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!"

Comments

X Slack??

[PeterPumpkin]

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

Re:X Slack??

[Alan Hicks]

Throwing in a shameless plug here. Myself and some of the other BOZOs on alt.os.linux.slackware have been sort on-again off-again working on an updated release of that book. You can find that project here.

Uhh

[toetagger1]

Any OS that I have to configure sound myself, I don't consider newbie-friendly!

just my 2 cents

Re:Uhh

[PitaBred]

So, when Windows doesn't work with sound or video out of the box, it's not newbie friendly?
Nice troll.

Re:Uhh

[Tr0mBoNe-]

True, but getting the sound working isn't hard.

Compile in sound drivers into the kernel, add the sound module to the startup scripts, and then find some easy to use interface... I used some obsure little program that was a series of command line statements like cvol 100 or cvol -r 100 for full or full right channel respectivly.

Slack however is one of the most compatable distros out there... I have not had many problems installing programs with it.

A thought just crossed my mind... Since when is Slackware... or any distro other than Fedora, Suse, or Linspire User-Friendly??? Oh well... One more setup guide helps us all... cudos to the author... we need more peeps like him.

Re:Uhh

[13Echo]

Sound works out of the box on Slackware 10 (through ALSA). You will simply need to turn the volume levels up with the mixer.

Re:Uhh

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Not that I blame you for the mistake, but I don't think he is a troll. Nor do I see that he is denying your conclusion.

That said, follow the statement to its logical conclusion!

Re:Uhh

[toetagger1]

Yes,

if ANY OS needs sound configured when it comes out of the box, it is not newbie friendly. That is exacly what I said.

Re:Uhh

[baywulf]

"Any car that I have to fuel myself, I don't consider newbie-friendly!"

And that would be true too if most of the cars around can add fuel by itself. Most operating systems (including many Linux distributions) can auto-detect sound cards themselves.

Re:Uhh

[nwbvt]

I disagree. Being a newbie isn't the same thing as being an incompetent moron. In fact, newbies generally refers to a class of people who have very little experience in something but are interested in learning. What better learning experience than something that has you do the configuration yourself rather than having some script do it hidden away in the background?

Saying Slackware is newbie-friendly does not mean it is right for grandma, merely that it is a good choice for someone interested in learning about Linux/Unix but who currently has little experience.

Re:Uhh

[nwbvt]

News for Nerds, remember? Some of us don't mind getting down and dirty with our computers.

Re:Uhh

[nwbvt]

And dancing naked through the forest isn't a good way to teach someone calculus.

See, I too can make irrelevant analogies that in no way benefit the conversation.

But....

[gfxguy]

why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie friendly installations out of the box?

Re:But....

[gfxguy]

Not a troll... sorry. How many newbies care to deal with two ethernet cards? More often than not, Mandrake (and other distributions) work flawlessly. The question still stands... if you want a distribution to learn how things work, slackware is fine, if you want a distribution where things just work (usually), you get something else.

Re:But....

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Open up 1 text file that will always be in the same place, that will never pop up the "this is C:\Program Files, do you really want to see the files?". Find the line in this text file marked "This is for the blahblah sound card". Delete the # in front of that line, and only the #.

Type startx, hit enter. If that doesn't work, type xf86config, hit enter. Answer all the questions it asks, and if unsure of the answer, it will usually tell you about a good generic answer. If you think you need to configure a video card, but you don't know the name of it, go shoot yourself.

Those *do not* look like rocket science instructions to me, but maybe I'm biased. It's all intimidating if you haven't learned anything yet, right? Except this isn't all that much to learn, is incredibly valuable (at least in my own unimportant opinion), and can't be faked with some asshat GUI wizard.

What's the alternative, mandrake with some GUI installer, which has a 45% of making it work auto-magically if its a stock Dell or IBM, and a 10% chance if you've installed even one PCI card on your own? There will be 4 or 5 different screens of the wizard, often worded ambiguously, that if you click on the wrong one, it may ot may not allow you to go back and fix it? And it is at least as many steps, isn't easily reversed, and provides a false sense of security.

I just don't see that as an improvement.

Re:But....

[munpfazy]

>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.

I don't know where this guy comes from

[xutopia]

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.

Must be wearing the wrong shades...

[Kjella]

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

Re:Must be wearing the wrong shades...

[Slack3r78]

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.

Re:Secondhand news

[gfxguy]

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.

Re:Vision?

[Xoder]

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. =)

Re:Are you sure?

[Slack3r78]

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.

User since 8.1

[brendanoconnor]

A while back (whenever 8.1 came out) I decided to try linux. I read a few reviews, and what not. I first tested out mandrake. I had bought it at the store for a couple of dollars (less then $40, maybe less). I played with it for a while, but it just did not feel right.

I tried Debian next, but apparently thats above my head cause when I got to the dselect area I was overwhelmed. Decided, perhaps not for me.

Finally I tried slackware. What I really liked from the start was they had an entire book, for free, on their website that I could read for help. Although when I started the installation, I did not really need any help. Slackware has a great menu-driven installer. With some previous computer experience, and a little network know how, installation was a breeze.

At the time the kernel supported my sound card, but did not compile in the drive automatically. Before I realized I could of just built the module and used it that way, I decided to recompile the kernel. Also a very easy task in slackware.

Ultimately, I love the distribution, and have been using it since. I have a subscription so I get the latest distro in the mail a few days after it is released. Although truth be known I have no reason to even break the plastic on 10 because I have kept myself patched up and just do not need anything new. It does feel good to support Patrick and the slackware team. They deserve that, and much more.

I will say you have to be willing to read and learn (which means 99% of the world just won't like it) to use slackware. But, once you have learned how, you realize just how great Slackware is.

Brendan

p.s. www.linuxquestions.com has distro specific forums. If you need help, try their first.

Re:User since 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not completely and utterly wrong, almost but not quite! =) Now that I've said that, lets get into some specifics:

1. No, not everything is in 1 file, but all the startup scripts are in one directory, with names like rc.sshd etc... These are excellently written and they are trivial to edit, once you understand what they do.

2. The spirit of Slackware is if you want to do something, the system will not stop you. There are no dependancies (which cause more trouble than they are worth, in my honest opinion) checking, because quite frankly, you should RTFM.

3. I would not say that Slackware is for everybody, but if you know enough linux, and you're sick of conforming to other people's systems Slackware is definetly for you. If you like hacking config files to get your system running optimally, Slackware is definetly for you. At the same time if you just don't give a damn and want it to Just Work (TM), drop a slackware CD in and you're fine.

4. Slackware is all about speed and usability on older machines. There are no thousands of start up programs like in RedHat or other distributions of Linux. If there was a proper distribution-wide benchmark, I have no doubt in my mind that slackware would come second, first being Gentoo. (reason is obvious)

5. If you think you know Linux, give Slackware a shot anyway, you wont regret it. It's one step away from BSD.

Re:hmm

[Bob The Cowboy]

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!

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

just ignore him - look at his website link - he's a java programmer for god's sake.

Re:Configuration is not the major problem

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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.

New hardware, Works "out of the box"

[respite]

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.

Re:Are you sure?

[Slayk]

Yep, aside from changing permissions on halt and reboot to allow regular users to use them (*glare*), Dropline-GNOME is the best thing since sliced bread. It's made me enjoy GNOME, which I really didn't like before I installed Dropline.

Re:Are you sure?

[boudie]

The problem with Dropline from my experience is that it changes so much of your system, including glibc that it makes compiling other non-dropline packages very difficult or impossible. So, if you want to use just the Dropline stuff and nothing else, it is worth a try. If you want to compile a lot of your own stuff, then you're better off without it. And, like gonnorhea, it's a lot easier to get than it is to get rid of (pam?).

Re:Not my impression.

[Welsh Dwarf]

First of all, it isn't made _by_ slackers, but _for_ slackers, and second the 'programmers and designers' are actually one man.

On a more serious note, I've had slackware on application servers (serving thin clients) and have never had any hassle. The 'lack of automation' is basically sticking to the KISS philosophy, and to be perfectly honest, personally I find that it's the other distro's who's toolsets are bloated, not slackware's limited. Then again, it's probably a matter of taste...

Stating the obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[eris_crow]

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.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Eudial]

How'bout

alsamixer
alsactl store
echo "alsactl restore" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local

That way it automatically restores the sund at every reboot.

Re:Wow!

[Quattro Vezina]

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.

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 ._cfg0000 file or move it somewhere else (I used /root/cfgblackhole/). After that, run etc-update and -5.

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 /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.

BIG fonts...

[Skiron]

Funnily enough, I installed Slack on my laptop 3 days ago. All went hunky dory... sort of.

I use Fluxbox as desktopWM, and it all worked great - unless I fired up a KDE/Gnome app - then fonts went HUGE (Mozilla here)

Buit, having a few years ;) experience with Linux, I re-ran /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config and sorted.

BTW, pre-compiled Slackware is soooooo fast - nearly as fast as Gentoo built on box.

Nick

My slackware story

[praedictus]

I've been using Slackware for over 2 years in a dual-boot situation (Win 98). It started off pretty simple with a Zipslack install to a dos directory, using loadlin to switch to Linux. Shortly thereafter I used part2.4.3 to create a true linux partition and swapspace, manually copied the installation from the DOS partition to the linux partition, ran LILO and got lucky on the first try.
Still no X or sound, so first I downloaded an updated kernel (2.4.19 IIRC), then began filling in the required libraries. Got X working, but KDE crashed and burned due to a dependency problem while loading. After much trial and error worked around that with an older version of XFREE86 and some symlinks. Then switched from default SVGA to NVidia drivers. Still works but no sound yet.
Next "discovered" swaret and upgraded the whole kit and kaboodle to Slackware 9.1 (very slowly- I'm on dialup in the middle of Brazil). Got the ALSA drivers working somewhat, so now have sound.
Of course at this time the mX440 decided to die and take the AGP on the motherboard along with it, so the system gets a brain transplant. With no hope of getting back home where good hardware is reasonable, I opt for whats available - a somewhat crappy ASUS a7v266 motherboard.
The Windows part went without a too much trouble, boot to safe mode, uninstall the old hardware, do a quick search and destroy mission in the registry, reboot and let it grab the needed files off the motherboard CD. Now for Slack - BORF-kernel panic on boot.
About this time I get a good deal on a 120 gig HD, and as the hd in the kid's machine is dying, another transplant in order. Of course I'm a lazy fuck and will do anything to avoid a reinstall even if it takes longer. Windows - no problem at all, used part243 to clone the partition off the 40 gig drive, finished that part in 30mins with formatting and all. Decided my linux partition deserved to be somewhat larger, so I couldn't clone. Formatted the partition. Now what?
Remembered I STILL had the old ZIPSLACK installed on the windows partition i had cloned, ran loadlin and now had access to the old linux partition. Used the old linux to copy the files over to the new partition. Ran lilo & to boot the new linux partition. Kernel panic. Boot to DOS, run loadlin, fixed the references causing the kernel panic in rc.d (old NVIDIA cruft) reboot.
Boots fine, no X, sound drivers still not right. Oops! Install cd only has linux drivers for old version of RH. Try to install manually anyway, kernel mismatch so give up. Change to plain old SVGA in XFree86Config, finally get X working, and lo and behold KDE is working too. Upgrade my moz to Waterfrog and start browsing in search of solutions. Which is where I am now.

Tells You How To Configure Sound Every Boot

[reallocate]

Slackware makes no pretension of being "newbie-friendly".

That said, it tells you how to configure your soundcard at every reboot and it keeps telling you until you do exactly that.

Re:First release to have some troubles with

[trocade]

I think the first problem is because of Xorg, since I upgraded to Xorg I can no longer use mplayer with -vo xv, something which worked fine with XFree86. I get some error message that says: The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec.

Re:Gentoo

[clymere]

Gentoo has hands-down the least intuitive install process I've ever seen.

Anything that doesn't autoboot into an install process of one sort or another, and instead gives you cryptic messages of how exactly one might conceivably achieve an installation. I actually finished downloading Slackware CD's in the time it took me to figure out the Gentoo install.

As a newbie I found Slackware to be far easier to install than Gentoo...and for that matter, so -called "user-friendly" distros like SuSE and Red Hat.