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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!"
just my 2 cents
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie friendly installations out of the box?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I would say "Here's an entire article on just how to get sound and X Window system working, to reaffirm the belief that this is not what it was designed to do, and that Slackware is meant for servers."
That you can, with considerable tweaking, make something function as something else is not new. Yes, you can mod almost any car into making it a race car. Doesn't mean the original is a race car, not by a long shot.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You have a low enough ID number to have learned by now the answer to your question is YES, that's exactly how slashdot has always worked. The difference here is in the discussion.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
As it always should be. If you think that software installation isn't something that any user but the most clueful should ever be allowed to do, you're begging for trouble. The receptionist up front, who is always installing shareware games, elf-bowling and shit, check out her computer sometime. Norton has probably nailed most of the actual viruses, but there is almost certainly dozens of spyware applets installed.
My favorite is "I thought we switched to Mozilla to get rid of popups". Walk over, and as she surfs, little IE windows keep popping up. It was amazing. The damn spyware app was intercepting Mozillas browser traffic, and opening up IE popunders. I wanted to cry.
Where is the author coming getting these ideas? The Slackware 10 install set up my sound and video without any feedback whatsoever from myself, and on fairly recent hardware too: onboard sound from an Intel motherboard and a Radeon 9000.
All I had to do was turn up the volume when I logged into the gnome desktop, which I agree should be done for the user in the first place, but it is hardly worth whining about.
Pardon me for stating the obvious, but a little rant is in order. Every linux machine can be turned into a desktop machine no matter what normal distribution you install on it. The normal in the previous sentence refers to linux distributions that aren't modified to be used as real-time operating systems, or have undergone serious modifications to suit some particular combination of hardware for embedded devices and even then, I'm quite sure it's still possible if you take into account the limitations these modifications imply.
I'm growing tired of the glowing reviews of distribution X and company Y providing the best desktop environment available. People can run Gnome or KDE on any distribution as long as they know their favourite package management system, and if not then ./configure; make; make install has always done the trick. Oh, I'm not saying that it isn't a good thing that distributions are trying to provide desktop environments, in fact I think it's a great idea. But at the heart of the matter of it all lies that whatever distribution you run, you can ALWAYS run windowmanager X or desktop environment Y, usually without too much hassle.
I've used slackware for years, and it was the first distribution I ever installed. I've used Redhat and Linux From Scratch, and lately I use Debian. But I've grown so tired of the endless debates of geeks preferring one distribution to another. It's all the same, just a little different, and even then you can still do whatever you want. Can we please stop our little holy wars, because the rest of the world doesn't care. If a person who is not a technophobe asks me what linux distribution to use, my answer always is "Pick one of the better known ones, and you'll be fine."
Maybe this is a smug attitude of mine, but I don't care. If someone wants to run fedora, fine by me. Someone chooses debian, fine by me. Someone chooses windows, be my guest. But please stop being such zaelots, as it's hurting the community.
Slack does make a good desktop, but I won't say it makes a good desktop for everyone.
The first distro I ever installed was Slackware 3.1 and used it and the other 3.x releases for about 3 years. Then I got tired of doing everything by hand and I switched to RedHat 6.2. I stuck with RedHat for several years after that, and now at work I deal with mostly RHE3, so the experience of using it paid off, but it was Slack that actually taught me how to do everything.
When it came time to upgrade my system at home, though, I ran into trouble. I'd been using RH7.1 for a long time and thought that I would go to RH9, but the installer frequently crashed during installation and I'd have to start over. Then when I finally got it installed and working, I managed to bork it while trying to get audio and video codecs and software installed. I could have tried repairing by hand, I suppose, but it being a fresh install anyway, I figured it would take less time to just start over from scratch and reinstall one more time. No dice. The installer crashed again.
I like RedHat, and I still run RH8 on a small print/mail/firewall server at home, but after the repeated installation trouble, I decided to go with Slackware. It is nice and conservative and I knew that it would at least install correctly, even if it needed a bit more hand holding to set up.
So I got out my Slack 9.0 CDs a friend had burned for me and loaded it up. No problems. Not a single glitch during the entire installation. Everything was smooth as could be. Sound worked out of the box, and X configuration was easy with xfree86config. I compiled Window Maker and KDE 3.1 from source, and had no problems at all with them.
Now I've got a clean, fast system with a low memory footprint, and it gives me no headaches. If there is anything I want to do, some program is already installed to do it, so even if I don't have the program I prefer, I've at least got a program I can use, and that is what counts. Downloading other programs is no big deal for me.
I'm not the only one who uses this box, either. My wife uses it sometimes and she knows nothing about computers. But Gnome, Mozilla, and OpenOffice handle 99% of her needs, and she can deal with them without trouble. She still needs me to do updates, and configure things, though.
So my judgement of Slackware today is this: it makes a great desktop for people who already know how to use Linux and already know how to customize things the way they want. For newbies it's probably too intimidating unless they are really interested in learning, but it can still work for them if a knowledgeable person is around to take care of details.