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| Slackware 12.1 -- Do-it-yourself-NUX |
| 摘自: www.techiemoe.com 被阅读次数: 24 |
由 yangyi 于 2008-05-08 19:07:39 提供 |
Introduction: If there's one thing I've learned from past experience, it's that Slackware fans are a loyal group. To say anything disparaging about their leader is to risk their internet wrath. That's not to say that *all* Slackware users are blind fan-boys; that sub-group just happens to be the most vocal. Slackware, like Debian, has a very large and long-lived user base who are quite happy with their choice in distribution. I see these two as lumbering beasts in the Linux landscape: stable but slow to change, with more agile distros dancing about at their feet. I've never been much of an elephant person. One thing that Slackware has over Debian is a single leader, Patrick Volkerding, who has complete control over what goes in and what doesn't. To the best of my knowledge there is no Slackware "committee" or any Slackware "social contract." What Patrick says, goes. The upside to this is that Slackware releases are generally very regular and have very few surprises. The downside to this is that you may or may not agree with Patrick's decisions, and if you don't you're just out of luck. Slackware is perhaps the closest thing on the market right now to a "generic" Linux distribution. You won't find branded wallpapers, special bootsplash screens, or really much at all that identifies your system as "Slackware" other than the LILO prompt. I think that because of this Slackware has become a sort of hot-rodder's distribution. These are people who want to buy the frame and a set of parts, tweak and install the components they want, and add their own special "branding." I see it as more of a Linux "kit" than a packaged distribution. In college, I was all about the hot-rodding operating systems. Gentoo and Slackware were my constant playground. I had a lot of free time, what can I say. In the years following graduation, however, my priorities have shifted. I no longer have the time or desire to spend hours configuring, tweaking, installing and uninstalling. Sure, I still tinker with things. Many a harddrive has felt the wrath of the reformat when I got bored. I just prefer to tinker with an already-functioning system now, rather than tinker to get the OS up in the first place. Install: After a stark boot prompt, I was given the usual Slackware welcome and told to log in as root, partition my drive and run setup. It would be nice if you could choose an option from the boot prompt that would just go into this routine straight away. I know, automation is not in the Slackware credo. It would still be nice. Folding the partitioning step into the installer would also be a nice touch. It can be done via an ncurses-style menu, and it wouldn't be *automating* per se, just consolidating the usual install tasks into one area. I created swap and root partitions with cfdisk and pointed the ncurses text-based installer to them. All went well. Slackware isn't exactly known for groundbreaking changes, so everything worked pretty much the same as the last 4 releases I've tried. I chose to install from the CD (I downloaded the first 3, leaving the 3 source CDs out). I selected just about everything except KDE International support and TeX typesetting software, then told the installer to just install everything. I then ran through the post-install: services, network setup, time zone, default desktop, root password. After all that I rebooted and got a surprise: an actual semi-graphical boot splash. I was then summarily dumped to a login prompt. Here's another thing on my wishlist: let me set up regular user accounts during the post-install configuration. It's not a big deal to run "adduser," but it's something I think could be handled better. I created and logged in as my regular user, ran "startx" and crossed my fingers. Previous versions of Slackware have had configuration issues with the out-of-the-box X Windows system. This version apparently had no problem. I immediately tried to enable subpixel hinting for fonts, since everything looks muddy on an LCD if I don't. The option was there, but grayed out. I did some research and apparently it's a KDE bug. I got a HAL error when I inserted my USB thumbdrive. I received a similar error when inserting a CD. I don't understand why some distributions simply can't get this one right. I shouldn't have to manually mount everything. It's 2008 for goodness' sake. UPDATE - I've received a forum post and several emails regarding this. Apparently the issue is rectified by adding my user to the "plugdev" group, and/or editing my /etc/fstab file. I'll post back when I can try it out and confirm. Adding my user to the "plugdev" group worked. In an unrelated matter, changing the default runlevel from 3 to 4 in "/etc/inittab" gave me a KDM login screen. There's instructions on the CD in a file called "CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT." It seems to be a problem that popped up around the time of Slackware 12.0, but the posts I've read claim it's not specific to Slack. I have indeed run into this issue with some distributions, but not with others, so I'm led to believe that other distributions out there have found a fix that doesn't require me to modify user groups or edit my /etc/fstab file. Although I'm glad a fix exists, this is still a problem I don't appreciate having to deal with. I'd also like to clarify something. One reader assured me that automount *did* work "out of the box" as long as I did the above extra steps. In my logic, making the end user do something extra after the fact negates the term "out of the box." I decided to change default desktops. There was no obvious way to do this (since there is no GDM/KDM-style "session manager") so I did some research and came up with xwmconfig. This was precisely the tool I needed. I swapped to XFce instead. Interestingly enough, I was able to turn on subpixel hinting in XFce, even though the box was grayed out. XFce unfortunately had the same mounting issues. This is a real point of contention for me. If I have to drop to a root terminal every time I want to swap out a CD or copy something to my flash drive, I'm not being as productive as I could be. My Nvidia drivers installed just fine and persisted after reboot (something Ubuntu 8.04 had issues doing on Rig 2). MP3/MPG/WMV support was included and my test files ran fine in Xine. Noatun froze on me trying to open a movie file and I had to kill it. I've had issues like this with noatun before, so I don't blame Slackware. Software Selection: The default KDE install pretty much includes the kitchen sink (exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C, exhibit D). OpenOffice was nowhere to be found. Java and GCC were installed, which meant that in theory I could do work on Slack 12.1, if I could get over having to manually mount everything. Conclusion: Aside from the whole having to mount everything by hand issue, I didn't have much trouble with this version of Slackware. It's definitely not for the unitiated, however. It still requires manual partitioning, manual user setup, and manual installing/uninstalling of packages once the initial install is done (unless you download a package manager of some sort). I don't see any of these things changing any time soon. Although theoretically I can use it offline, do work, listen to music and play 3D games, the lack of a proper automount makes Slackware 12.1 just too much work for me for everyday tasks. I begrudgingly give it three out of four Tuxes. Original link: http://www.techiemoe.com/tech/sl... |
