I fell in love with Slackware as soon as I started to use it, frustrations with building from source aside, it is a very streamlined system. With the recent release of v12.1 I think I will give it another shot; I'm still running 11.0 with a (more) recent kernel, and many system library updates, as needed as dependencies for other programs... the funniest of all was upgrading flex, a text parser, because I had the 1997 version on my machine and pidgin wanted one from a few months ago or sooner - so I went to grab those packages and successfully built pidgin after having updated that dependency.
Another woe is using KDE 3.5.7 when 4.1 is almost here... it seems to be maturing nicely; I used an early beta via the OpenSUSE live disc but that was a very unpolished build... I have also used a more recent 4.0 build (or a 4.1 beta?) on Ubuntu, which is better but still a work in progress - 4.1 seems like it will finally be worth using, and they just announced the Cube desktop switcher, KDE native!
Another interest I have is running KDE on Windows and Mac - I use all three platforms daily (both Windows XP and Vista) and it would be nice to merge the interfaces together somewhat... hitting the key to the left of the spacebar as the primary modifier doesn't work so well in windows or linux... :) (CTRL(alt!) vs COMMAND key mappings). Plus, Amarok is undefeated in my eyes and I'm still using a very old version of it - can't wait for latest stable!
Another thought I have is to maybe switch over to a Slackware derivative with package management (like KateOS, which I reviewed a while back). We shall see... Always backup data and profile settings :)
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
Slax 6
I have always appreciated the simplicity of Slax, and version 6 was long-awaited. I didn't try it out initially, for various reasons, but one of my friends had a hard drive-related problem and couldn't boot - a typical usage for a live CD with the simplicity and agility of Slax. So I downloaded and burned the 189MB ISO and fired it up in the broken machine.
I chose the copy-to-ram method from the graphical boot menu (an upgrade from the v5.8 text-based boot-loader), and a few minutes later the CD came out and I was looking at a full-blown KDE session with wireless networking already enabled and connected! The hardware support was incredible. I always had to tweak my xorg.conf and various network-related config files to get things to run nicely, but v6 runs like a dream!
If you're not already familiar with the Slax project, it is an implementation of the developer's live-CD library and utilities - another project well worth the research. For more information, check out Distrowatch's Slax page.
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
I chose the copy-to-ram method from the graphical boot menu (an upgrade from the v5.8 text-based boot-loader), and a few minutes later the CD came out and I was looking at a full-blown KDE session with wireless networking already enabled and connected! The hardware support was incredible. I always had to tweak my xorg.conf and various network-related config files to get things to run nicely, but v6 runs like a dream!
If you're not already familiar with the Slax project, it is an implementation of the developer's live-CD library and utilities - another project well worth the research. For more information, check out Distrowatch's Slax page.
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
KateOS
So, as usual, I have been keeping an eye out for a nice little distro. People ask about Linux more and more and I have just been recommending Ubuntu or the live disc for Fedora or OpenSUSE. Last week I found KateOS, a Slackware-based distro out of Poland. It combines the simplicity and stability of Slackware with a dependency-aware package manager (managing Slackware packages, of course). This means that the aspiring power user can figure things out without having to worry about the little nonsense that makes pure Slackware a bit of a chore at times. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Slackware to death, but KateOS is a very polished distro (in their own words, "polish"ed is a play on its country of origin).
It is available in a full DVD (or CD series) with a text installer, a live CD that runs XFCE, and a minimal install CD (300MB) from which you can use the package manager to add a bit of flare after having gotten the core system running. So go check it out! http://www.kateos.org
Personally, I used the miniISO version, which has the typical Slackware text installer, and was up and running KDE 3.5.7 with Firefox-2.0.0.12 in a matter of a couple hours.
The live CD did a pretty good job of detecting my not-too-special-hardware, and with a few Slackware-reminiscent tweaks, you can have all of your specialized hardware up and running!
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
It is available in a full DVD (or CD series) with a text installer, a live CD that runs XFCE, and a minimal install CD (300MB) from which you can use the package manager to add a bit of flare after having gotten the core system running. So go check it out! http://www.kateos.org
Personally, I used the miniISO version, which has the typical Slackware text installer, and was up and running KDE 3.5.7 with Firefox-2.0.0.12 in a matter of a couple hours.
The live CD did a pretty good job of detecting my not-too-special-hardware, and with a few Slackware-reminiscent tweaks, you can have all of your specialized hardware up and running!
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
Acrobat Reader 8 and Firefox
It's been awhile since I blogged, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been fixing things that aren't broken or using lame workarounds...
Just today I was annoyed that when I clicked on a pdf in Firefox (latest stable - 2.0.0.12), it would behave as if the plugin were loading the file, but nothing would be displayed (blank window). I ascertained from the "about:plugins" output that two versions of the Acrobat Reader were loaded - 7 and 8. I checked the system installation plugins directory and found only one version. Then I looked into my local profile, under .mozilla - there is a file called pluginreg.dat there, and inside of the firefox subdirectory. These are auto generated, but Firefox can run without them. I renamed them to *.bak, symlinked the nppdf.so that was in my .mozilla/plugins/ and .mozilla/firefox/plugins to the current version, and re-launched Firefox. Worked like a charm!
Hope if somebody else has trouble with multiple versions they can benefit from this...
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
Just today I was annoyed that when I clicked on a pdf in Firefox (latest stable - 2.0.0.12), it would behave as if the plugin were loading the file, but nothing would be displayed (blank window). I ascertained from the "about:plugins" output that two versions of the Acrobat Reader were loaded - 7 and 8. I checked the system installation plugins directory and found only one version. Then I looked into my local profile, under .mozilla - there is a file called pluginreg.dat there, and inside of the firefox subdirectory. These are auto generated, but Firefox can run without them. I renamed them to *.bak, symlinked the nppdf.so that was in my .mozilla/plugins/ and .mozilla/firefox/plugins to the current version, and re-launched Firefox. Worked like a charm!
Hope if somebody else has trouble with multiple versions they can benefit from this...
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
fontconfig breaks everything!
So I decided I wanted to run the latest version of GIMP, my favorite image editor. To do that, I needed a current version of GTK. I have had only bad experiences building the GTK and its myriad dependencies, so I was not thrilled about doing it again. Well, to make a long story short, I screwed it up bad enough that I needed to fix it so I could use other programs. I slowed down and read the docs on each package and sketched out a dependency tree so that I could tell in which order I should build and install each package.
Note that when you are installing dependency libraries, always run ldconfig to update that database for the next configure script. Also, go look for previous versions in the other lib directories. Install your new stuff into /usr/local/lib but then go look for that same library in /lib and /usr/lib, and on occasion /usr/X11R6/lib or something fancy like that. I had to do a ton of manual cleaning to get things to work.
After GTK was all built and nice, I still had trouble with fonts. My web browsers were all screwed up, OpenOffice only had about 6 fonts in its list, the KDE KControlCenter Fonts page in Administrator Mode still showed my 700 odd fonts, but things were looking really bad with regard to anti-aliasing and such. I had to start digging. First, I looked at the startup messages and noticed an error from the fc-cache line, which got me thinking about fontconfig. So I figured that there were more artifacts left behind by the previous version.
I had to edit my rc.M script that runs fc-cache (from the fontconfig library) to point to the path of my new fontconfig (because there is one bundled with X11). I had to symlink /etc/fonts to /usr/local/etc/fonts and then I had to edit /usr/local/etc/fonts/fonts.conf manually, based upon what information is available in the manpage for that file format (section 5). I specifically had to add the directory containing my 700-some fonts (/usr/local/share/fonts) and specify the cache directory to be /var/cache/fontconfig rather than NONE/var/cache/fontconfig, which would create this structure wherever you run fc-cache, which becomes absolutely useless to the running OS and the programs that reference it.
To polish it all off, I logged out of my KDE session and dropped the system to runlevel 1, and then brought it back up to 4 - et voila!
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
Note that when you are installing dependency libraries, always run ldconfig to update that database for the next configure script. Also, go look for previous versions in the other lib directories. Install your new stuff into /usr/local/lib but then go look for that same library in /lib and /usr/lib, and on occasion /usr/X11R6/lib or something fancy like that. I had to do a ton of manual cleaning to get things to work.
After GTK was all built and nice, I still had trouble with fonts. My web browsers were all screwed up, OpenOffice only had about 6 fonts in its list, the KDE KControlCenter Fonts page in Administrator Mode still showed my 700 odd fonts, but things were looking really bad with regard to anti-aliasing and such. I had to start digging. First, I looked at the startup messages and noticed an error from the fc-cache line, which got me thinking about fontconfig. So I figured that there were more artifacts left behind by the previous version.
I had to edit my rc.M script that runs fc-cache (from the fontconfig library) to point to the path of my new fontconfig (because there is one bundled with X11). I had to symlink /etc/fonts to /usr/local/etc/fonts and then I had to edit /usr/local/etc/fonts/fonts.conf manually, based upon what information is available in the manpage for that file format (section 5). I specifically had to add the directory containing my 700-some fonts (/usr/local/share/fonts) and specify the cache directory to be /var/cache/fontconfig rather than NONE/var/cache/fontconfig, which would create this structure wherever you run fc-cache, which becomes absolutely useless to the running OS and the programs that reference it.
To polish it all off, I logged out of my KDE session and dropped the system to runlevel 1, and then brought it back up to 4 - et voila!
Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)
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