The second Slackware release in the 9.x series (based on the GCC 3.2.3 compiler), Slackware Linux 9.1 continues the ten-year Slackware tradition of simplicity, stability, and security. OSNews featured a preview of Slackware 9.1 two days ago with many screenshots. Buy for only $40 or download for free.
Slackware Linux 9.1 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Did anyone else notice that the betas and RCs just flew by? Didn’t seem to have proper time to sort out any glitches and gotchas, which is important with a brand-new GNOME 2.4 etc. Slackware is always solid, but this release seems very rushed…
heh, and yesterday I purchased a pre-order. Hope it comes in soon…
I only had one bug with Gnome: nautilus crashing when deleting the last file on a list-view.
And one with KDE, which is already filed as a bug report at KDE and it is a Qt issue (fixed in KDE 3.2).
Also, I had the sound problem, which I since fixed by simply getting another sound card.
However, except these problems, I did not see any other bug or instability on the 1,5 weeks I run Slackware.
While on my Fedora installation last night, I found SIX bugs in 45 minutes:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=4660&offset=30&rows=45#14…
I think that says a lot that Slackware is pretty stable.
BTW, found two more bugs on Fedora this morning… One is a crashing bug, the other one is a weird Mozilla effect (you can’t type into mozilla anymore if something specific has happened that I won’t detail here). My point is, Fedora felt more like an alpha to me than a beta (it is bugier than Severn Beta 1) while Slackware RCs are stable as a rock.
>I usually get the “no typing” bug in mozilla when looking at hottieasians.com
No, I get it when the focus of the window has artificially changed and I can’ get it back by clicking its window.
What a nice surprise!
n0dez
I downloaded this release and tried it, but it wouldn’t install. There was some major crash detecting hardware. I’ll try it again, but I won’t spend hours with it.
You don’t seem to understand! Slackware’s development model is very different from other distributions. The -current is what becomes the next release. Its development “starts” right after a release, so after this release stuff will be added to -current and labeled as “unstable” , where in fact its a hell lot stable. To the stable tree there will be nothing added except patches. The release (first beta and then 2 rc’s) cycle was very short because (at least that’s what I understood from Patrick) it was already stable and very secure. It takes some times for people who come from other distros, especially from RHL, MDK or SuSE that things with Slackware work diferently.
Please order a subscription or a CD set to support this great distro. Its totally inexpensive for what you get back.
Keep slacki’n and have fun!
Marc.
I get that too. I get it in Windows too with MozillaFirebird 0.6.1, although rarely. It also makes my scrollwheel not work.
I just press the new tab icon and close the current tab to get control of the browser again. Of course you could close it and relaunch the program, but then you would lose all you tabs.
Funny I never got that in Phoenix 0.5.
About Slackware being released so quick, well if it work reliably why delay a release. A release could take a long time or a short time, it just depends.
There’s always short Beta/RC time.
IIRC, 9.0 had 3 RCs, each basically a day after another, and it was a pretty solid release.
With Swaret now included, Slackware is doing great.
Did anyone else notice that the betas and RCs just flew by?
Yeah. Are the 9.1 release CD’s already available? I mean, it takes *some* time to have them made… Or does the slack store just burn `em when you place your order?
Did anyone else notice that the betas and RCs just flew by?…
<p>
Feel sooooo good, didn’t it
))
Eugenia, I’m looking at this screenshot here:
http://img.osnews.com/img/4637/slackware3.jpg
How did you put those clocks there? I like ’em.
Also, what is that app that shows weather info?
And where can I find that terminal client?
Thanks allot, Marc!
Are the 9.1 release CD’s already available? I mean, it takes *some* time to have them made… Or does the slack store just burn `em when you place your order?
It will take a little under a week to get out the door in my experience. Patrick V. will send them off to be made and start shipping them in the next day or two, but it takes a while to send off all the subscriptions, like mine
, and pre-orders. When not around the time of a release it tends to go out immediately. I mirror Slack 8.1, 9.0, and for the last couple of weeks current. So I’ll create some ISOs in the morning. I subscribe just to support Slackware.
Hi my name is Mephisto, and I am a Slackaholic.
>How did you put those clocks there?
http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org
Requires python (comes with slackware), pyGTK, PyORBit
and gnome-python (get these 3 from freshmeat). They have to be configured with –prefix=/usr otherwise it won’t work on Slackware.
>Also, what is that app that shows weather info?
Also gdesklets.
>And where can I find that terminal client?
http://www.gnomepro.com/tsclient/ Requires RDP (comes with slackware) and also supports VNC and two other protocols.
I downloaded this release and tried it, but it wouldn’t install. There was some major crash detecting hardware. I’ll try it again, but I won’t spend hours with it.
Can you give some details on your hardware and where it is failing? Perhaps someone here can help. Or you could try the Slackware forum on linuxquestions.org. There are some fairly experienced and patient members on there who would be happy to help.
I tried to install it again and I got an error relating to kernel virtual paging. Maybe my memory is bad.
Please provide us with exact hardware specs of the machine.
P3-700
Abit BH6
ASUSV7700 GeForce 2 GTS
384Mb (256Mb is Micron and the other is just generic)
SBLive Value
LiteON CDWriter
Toshiba 40X CDRom
20Gb Seagate (multiple partitions)
Samsung 900NF
Tell me if I’ve forgotten anything
You don’t tell us if your devices are scsi or IDE.
Also, what network card, modem do you have there? On board? PCI? Do you have also on board sound and gfx in addition to your PCI/AGP cards?
I suggest you take out a stick of ram at the time and re-test.
Also, check your BIOS settings for anything suspicious.
I subscribe just to support Slackware.
I’d like to support Slackware too, but it seems ridiculous to me to buy a CD set that offers virtually nothing over the generic isos you can get from the Linux CD vendors or download yourself. At least that was my impression of the official set of Slack 9.0 I bought earlier this year to help Pat out.
Maybe this time around I’ll buy some promo stuff like t-shirts or mousepads instead.
Slack is a great distro, but its business model is about where Mandrake’s is–carewear. A free-as-in-beer distro put out by a commerical company whose only revenue source is selling its software and a few accessories. Luckily, Patrick keeps his expense profile down to nil and Slack has a following of devoted fans willing to still buy CD sets whether they need them or not.
Imagine how much further this distro could go technically and mindshare-wise if it found a business model to get some serious cash behind it. Personally, I’d love to see Slack take back the market share it’s ceded to other distros because it is such a fine product.
Fair warning, I am not the best at troubleshooting installs. (I am better once it is installed). That said nothing in your hardware raises any obvious concerns. Are you using SCSI or IDE, the BH6 had built in SCSI didn’t it? Also I am assuming the crash is coming when the kernel is being loaded to create the install environment correct? You might try pulling any boards you don’t need for the install but I don’t think that is the problem.
I see three possible areas to check. Did you confirm the iso images against the MD5 sums? You managed to get it fairly quickly perhaps something did not download successfully. Pull the 128MB and see if that helps… Make that 2 places to check, the BH6 is too old to have APIC I think (and besides that was resolved in the 2.4.21 kernel.)
> Slack is a great distro, but its business model is about where Mandrake’s is–carewear. A free-as-in-beer distro put out by a commerical company whose only revenue source is selling its software and a few accessories. Luckily, Patrick keeps his expense profile down to nil and Slack has a following of devoted fans willing to still buy CD sets whether they need them or not.
Imagine how much further this distro could go technically and mindshare-wise if it found a business model to get some serious cash behind it. Personally, I’d love to see Slack take back the market share it’s ceded to other distros because it is such a fine product.
Perfectly said jgisclon. Fully agreed.
so slackware seems to have a development model similar to freebsd???
correct me if i am wrong….
i would be very receptive this distro if thats true…
I’d like to support Slackware too, but it seems ridiculous to me to buy a CD set that offers virtually nothing over the generic isos you can get from the Linux CD vendors or download yourself.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. I think of it as an investment to ensure that my distribution of choice continues to be updated and supported (with patches). I have a growing number of Slackware servers at this stage and a couple of desktops. It would be a significant effort for me to keep up with the various programs I use just for security fixes, more or less for updates. So I am in effect paying Patrick to do the job for me. I could get the exact some thing for free, but I feel it is worth the small cost to help out a project that is producing a product that I like. A GPL based business will not survive without a level of socioeconomic (not sure if that is the right word) morality. If you feel that what you get is worth the money to ensure it’s continuance then you should help support it.
Not meant as a slam but I have a problem with the idea of the Linux ISO vendors. They do nothing to contribute to the distributions they sell or the linux community. It may not be rational but I see that as a person profiting off of the work and reputation of others.
Perfectly said jgisclon. Fully agreed.
Even though it’s not technically a company, I think OpenBSD has a fair and appropriate revenue method.
Free FTP installs are a-ok. If you want to make your own CD–and even sell it–go for it.
But if you want a CD install put together by the OS vendor, the only way to get it is by purchasing an offical CD set.
Distros that don’t have huge support contracts to fall back on like Red Hat need to realize that giving away their product for free download in the same format as their retail product may not be the best idea. Look at all the complaints by the freeloaders over Mandrake Club and the upcoming release with embedded advertising.
Not meant as a slam but I have a problem with the idea of the Linux ISO vendors. They do nothing to contribute to the distributions they sell or the linux community. It may not be rational but I see that as a person profiting off of the work and reputation of others.
It’s hard to complain about the iso vendors when Linux companies allow their product to be distributed in iso format free-as-in-beer.
Those CD companies are merely filling a market niche for people on dial-up, without burners, or who don’t want to spend the time burning their own.
(Sorry for the pseudo-intellectual crud that follows, I do mean what I say but can’t explain it well.)
I don’t want to get into a religious war but I do not believe that a GPL based business is viable in the classical sense. Software takes time and resources to develop, as do distros. In the classic paradigm it is value for services rendered. If the services rendered are not worth what the producer asks for it then the consumer has the option not to accept the service. But when you give away the services for free what is the short term motivation of the consumer to pay for it? The motivation is no longer the service itself but the assurance of continued availabiity of the service. But now you are in effect paying for one thing but receiving something else. This separation motivation from gratification and makes it harder on an emotional level to justify the cost.
As far as low bandwidth consumers, I believe even a moderately motivated person in the US could find a way to save $4 a month to keep up with the current distro. If they can not then go to a LUG and get it there. Patrick may not get anything out of it but neither do the leeches. And maybe when they do have money they can direct it where it will do some good.
I have nothing to back this up, but are you absolutely certain that those “leeches” don’t send portions of the money back to the distro managers? (undoubtedly, some keep the money, but ALL?)
I have nothing to back this up, but are you absolutely certain that those “leeches” don’t send portions of the money back to the distro managers? (undoubtedly, some keep the money, but ALL?)
No, but I would put some fairly heavy odds against it. I would be happy to find out that I am wrong, unfortunately I don’t have much faith in mankind as a whole.
Slackware 9.1, bay-bee! Looks like Christmas came a little early this year
…I’ll wait for Dropline for Slack 9.1 as Dropline for Slack 9.0 already includes GNOME 2.4 and I’ve installed Kernel 2.4.22 myself. The new GCC and Python will be nice though.
Well done Patrick! I started using Slackware in place of RedHat a few months ago and I’ve never looked back. Redhat is now too enterprise-centric and it’s internal structures are gaining complexity by the release.
I guess the RedHat, Mandrake SuSE and (particularly) Debian users will have to wait a little longer for their next release. Slackware can release early because of its simplicity (*grins*). Gentoo still doesn’t have GNOME 2.4 in their stable tree (as of an hour or so ago).
Cheers to another high quality (and uuup 2 date) release.
Is it working for anyone?
http://www.slackware.com/torrents/index.html
Got a few comments here.
First, I’m thinking that the 8 gig hard disk I just found in an old computer is gonna give me somewhere to play with Slack without risking my other three OSs… heh heh heh
Second, I think a good business model for GPL software would be to do something like this: The current version is only available if you buy it; the previous version is available for free. That way, people (like me) who are still being bled to death in college can have reasonably recent installs, while the people who need the latest and greatest can get it, as well, and the vendor makes a bit more money. But making it a shareholder thing is a BIG mistake, I think.
That said, I switched to FreeBSD because it gives me three very important things:
1. Rock solid stability.
2. Very good currency of software and easy upgrading of the software and OS.
3. It’s absolutely free. (Although I have bought the book-with-CDs.) I used to use Mandrake, but I could never afford to buy it beyond version 7.2, and I always felt bad about that.
Slackware sounds like it’ll be interesting to try out, but I doubt I’ll switch over; FreeBSD sounds much easier to administer and update. Anyone who’s used both? How do they compare? I have only a 56 k dial up, so it’ll be a few days before Knoppix 3.3 is finished downloading.
If I was going to go back to an installed Linux, I’d use Slack or Deb, though. Probably Slack since it’s more current.
It’s working for me however it’s damn slow. I’m gonna take it from some fast ftp mirror when available.
I have already been waiting for the final release a few days and have actively monitored the changelogs
. I hope I get the CD box soon (I have a subscription).
Happy Slacking!
My mouse isn’t working in the new Slackware. It’s a PS/2 mouse fer chrissakes! Please fix, kthxbi.
I am uploading more than what i have downloaded. I feel like a good netzen, until i see that it will take me another 100 hours each to download … hmm… somehow i do not feel like i will be installing slackware this weekend unless something exponential happens
> It’s a PS/2 mouse fer chrissakes!
Give me the relevant mouse part as found on your /etc/X11/XF86Config file and I will fix it for you. Email me.
Many of you would enjoy using Linux a great deal more if you realized that you do not need to download the entire ISO when it is released. Download the entire tree of the distribution and then use rsync when the final release takes place. Not only does this greatly reduce your download time, it also puts less of a load on the servcers.
Rsync also verifies that your local copy is indeed identical to the stored one.
man rsync is your friend.
Shannon,
I currently run both FreeBSD and Slackware on various machines. They are both excellent Operating Systems, I am not going to get into a heated battle about the Linux being only a kernel. However, I have found they excel in different environments.
FreeBSD/*BSD
Awesome at running server side and has never failed to give me the stability that I need. However, they are not on the bleeding edge of drivers (sound, laptop…) that Linux has. My choice for any server! Ports colection is by far the easiest system of any OS.
Slackware
I started my Linux journey with Slackware 7.0 and have never looked back. Since, Slackware is a Linux distro I all the benefits of the current Linux kernel. I run this as a desktop OS. I could go on about how many times the RH, MD and other boxes have gone skitzo at work while the SlackBox races on(Pat RULES!!).
The delpoyment environment will dictate which of these I use, server that must take hundreds of connection FreeBSD, a multimedia workstations with USB drives and bleeding edge hardware, Slackware. It just depends.
As a final note, I have a subscription to both OS, since Slackware 7.0 and FreeBSD 4.5.
I’ve been looking forward to this release for a long time, finally it’s here… I can’t wait for my CDs to arrive
I ve made decisin to switch to slack9.1 from my rh box. However, I prefer to use LVM to a harddisk partition. On the set up phase, does slack offer a easy way to do that (in commands line of course)?
any ideas are very appreciated
thanks
Yesterday i installed slack 9.1rc2 and upgraded it with swaret to 9.1 final today. Seems to be very stable, only with first boot init process ate all my cpu time so i needed to reboot. Installation is very good now and alsa sound systems rocks.
Simple question. Is it worth my while trying it on an nforce2 board?
I’m not keen on the idea of a text based install but am willing to give it a looksee if someone can tell me they got it working on that chipset…
Anyone who is having trouble with BT, try downloading the files one at a time instead of both together. I was trying to download them both at the same time last night and was getting about 5k/s on both. Then I cancelled one and the one that was downloading by itself was up to 90k/s in about 60 seconds.
🙂 (IP: —.satx.rr.com)
so slackware seems to have a development model similar to freebsd???
Slackware and FreeBSD were owned by the same company for a while. I think that if you tried Slackware you’d find it to be rather similar to FreeBSD (about as similar as Linux can get).
However, if you make use of ports under fbsd, you might be a little disappointed with Slackware.
That said, I hope to have my subscription cd set within a couple weeks
What is so great about this release? Honestly why is it better then redhat 9 or debian?
If I was going to go back to an installed Linux, I’d use Slack or Deb, though. Probably Slack since it’s more current.
People always seem to equate Debian Stable with “out of date”, which it is, but for stability and security reasons. If you want to run “Bleeding-edge” Linux, it is very simple to do so under Debian. From Debian Stable, all you need to do is edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all of the occurances of “stable” to “unstable”. This will give apt access to the Debian Unstable archives. Next, type in the following command:
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
This will upgrade your entire system to Debian Unstable. Don’t let the word “Unstable” fool you. The packages you find there are basically the same ones you will find in the latest Red Hat, Mandrake or whatever. I’ve been running Debian Unstable on my workstation since March or April of this year, and have only had one problem, with GNUCash, which was fixed very quickly.
That said, I too will download and install Slackware 9.1, because I really like Slackware. I tend to use it as a test-bed OS. More than likely, I will install the latest 2.6.0 prerelease test kernel on it directly afterwards.
Hi!
i’ve got a slack 9.0 cd. If i install it, will be there an easy way to upgrade it to 9.1? Or should i download that cd too? Is there something like ‘apt-get upgrade’ here? Or the way eugenia described (just download everything and install them…hm won’t it result in a bloated system w/ many unused programs isntalled?:)
So in short: how u refresh it when a new version comes out?
thx, hirisov
Use swaret to upgrade : http://www.swaret.org/index.php
It will work for any slack as far back as 8.1
For people who ask “What’s so great about Slackware as compared to Debian, Mandrake, Redhat, etc?” I would say:
* vs Lindows/Xandros – Complete different audience – users of these type distros probably would have no interest in Slack anyway
* vs Redhat/Mandrake – MUCH less bloat, and faster/more stable as well
* vs Gentoo – The latter may be better, so long as you can stomach the compile times
* vs Debian – No need to upgrade to unstable to get the newest shit
* vs Libranet – Great if you want to pay the $60+, but I don’t relish the thought of paying them everytime they update it to get the current branch. Of course, I could always ‘apt-get update …’ but if I wanted to do that, I would just bypass Libranet and go with Debian
I guess the thing I like about Slackware is the simplicity of the whole thing. It’s probably best distro of choice if you’re looking for ease of use but still want control over the distro itself. So, if you’re the type that likes to get your hands a little dirty without feeling like you’re doing an LFS install and having to hack 3 million config files by hand, I think Slackware strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and bloat. There’s a lot of little utils for doing things like switching desktops, configuring the network, etc .. but you’ll most likely stumble around a bit until you find them all. Of course, the beauty of Slack is that it doesn’t change a whole lot over time, so once you learn what command allows you to do xyz, that same command will probably work 5 years from now
Just dl’ed it from here:
ftp://ftp.kpn.be/pub/linux/slackware/slackware-9.1-iso/
Got an average of about 2500 Kb/s
Cap your uploads…most cable modems have an upload cap, and if you saturate your upload you can’t download. So cap them both to upload at 5k from the command line. Yeah, or download one at a time and cap it at 9k or so. Assuming you have 128k upload, which is quite sucky.
There is really no need to install every program in the installation CD’s but (unless things have changed recently) Slackware package management doesn’t track dependencies, so you need to know exactly which programs and libraries the applications you install require. For this reason installing everything is the easiest way to ensure that you get a working system. Of course, if you install programs that don’t come with the official Slackware distribution, you need to take care of the dependencies yourself.
Hi, I just burned them and tried it out. Some big improvements over 9.0, but also a few drawbacks (which could easily be I’m not doing something right). Improvements though, for one the fonts. Wow, very nice, looks like they now have the vera fonts in there, improving the very ugly default that came with 9.0 for some reason. Also nice is some of the surprising packages this one came with. Particularly I wasn’t expecting to have java and flash working out the box as such, but there they were. Nice. (The only other distro I’ve seen this with is Sun’s Java Desktop, which by the way is very, very cool). I think spreading the distro over two cds now has given it the capability of putting alot more of the good stuff, while still not getting bloated.
On the down side though, looks like alsa is set up for you, even recognized my obstinate Audigy card, however, no volume for me. Even jacking up alsamixer didn’t do the trick. Also, Slack wouldn’t recognize the CDs I’d try to mount. Putting in audio CDs and trying to mount them would fail. very strange.
Overall though, pretty nice, though I’ll probably stick with Redhat for now. To all those anti-RH people out there, you just have to know how to tame it, and it becomes a very nice distro to work with. Turn off unnecessary services, install a nice package manager like apt-rpm, use a more lightweight X desktop, like fluxbox, or Xfce (using version 4 as I type this, I am quite impressed with it). You’ll notice it is reasonably fast, and most importantly, it just works. And this is coming from someone whose been called a Debian troll in the past 😉
Thanx for the link man.
Downloading it but also put in an order to buy it to support the project.
Downloading it coz its soo much faster to get the CDs this way.
Anyways as long as I support by buying right.
Cheers,
madmax
You can’t mount an audio CD.
ok, but why cant the gnome cd player pick them up though? says disc failed or something like that, and its not the cds, xmms doest work with them either.
You CAN’T mount Audio CDs. They dont have a filesystem. Just stick them in and play them from whatever program you want.
D’Arcy what u need is something like cdfs. You can get it here.
http://www.elis.rug.ac.be/~ronsse/cdfs/
After installing that u should be able to mount ur audio cds.
Hi, thanks for the tips, however it was really just a poor choice of words on my part. The problem is more that Im not getting any sound out of alsa, the example being audio cds, which also as an additional problem dont seem to be working even with the cdplayer progs like the one that comes with gnome.
Eugenia onde voçê fez o download do evolution ?
Portugues-BR
Get a damn irc client and /server irc.freenode.net (or irc.oftc.net) and /j #slackware. Thats how you learn things…always have an irc client handy. And/Or join a forum like the one at http://www.linuxpackages.net which is slackware only.
Its pointless asking for support on osnews…gd people.
>Eugenia onde voçê fez o download do evolution ?
http://www.dropline.com/gnome
I’ve been running current for some time, decieded to pull down all 4 cd’s last night, woke up to a present!
Running on two systems now, sweet! If only they still made a sparc64 port, I would convert one of my sparc box’s over too.
😉
Still the one thing I wish they would support on the inital install, if they do, I just can’t figure out how to do it. I’ve done it in Gentoo and it wasn’t all that hard, but slack doesn’t seem to let you mount LVM /dir’s
typo Eugenia,
http://www.dropline.net/gnome
I’ve never really tested slackware, I am used to debian. What would slackware give me that debian couldn’t ?
In one word.
Simplicty!
I like Debian and I have no problem running Sid either(some times).
I just think Slackware keeps Linux, well Linux they don’t hack up every piece of GNU/GPL G whatever software that is availble out there. They keep it all standard, Simple!
Personally I don’t care what version of Linux people run, I don’t even care if they want to run Lindows or some crap like that. What ever suits your fancy!
😉
I would certainly encourage you to just give Slack a spin and see what you think, but like I said in the beginning you really only need one word.
Simplicity, Speed, Stable, Ok, maybe a couple more!
… xfce 4.0 (final), gaim 0.69 and perl 5.8.1
Ok, i cannot wait all the time for a release. But I think it’s a week to early for 9.1 Slackware.
I installed Slackware 9.0 a few days ago and upgraded to 9.1 using swaret. Some experiences:
– Install went fine, however, Slackware is one of those distributions that do not remove ports 0x800-0x8ff (or similar) from /etc/pcmcia/config.opts. This causes my computer to crash once PCMCIA is initialized. So, before reboot I had to remove that.
– After upgrading to 9.1 swaret installed the IDE kernel. Since I am using JFS it couldn’t boot and I had to recompile the kernel. Maybe I missed something during upgrade, though.
– For some reason Freetype didn’t use the byte-code interpreter for TrueType fonts after the upgrade. Recompiling Freetype myself fixed this. In the source it was enabled by default, so I am not sure why it wasn’t working.
Slackware is nice and fast. It makes working with X and KDE a very nice experience. I had other distros before but they were usually slower. Still have to try GNOME, because it was pretty slow compared to KDE on other distros. Maybe it is faster in Slackware.
I’m downloading Slackware 9.1 again; maybe the one I had was damaged.
My hard drive is IDE; ST320420 or something like that. I have a 3COM 3C905B-TX network card. I don’t have a modem installed.
I found a big bug in Slackware. On install it detects all my USB hardware inlcuding the keyboard and mouse, then it suddenly removes the USB drivers so I cannot even type.
I would recommend looking into a PS/2 keyboard and mouse in your situation.
Which windows manager and which theme are you using in the screenshoft ? I couldn’t find any useful gnome OS X theme ( gnome 2.2).
“I would recommend looking into a PS/2 keyboard and mouse in your situation.”
I got the USB keyboard to replace the PS/2 keyboard because it looks better and is easier to clean. I’m not going to switch back.
I would recommend that Slackware fix the problem, especially since no other distro I’ve tried ( Red Hat 8, 9, Lindows, FreeBSD, Solaris ) has the same problem.
go to art.gnome.org and download them
I had the same problemm, but its not a slackware problemm. SuSE has also the same problemm. I have 2 USB printers and an USB keyboard. The solution is simple: shut down all USB devices except your keyboard before booting the install CD. After you finish installing Slackware turn them on. They will work just fine. Its a kerel issue, not a Slackware issue.
Don’t forget to enable hot-plug during the install (after it finished installing the packages).
All the best, Marc.
I removed two USB devices plugged into my PC and the installation worked. I was somewhat shocked to see that it was still a text based installation, but I’m doing it anyway!!
Currently downloading dropline.
All I did was unplug my USB hub and the install worked (I think, I haven’t set up grub yet or started slack)
I had the same problemm, but its not a slackware problemm. SuSE has also the same problemm. I have 2 USB printers and an USB keyboard. The solution is simple: shut down all USB devices except your keyboard before booting the install CD. After you finish installing Slackware turn them on. They will work just fine. Its a kerel issue, not a Slackware issue.
Actually, I had a very similar problem with Gentoo, except with a keyboard and a mouse. Now, I don’t know about you, but I consider it a huge pain in the ass to have to unplog the mouse everytime the computer reboots
But anyway, that was 1.4 RC4 .. it has been fixed in the 1.4 final.
I’m in Slackware 9.1 with Dropline. I installed the NVidia driver, but it seems a little slower than Mandrake 9.1 both graphically and when switching between apps for example. I need to increase the refresh rate as the white @ 60Hz is killing my eyes.
Oh and the audio doesn’t seem to be working so I need to fix that.
Now I need to learn what Slack does (and how) that others don’t. I’m primarily from a Mandrake background, so this is a completely new experience.
I haven’t tried plugging the USB devices back in yet.
Cheers
How can I setup and configure LVM in progress of installing slack-9.1? (fresh installation)
thanks and regards
dphan
I’ve been looking for the answer to that for awhile, You can create an LVM partition during install, but you don’t have the option to mount any slices?? I’m still searching that one. ;(
Does anyone know a good slack forum. Maybe I have not tried hard enough. Either way I can’t figure out how to get my sound going.
Slack 9.0 works on my nForce2, so I can only imagine it would work for 9.1… that said I haven’t tried Firewire, USB, or SATA, but thats cuz I have none of these devices. They all seem to be detected at boot.
Bill
I waited until after midnight to only get offpeak downloads clocked up (here in Australia) and grabed cd1 & cd2. Very impressed so far. One of my original gripes with Slackware was it’s policy of having everything fit on 1 cd, causing the number of packages having to be reduced with each release as things like GNOME & KDE expanded. This has now been fixed (in my mind, anyway) with the release now taking two CDs (binary ones, anyway).
Slackware 9.1’s Linux 2.4.22 feels slightly more responsive than the Vanilla 2.4.22 sources I compiled on Slk 9.0. I guess I’ll try Kernel 2.6-test6.
Cheers Patrick! I’ll buy the official CD when my distributor gets them in.
Well ummm turns out that sound does indeed work. But sound from gnome and cd drive does not work. If someone just point me in a direction of a good forum I would appreciate it. I think it might just be a matter of turning it on in alsa. But I can’t seem to make that happen.
How do you manage to try most distros that come out ? Are you all millionaires or are you paid to do it ? When I come back home from work, I barely have time to watch TV, let alone take care of my computers. So, I’m amazed whenever I hear guys say they’ve just finished installing Slackware 9.1, compiling Gentoo 1.4 or testing Fedora beta.
Carl :
Well, this month I install SUSE 8.2, Gentoo 1.4 (from stage 1), Slackware 9.0 and I have just download Slackware 9.1.
I’m just a student with a lot of time 😉
I’m wondering if any of you have tried to install the lastest official drivers from ATI? I can’t seem to get them to work. Dependencies problems it says. Maybe it’s due to kernel 2.4.22? Suggestions? I’m using VESA now.
For a Slackware forum I would recommend http://www.linuxquestions.org
While most of the old crowd that I knew are less active, there are still a number of helpful people there.
Normally I wouldn’t do this, but go back to red hat or mandrake or whatever.
Really, there are no dependencies in slackware.
try first this:
rpm2tgz ati-driver-package.rpm ati-driver-package.tgz
installpkg ati-driver-package.tgz
cd /usr/lib/modules/fglrx
run the build scripts and configure with fglrconfig your card and you’re donne
Doesn’t compare to windows, does it?
>Doesn’t compare to windows, does it?
Nope. It is easier on windows, you just click through a bunch of screens.
This was my 5th distro that I tried and haven’t needed to look at any other. RH, Mandrake, Debian and Suse wasn’t my cup of tea. RH, MD and Suse were to bloated, Debian was good but their Stable release was behind the times.
Now been using Slack for a year on my laptop and loving it.
I just downloaded and installed it over the weekend and was suprised at how fast it is for a binary distro.
Setup was pretty easy as well, the only part you really have to do your self is setting up the partions and with cfdisk that is a piece of cake.
The only problem I has was with the official ATI drivers, I was able to get them working in 2d but not 3D.
I thinks it’s because DRI and AGPGART are compiled in the kernel. Basicly I get a error Can’t aquire AGP and uable to determine apeture size. Will be re compiling the kernel tonight with no DRI and no AGPGART and we will see.
Lilo is pretty nasty looking in 9.1.
Would be nice if Grub with a nice Slackware splash image was part of the disto. Seems all the other distros are going to grub why not slack?
Does anyone know of any good configurations tools for slack(other than webmin)? I ant to learn the hand configing and the scripts but i would also like somthing so I don’t pull my hair out.
I guess Patrick doesnt think useless eycandy on the boot screen is all that important. Or maybe he just doesnt like grub for whatever reason, i know I dont. His project, his call.