I’m trying out Arch GNU/Linux, with an eye toward switching my desktop to it from Slackware. Arch is supposed to give vanilla installs of software and leave it up the the user to configure however is wanted. Arch has a package manager which resolves dependencies and can work with build scripts. And Arch uses a [...]
Since I started out with Gentoo, I’m used to colors in virtual consoles and terminal emulators. There’s a small but vocal group of Gentooers who hate them and switch everything to monochrome, but I couldn’t live with that at this point. Slackware sticks with basic white-on-black, so I have to tweak things a [...]
I have a GeForce 8600 GTS so I need nVidia’s binary driver. (Well, for values of “need” which include needing to run at full resolution and have a tolerable display.) Just downloading and running the installer from nVidia has worked up to now for me with Slackware, but not this time, after I had compiled [...]
As it turns out, there’s really very little to blog about regarding my Slackware 12.1 installation. Almost everything Just Works.
Update: I gave up on the approach below and solved the problem by modifying the kdeeject script per comment 13 in this Gentoo bug report. This seems a lot better than screwing with the device’s [...]
I have a GeForce 8600 GTS video card. Grabbing the latest nVidia drivers (right now, 169.12) and following nVidia’s instructions worked fine. I’d never let nVidia’s installer autoconfigure xorg for me, but I gave it a shot this time, and it turned out well. It left the default resolutions at 1024×768, but it [...]
I’d been doing most of my work on my laptop. I wanted to play the most recent Half-Life episode on the desktop, which meant installing Windows. It was a huge hassle installing Windows XP, much worse than any Linux install this century, and part of it was to destroy everything on the [...]
I don’t play games in GNU/Linux too much, but I really wanted to have Fish Fillets NG. It’s mind-bending in a very satisfying way (which unfortunately also makes it a very effective time-sink). This was the first Slackware install that gave me some fits. Fillets needs Lua libraries; I knew that [...]
I’ve played with Compiz with a few livecds and I like it, so when I noticed Slackware 12 came with Compiz 0.5 I decided to use it on my desktop.
I got it running more-or-less ok using this howto posting as a guide. Without GNOME, it’s very difficult and frustrating to tweak the Compiz settings. [...]
I guess I’ll continue to blog about setting up Slackware 12 on my desktop. I’ve just installed the driver for my cheap Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 1020. I call it cheap; it’s a very low-end USB laser printer, but it does a great job for me. Don’t buy it from links on HP’s [...]
As I’m using my new installation of Slackware 12, I keep remembering some little things I want to do, but when I have spare time I can’t remember what they were. So I need a to-do list. /me loves BasKet Note Pads. It was already installed on my laptop, so that’s [...]