Distro#8 Slackware Linux 12.2

Slackware releases 12.2 on 2008-12-11. I downloaded the DVD image via BitTorrent.

It needs you to manually take care of partitioning. I didn't do partitioning but re-mkfs partitions from the existing partition table and mounted them under /mnt.

hda1 /boot
hda2 /
hda3 swap

After mounted hda2, I created /mnt/boot to mount hda1. I don't know if that is necessary since pkgtool doesn't list what are requirements.

Before I run setup, I set TERM=vt100 to make sure I have colors. In setup, I realized that I only need to make sure the partition table is what I want and you don't need to mount unless you want to change an existing Slackware's packages. You can format partitions with help from setup. For package selection, I used default options with full install.

I got an error message about mozilla-firefox-3.0.4-i686-1.tgz may be corrupt. I hit enter to continue. Later, it offered to create a USB boot stick and I knew the boot partition is useless because Slackware will be booted from /dev/hda2.

After rebooted, there are two mails with useful information in root's account. I ran adduser to add a normal user and logged in with it, then startx. It's KDE 3.5. I set up PPPOE using pppoe-setup. I also tried to install official nVidia driver, but can't build kernel module successfully. Now I only have 800x600 resolution. After installed, it took about 4.2GB. Kernel is 2.6.27.7

After some research, that seems nVidia can't build up against kernel 2.6.27. You will see an error:

error: asm/semaphore.h: No such file or directory

I got a patch from Gentoo and I got it compiled with steps as follows:

wget http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=168800 -O nvidia.patch
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.07-pkg1 --extract-only
mv NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.07-pkg1 NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.07-pkg0
patch -p0 < nvidia.patch
cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.07-pkg0
./nvidia-installer

I have to remove current xorg.conf and generated new one using nvidia-xconfig and manually add 1680x1050 resolution in order to get the correct setting. Now It's perfect.

Honestly, Slackware is easy to install if you already have knowledge of normal tasks on Linux. It shouldn't be hard to install or to use it. While the whole process, I met only one problem, the Firefox package. I downloaded the Firefox package and installed, this time it went smoothly. The nVidia driver issue is nVidia's issue and that will happen on all distributions.

As of package management. I didn't play much with that, so I can give any thoughts about it. But I think that shouldn't hard to use.

Lastly, a screenshot

This post is written on Slackware Linux