Credit where it's due!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| the_yikes Apr 10, 2007 6:08 AM EDT |
Well done both of you on the new system, the specs sound pretty sweet. I do have to say though that the standard slackware 11 installation does inform you that it's going to use a standard kernel, while at the same time offering the option to choose a custom kernel. Nvidia drivers have appeared in my search results numerous times, as to have many others. I don't know if your signed up to linuxquestions.org yet but if not you should seiously do so. The section for slackware is amazing, and the knowledege that passes throught those pages daily asstounds me! Good luck with the new system and happy slacking! |
| jdixon Apr 10, 2007 6:29 AM EDT |
> I do have to say though that the standard slackware 11 installation does inform you that it's going to use a standard kernel, while at the same time offering the option to choose a custom kernel. The install allows you to select the kernel you want during the installation process, yes. However, selecting a 2.6 kernel would have given us a non-bootable system, as we had not yet created the initrd, we had formatted the drives as ext3, and the 2.6 kernels don't have ext3 support compiled in. Hmm..., well, actually, it should boot but mount the drives as ext2. However, I've never tried that, so I can't be certain it would work. Besides, Meredith had already indicated she wanted to compile her own kernel, so I didn't see any point in not taking the default 2.4 kernel to start with. |
| bigg Apr 10, 2007 9:21 AM EDT |
This was an interesting and informative article. I've been meaning to play with Slackware for some time now. After reading your article, I've decided maybe not. |
| jdixon Apr 10, 2007 10:37 AM EDT |
> After reading your article, I've decided maybe not. Well, to be fair to Slackware, this is a very customized install. If you use the default kernel and vesa video, everything pretty much just works, and upgrading to an smp and/or a 2.6 kernel is fairly simple. Our install was greatly complicated by the RAID 1 requirement and the newer NVidia chipset on the motherboard. As far as I could tell, the sound and network problems appear to be generic across distributions. The video problem is probably Slackware specific, and due to the fact that Slackware 11 is still using Xorg 6.9, but the vesa driver works well enough to meet most people's needs. The problems with VMware products are entirely VMWare's doing, as they make unwarranted assumptions about your distribution, but they're easy to work around. Since the Slackware kernels include the md drivers, the RAID 1 procedure we used probably more complex than it needs to be. It should be possible to partition your drives in advance, mount them, create the necessary raid tables, and simply do the install to the raid array. Doing so is not something I felt up to tackling however, since we could be fairly sure the procedure we had would work. Every distribution has its quirks. Slackware doesn't hold you hand in setting up your hardware the way some other distro's do, but there's nothing overly complicated about it. If the audio chipset is recognized by the kernel, it should work out of the box, though you'll probably have to run alsamixer to unmute things. Ditto for the network. The only thing that really requires manual setup is X, and that's only if you want to use something other than the vesa driver. I didn't cover the actual installation steps for Slackware, as that's been done a thousand times or more in other places. We simply selected everything and performed a full install. About the only customization involved was that Meredith changed her keyboard layout and screen fonts, and opted for a fixed IP address rather than DHCP. The things I wanted to cover were the specific problems and solutions for this particular machine, as I thought they might be useful to others. |
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