into the slack
Since installing Gentoo GNU/Linux on my laptop, I’d found myself using my desktop less and less. Thanks to a really stupid thing I did a while back, it only had Windows XP installed; that was fine for a while, but eventually I found myself opening the laptop every time I wanted to do something rather than put up with Windows.
Having maintained Gentoo on the desktop before, I didn’t want to do it again. The desktop only connects to the intertubes via dial-up, and Gentoo involves a lot of downloading. So I started checking out livecds and installing some distros for testing. I ended up choosing Slackware, and I’m just starting to get into it. The main reasons for the choice are:
- it uses dbus and hal
- it uses udev and cups
- it comes with KDE (v. 3.5.7)
- it comes with much of the software I use
- its packages remain close to what developers release, without customization
Many good distros satisfy most of that list, but for the last item. In particular, there seems to be a feeling that KDE’s menu is a Bad Thing, and most distros modify it to a large extent. I like the K menu, and every one of their customizations annoys me to some extent.
So I downloaded the just-released Slackware 12 DVD and booted. Slack’s installer is simple and straightforward. It’s not a command-line installer, but it is text-based, without X loaded. My drives were already partitioned the way I wanted, and the partitions formatted, so I skipped that step.
It was just a matter of telling it which partition should be used for what and then selecting packages to install. I googled a little and found that Slackware’s package manager, pkgtool, could uninstall anything later, so I just had it install the whole shebang. Except Emacs, because Emacs is Evil. Oh, and I also told it not to install lilo, since I already had grub set up on its own partition.
After editing grub’s configuration file to point to a Slackware kernel (it comes with a few — I just used the default one), I rebooted and logged in as root; Slack’s installer doesn’t have a provision for adding users, but adding users is easy. I created a normal user account for myself. Several edits of xorg.conf later, I had a decent KDE desktop with my USB mouse working fine. After installing nVidia drivers (which I had on a USB drive) and a little more xorg.conf tinkering, followed by a brief trip through KDE’s configurator, I was completely happy with the desktop. (I also use Xfce, but I haven’t run it under Slackware yet.)
Slackware comes with a nifty utility to configure dial-up, called pppsetup. It made connecting far easier than any other distro I’ve tried.