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The Stealth Desktop: Sight and Sound With Slackware
sombragris writes "Many people think of Slackware as a distribution oriented to servers and experienced users. However, here's an article that shows how to configure sound and the X Window System in Slack, in a newbie-friendly way and oriented towards desktop usage. The article is a follow-up to Part I of the series, where the author introduced his vision of Slackware as a desktop. Enjoy!"
Installing X is already covered in the guide. Slackware was my first distro, I don't remember having any trouble getting X to run :D
I've been using Slack 9.1 now since it came out and honestly I can't remember having as many problems as he brings up. Aside from having to run alsactl to lower the volume a bit I had no problem whatsoever with sound and video. X ran out of the box too. I also used dropline gnome which is IMHO a great DE package.
I concurr. Sound worked correctly out of the box (the volume levels were zeroed, but that's nothing that aumix can't fix). X started up with my window manager of choice no problem at all. Happened in slack 9 on my laptop, happened with slack 10 on the desktop.
Verdict: Article is a troll. =)
The previous sig has been removed due to
Two words: Dropline Gnome.
Dropline's a meta-distribution that sits on top of Slackware that's very desktop oriented. It even has a helpful little applet that checks to see if there've been updates and a simple menu based program for upgrading the system. This means you get all the latest packages with a pretty nice amount of ease.
When it comes down to it, Slack is actually one of the simplest distributions out there. Everything is very logical, and nothing is made more complex than it needs to be. Thrown in with the nice admin tools Dropline provides for those that aren't really comfortable hand editing config files, and I feel like it makes for an excellent desktop distribution.
Sound works out of the box on Slackware 10 (through ALSA). You will simply need to turn the volume levels up with the mixer.
The funny thing is, getting X working on Slackware isn't that hard. The most it's taken on any of the machines I've installed it on is a quick xf86config, or now with 10.0, an xorgconfig. It defaults to a basic Gnome desktop, which I happen to rather like myself. And as I've pointed out in another post, adding in Dropline Gnome makes it a top notch desktop platform.
Yes, Slackware makes an excellent server system, but that doesn't mean that it's difficult to make it an equally excellent desktop system. Just because the underlying system is intentionally kept simplistic (read: easily manageable) does not mean that it takes any obscene amount of tweaking to turn it into a rather nice to use desktop environment.
On what planet is KDE 'simular' to Windows? Oh... its probably the IOSlaves that let you transparently save files to different networks via ftp, ssh, etc. Oh, wait, no thats not it. Maybe its that you can get an mp3 or an ogg from a music track on a CD simply by putting the cd in, and typing in audiocd:/ and picking the files you want. Oh, windows doesn't have that either? Seriously. The similarity begins and ends with the fact that they both have a taskbar, a cursor, and windows.
And how is Gnome not?? And they're both easy to install, because they come with the freaking distro!
I have been using Slackware since version 8.0 and 10.0 is the first version to give me some hassles. Mind you these hassles are minor compared to what you get with other distroes. I don't know what's wrong as I have used 9.1 on the same comp without these problems:
1 - Xine, noatun, kaboodle don't play MPEGs without dropping most frames (mplayer works OK, though not as well as with 9.1). Likewise xine has troubles with DVDs
2 - I had a really tough time getting sound to work (though not with KDE components). It's not an issue with permissions, but something to do with hotplug, udev, or something like that, which I think is also to blame for the next problem below.
3 - Could not get my USB thumb drive to work (this worked flawlessly under 9.1 with hotplug)
As I said, these are minor, though annoying. Still, Slackware is the least annoying distro out there, which is why I will continue to stick with it. Patrick does a wonderful job.
How'bout
/etc/rc.d/rc.local
alsamixer
alsactl store
echo "alsactl restore" >>
That way it automatically restores the sund at every reboot.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
The only other thing that's annoyed me with gentoo is when etc-update hoses my fstab (and half a dozen other important files.) Maybe I just don't know how to use it properly.
._cfg0000 file or move it somewhere else (I used /root/cfgblackhole/). After that, run etc-update and -5.
/etc/dispatch-conf.conf -- set every yes/no option to yes, and make sure the archive-dir exists (create it yourself if you have to). Oh, and emerge rcs if you've not done so already, dispatch-conf needs it to do version control.
After I switched to dispatch-conf, updating config files stopped being a pain.
1) Don't just hit -5 everytime you use etc-update. Look at the list. If there's a file you want to keep, exit with -1 and either remove the
2) You might want to use dispatch-conf instead of etc-update (it's part of portage, no need to emerge it separarely) -- it's much smarter, allows you to compare diffs, and has better options for keeping the old file. Also, you'll to edit
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
>why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie
>friendly installations out of the box?
At the risk of being sucked into a religious war, I'll assume this is a serious question.
The first response must be, what do you mean by a newbie?
If you mean someone who have never touched anything but windows and has no experience with a unix shell or a text editor, and who doesn't have any close linux-head friends to turn to for help and advice, then I agree with you. Slackware may not be the best way to take a first step into linux.
If you mean someone who doesn't *want* to ever have to edit a text file because they have some philosophical objection to it, then slackware is not the distribution for them. I realize there are actually a lot of these people in the world, and that there's probably no point in trying to change their minds. I'm all in favor of creating distributions for them to use, but Slack really isn't one of them.
On the other hand, if you mean someone who's got a couple of basic shell commands under their belt and has spent a dozen hours in some kind of *nix and is looking to put together a useful system, then I'd argue slackware is actually a great way to start out administering linux.
First of all, the skills one acquires living in slackware for a while are easily transported to just about any other *nix out there. If you start out relying entirely on distribution specific config tools, you end up having to start over from scratch every time you switch to something else.
Second, the problem with nifty auto-configurators is that they have a habbit of failing. In slack, if your something doesn't work, it's easy to find out what's actually broken and how to fix it, 'cause in the process of setting it up you've already met all the relevant files. On more "friendly" systems, you merely get a cryptic error message that the fancy wizard failed; or more often than not, a message that everything is set up and working fine even though it's not.
As someone who followed the path windows+sun->debian->mandrake->slackware+openbs d (and a bunch of quickly discarded experiments with other distros along the way), I'm sorry I didn't start out with slack sooner. I'm fond of both debian and mandrake, but I wasted a whole lot of time struggling to solve problems that were distro specific rather than actually using the system. Slack may take a little while longer to set up if everything goes right, but if anything goes wrong it's a hell of a lot easier to solve.