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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
just my 2 cents
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
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.
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.
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!
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.
just ignore him - look at his website link - he's a java programmer for god's sake.
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.
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
>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.