvdrw. I couldn't figure out why the screen was getting brighter and brighter or dimming until I looked at dmesg and saw 'Activating service name='org.kde.powerdevil.backlighthelper' (using servicehelper)
Oct 22 07:23:10 dbus[1878]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.kde.powerdevil.backlighthelper''. Hopefully turning every single thing off (unticking) in System settings->power management will work.

Some apps (amarok at the least) wouldn't work with my SBLive! card and kept wanting to use an HDA hdmi stuff. I don't have any idea where that came from as I have anything to do with sound turned off in the BIOS (MoBo sound). I had to find HDA in modules and delete/comment-out so it would stop doing that taking over thing.


Overall, nothing too bad except for the somehow-corrupted rc files and .conf files. It doesn't seem quite a snappy as 13.37, but I'm probbaly just being overly pessimistic because of the installation troubles I had and the shutting down problem I have now. The corrupted rc.x thing happened in 13.37 also once, but I can't remember how I fixed that either <mutter><grumble>.

As things are, I expect 14.0 to be just as rock-solid as my 13.37 was. I'm always fiddling with things at first, so I'm always getting into trouble at first, but once I settle in, my Slackware has been nothing but absolutely perfect. Pan doesn't work, as it didn't in 13.37 either, but I believe it's my ISP at fault and they're dragging their butts in giving me answers to my questions.

Anyway, sorry it was so long, but that's what I have. Once I get the rc.x and other files fixed, I'll be happy as a clam once again with my Slack system and it'll have an average up time of three weeks (sometimes the storms we get here last a long time and do major damage to power lines because of the numerous tornado's throughout the year and my UPS only has a 10 minute backup, heh). Oh, in case anyone asks, my system is:

MOBO: ASRock A770DE+, AM3 ready, 2600 mhz FSB (it was cheap and it works well!)

Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GT520 1GB DDR3

CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 250

2GB DDR2-800 RAM

Modem: ZOOM USB model 3095

Sound card: Creative Labs SB Live!

The biggest problem I have had, has to do with Audacity, Skype and the Sound System...or any other combination of trying to record Skype calls.

But mostly, when setting Audacity to Stereo Mix, it will record but I have a USB Blue Yeti Microphone, and the Stereo Mix setting does not mute the internal Mic and use the Blue Yeti.

Otherwise, I have been able to make everything work as I would have it : )

One good thing everyone can do that doesn't cost money is simply... spread the word.

While monetary donations do help Patrick stay in operation, Slackware can also be supported through the community with feedback, code submissions, help, and in general just spreading the word about Slackware to people getting into Linux who want to learn what Linux is about.

Slackware isn't just another Linux distribution.

Slackware is a great educational system, server system, desktop system, and laptop system. All it needs is people to contribute to it with whatever they can.

@ReaperX7 - I got my mom to use Linux about 5 years ago, she's 73 now. At that time I was using opensuse. When I got Slackware, I formatted her system and installed 13.37 on it. I've not had hardly any problems other than "This doesn't work" stuff and only because she almost refuses to *look* or *read* anything about an app. I go and sit down, ask what the problem is, shake my head in disgust at how dumb it is and show her what to do - all usually in less than 2 minutes.

I've just turned a buddy of mine on to Slackware also and he's dual-booting so he can take his time learning it...so far he's loving it and spends equal amounts of time in each OS...not bad for someone who's never even heard of linux before, heh.