TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

If you've missed my previous few attempts at using Slackware you might want to go ahead and catch up. Go on, I'll wait.

Those of you who've read them know I'm not a fan, and a lot of people don't like that. I've ruffled quite a few feathers by saying in no uncertain terms what I don't like about the operating system.

Nevertheless, with each new version I hope that this one will be the one I can actually use. I admit there's a kind of geeky cool that comes from running Slackware. I've just been spoiled in recent years by distributions that don't require as much work.

Install:

The Slackware installer is ncurses text-based and hasn't really changed at all since as far back as I can remember. I still think that during the process the user should be prompted as to whether or not they want to create a regular user account, rather than relying on them doing this after the fact.

I partitioned my drive with cfdisk, ran "setup" and chose my swap and root partitions, and told the installer to "Install Everything." Upon reboot I logged in as root and created my regular user (with the right group permissions this time) and logged in. I then started up the GUI with "startx."

The first thing I noticed was my resolution. 1024x768 simply looks terrible on a widescreen monitor designed for 1280x800. I tried to fix it using xorg.conf, but KDE took no notice. I can't tell whether this was KDE's fault or Slack's.

I know a lot of newer distributions are trying to get away from using xorg.conf, and that's just peachy when the auto-detection algorithms work. When they don't, manual tweaking should still be an option.

If there is one thing I appreciate about the slow and plodding upgrade process in Slackware it's that Patrick hasn't yet seen fit to include KDE 4, and well he shouldn't.

I find it apalling that major distributions include that desktop in an otherwise stable system, considering in its present form I would equate KDE 4 with a desktop abortion. It was a bad idea to begin with, and it's not getting any better regardless of how many numbers they add to the end of it.

The downside of course is that to boot Slackware up with the default KDE 3.5 makes me feel like I'm back in college in the 20th century. However, given the choice of stable and shiny, I have to go with stable.

Because I don't like to be tethered to the TV stand in my living room (inside which resides my cable modem and router) I wanted to get my wifi working. This is something that should be simple, since the Intel wireless drivers have been included in the Linux kernel for several versions now, and most distributions work with my laptop out of the box. Slack didn't.

I tried tinkering with the KDE wifi tools, which didn't seem to understand WPA encryption, and at first none of the graphical tools I could find would even acknowledge that my laptop had wifi capability, much less let me configure the card properly. The error I received was something to the effect of "cannot talk to wpa_supplicant."

Strangely enough, using one of the GUI tools I was able to connect to an open network, and my WPA-protected network was detected but the button to connect to it was grayed out. This tells me that somewhere my wireless card was getting detected, the system simply couldn't handle encryption. This was not an acceptable option.

The only article I could find that addressed this was here. It looked like it was going to work up until I ran the last line. It asked me for a WEXT code of some sort. At this point I felt I'd done my due diligence and called it a day.

Editing several obscure text files may be an everyday affair for Slackers, but for me it was an annoyance. If more desktop-oriented distributions can get this right, I see no reason why the grandfather of Linux distros should stumble.

The latest Nvidia driver installed without issue (177.82). That immediately fixed my resolution problem. Things looked decidedly less fuzzy.

Software Selection:

MP3 playback was included. The usual suspects (Pidgin, GIMP and Firefox) were also installed. KOffice replaced OpenOffice. Most everything else was standard KDE.

GCC and make were installed, as evidenced by my successful Nvidia driver install. Slackware is known for its utility toward developers, so I'm not surprised at this.

Conclusion:

To cut right to the chase: Slackware 12.2 still fails as an out of the box desktop on my machine. No doubt the fans of Slack and perhaps even its creator would point out that it's not meant to be such a thing, and they might be right.

However that is what I look for in a Linux distribution, and for that purpose Slackware simply fails. With better wifi detection and configuration tools the process might not be so arduous.

Some of you might be a bit disappointed at the lack of my usual vitriol for this version of Slack. It's about as high a compliment I can give that since version 12, Slackware is not annoying enough to evoke that kind of emotional response. Oh well, there's always aLinux.