I've been Slacked

[Furant]

Well, I finally got my home 'puter set up to dual boot XP and Slackware 10. I must disagree with some of the Slackware reviews I've seen about it being difficult to setup. There's ample information in the official Slackware Essentials book and various sites around the web for me to configure my hardware and network and it worked like a charm.

I have GAG as the bootloader (thanks for the tip FastVFR), but now I'm tempted to add more OS'es just to fully utilize GAG's capablities. ;a

A few questions:
1). For installing and managing packages, should I use the traditional "make install" or Slack's "pkgtool" utilities? I have also seen reference to Swaret as an add-on package manager. I want to use something that is consistent across all Linux (and Unix) distros unless there is a compelling reason to use a special tool. Any ideas?
2). How do I modify which OS boots by default after the boot timer counts down in GAG? I initially set it up to boot Linux, but I think it might be better to default to XP for my wife.
3). I setup KDE as my default GUI for "startx" (I still boot to the command line). How do I launch GNOME and Fluxbox so that I can play around with them and see which one I prefer?
4). Last one... for now: When I "tar -xvzg" a package and then install it, is it installed in the directory to which I extracted it, or are the directory structure and package contents copied somewhere else? Basically, I just want to know if I should extract these packages in my /usr directory or my /home directory, or somewere else. Or if it even really matters.

Thanks in advance,
Joey

[lomfs24]

First of all, good job on getting slack. I love it.

1) I have found that the pkg too in slack is a bit lacking. However, the devel libraries are pretty good. I just down load source code and make make install.

2) I am not familiar with GAG. There is probably a GAG conf file somewhere. Probably the same place that you would add new OS's.

[lomfs24]

Oooops pushed the wrong button too soon.

3) log in as root or su type run kdm which will lauch a graphical login. You should have an option of which one you want to log into. I don't know of anyway to kill kdm except rebooting to get back to runlevel 3.

4) Again, I am not too familiar with the Slack installer. If I am compiling from source code I put it in a downloads folder in my home directory. When you compile the program it normally places it where it needs to go.

Hope that helps.

[Furant]

lomfs24,

Thanks, that helps immensely. I can't wait to get home tonight to try it out. I really am a geek (or a geek wannabe).

I'll read more up on GAG to set the default. It's a very simple, straightforward program, so I'm sure I'm just overlooking something trivial.

Just to clarify:
Originally posted by lomfs24
4) Again, I am not too familiar with the Slack installer. If I am compiling from source code I put it in a downloads folder in my home directory. When you compile the program it normally places it where it needs to go.
Hope that helps. [/B]
So, when you're done installing, you can "rm -r" the files in your downloads folder and everything works fine? Even uninstalls at a later date?

Thanks for the quick response.

Joey

[lomfs24]

I remove all the files except the original tarball. The reason is for many things you will need original source code to uninstall. If you keep the tarball you can untar it and recompile at a later date to remove the program.

[bytelevel]

Hey, congrats. I never found slack difficult to set up, but I've only been using it since 7 and I make it a point to buy very standard hardware. Like lomfs, I just configure/make install the source whenever I want to get some new software.

The thing I really love about slack is how logical and clean the layout is. I prefer Mandrake for a general purpose workstation, but I've been using a slackware 10 box for learning kernel module development. I initially tried it on Mandrake and it was just too much of a pain tracking down where everything should be. However, it's been very easy with slackware - everything worked right out of the box. It's also a very nice distro for performance clustering.

Now that Pat Volkerding is back in good health hopefully we will see the slackware project continue for a long time.