Distro#16 Slax 6.1.0

Slax is a LiveCD system, based on Slackware. When I booted it with default option, there is a driver issue because of wrong driver version. But, the VESA mode is ok to use, just the resolution is too small for these days.

Boot-time for my hardware took about a minute. The desktop environment is KDE 3.5 and Kernel is 2.6.27.8. I checked the website, its build system is very convenient to compose your own of packages, but adding dependencies needs some clicks. I added NVIDIA 96xx driver, Firefox, pppoe-kemo, and removed KOffice. The final is about 198 MB and only took 4 minutes or less to download, the download speed is very fast. I used external USB harddrive this time, because I want it can be able to store data/session.

Screenshot of Slax' builder

I unpacked tarball to disk and ran ROOT/boot/liloinst.sh instead of bootinst.sh (for FAT-only) because the partition is ext3. It provided a clear message about what would be done:

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
                        Welcome to Slax boot installer                        
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

This installer will setup disk /dev/sdb to boot only Slax from /dev/sdb1.
Warning! Master boot record (MBR) of /dev/sdb will be overwritten.
If you use /dev/sdb to boot any existing operating system, it will not work
anymore. Only Slax will boot from this device. Be careful!

Press any key to continue, or Ctrl+C to abort...

Flushing filesystem buffers, this may take a while...
Updating MBR to setup boot record...
Warning: /dev/sdb is not on the first disk
Warning: The initial RAM disk is too big to fit between the kernel and
   the 15M-16M memory hole.  It will be loaded in the highest memory as
   though the configuration file specified "large-memory" and it will
   be assumed that the BIOS supports memory moves above 16M.
Added Slax ? *
Disk /dev/sdb should be bootable now. Installation finished.

Read the information above and then press any key to exit...

This time it's in text-mode. I ran xconf, then startx, the video driver didn't work, kernel module wasn't load, because that package is for kernel 2.6.24.5. So, I set up PPPoE and downloaded the driver from NVIDIA, and deactived the module and removed it from USB hd. After running the installer, startx gave correct result. After rebooting, it also gave the correct one.

I started to explore Slax, the following screenshot is the Module Manager:

You can use it to add or to remove a module. On the website, you can directly activate a module (not in Firefox).

 Accoding to this feature list, the persistent changes to whole root filesystem is achieved by AUFS filesystem. In this current install, it took about 450 MB disk space, and around 200 MB memory in use. I think speed isn't an advantage of Slax, but portability is. By my estimation, there should be over 1100 modules (including multi-versions of a module) that you can activate on your system. The boot-time is not fast, but it's acceptable becuase it's not just a LiveCD.

Lastly, the screenshot

Distro#10 Simplis 2009

Simplis' website doesn't have much useful information about the distro itself. According to Distrowatch, this distribution is based on Fedora and it does look so, and it was called “Vixta”. It seems to have special support to eeePC and AcerOne.

After booted up, it's KDE 4.0 desktop environment. The screen resolution is 800x600. The desktop has few icons, I am interested in simplis 3D and webcam. The main menu has aMSN. But I think I should install first, therefore I clicked on Install Simplis icon on desktop. The installation took about 10 minutes.

After booted the newly installed Simplis from harddisk, you will be prompted to create a normal user. In the login window, beside my normal account, there is already an user called simplis. After logged in with the normal user, I got prompted to input the password of simplis account. Since I don't have the password, I could only ignore.

I set up DSL connection using NetworkManager and ran the first time system update. The repository source actually is Fedora and RPMFusion as well. I timed the boot time, it's about 45 seconds. I then remove PackageKit (troublesome) and tried to install nVidia 96xx driver, but I was being kept asking about kernel 2.6.27.9-159, which is not visible in yum. I downloaded it from Koji directly, then I installed kmod-nvidia-96xx. Now, I have correct resolution 1680x1050 and Compiz. Flash already works in Firefox 3.0.5.

So far, I really don't see any visual customized stuff, which is different than Fedora. But I think the point of Simplis is that if you can install it, then you would have multimedia things worked out-of-the-box. I would say Simplis provides a different installation, but after all, it's same as Fedora. Of course, the default desktop environment is KDE.

Lastly, a screenshot

This post was written and posted on Simplis.

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

Distro#3 Pardus 2008.1 Hyaena hyaena

Pardus is from Turkey. The version I installed is 2008.1 Hyaena hyaena. It only requires average hardwares:

• 256 MB memory (512 MB recommended)
• 800 MHz Intel or AMD processor (1200 MHz recommended)
• At least 4 GB of free hard disk space (10 GB recommended)

I guess that is why I didn't see "64" in the download options. You can download a normal installation CD or a live CD from FTP/Torrent. Here are some screenshots from 2007 release.

At 1600, booted from CD, I pressed F2 to switch to English interface. In a few moments, it brought up the Pardus installer. The installer use the correct resolution of my LCD monitor, which is 1680x1050, it's a well-designed soft orange theme. The first thing to do is accepting GPL, then I can check the CD integrity, that took about 3 minutes. After checking, setting timezone and creating a new users. In the creating user screen, it allows you to give the administrator privileges to new user, I didn't check it. Once you satisfied to proceed next, you can set the root's password and hostname. Next step is partitioning disk, then GRUB. The automatic partitioning doesn't create a swap for me. Anyway, I clicked on Begin Install button to start installing. While installing and configuring, you will see some well-known icons of the packages, that is interesting. After exactly 20 minutes, this phase is done. Time for first boot!

It took 48 seconds to logging screen. It is a KDE. The first window is one called Kaptan Welcome Wizard, it let you do some configurations for this new system. However, the Network doesn't give me the PPPoE option. After finished all steps in this window, it told me about Tasma, a configuration application for Pardus. I still can't have PPPoE in this new Tasma tool, therefore I am seeking help from Package Manager, PiSi. I searched for PPPoE and tried to install it. Obviously, that can't be done since I don't have Internet connection for now and CD isn't in. However, there is not rp-pppoe package on the CD, but I saw ppp package and installed it. For unknown reason, I can't su. Later, I realized that I need a administrator privilege to su or sudo. After manually set up a DSL link, I did a first updating with only three packages only.

The current X display driver is nv, so I installed nvidia packages and ran nvidia-xconfig, then rebooted. But that didn't work, so I removed and tried the package directly from nVidia. Still couldn't get it to work, it reported that it can't open /dev/nvidiactl. I am not gonna solve this.

The sound system works, so does Flash. The default fonts seem to only have western fonts. One strange thing is it use runlevel 3 to bring up X, not usual runlevel 5.

I think this distro is nice and cute, e.g. PiSi. However, I still met few problems, like PPPoE and nVidia driver. So far, I haven't installed a distro which can completely work out of box for all my needs. It doesn't take too much storage, about 3.X GB after installation. Memory usage is ok, about 3XX MB after logging in. Didn't take too long to install, just about 30 minutes. This is an regular distro, you won't get into much troubles, but still need to fix!

Lastly, a screenshot:

Distro#1 Frugalware Linux 0.9

I chose Frugalware Linux as the first distro of this project because it is the latest stable release among distros (as of 2008-09-16). First thing is reading the webpage, and downloading the CD/DVD images. It supports CD, DVD, netinstall, USB and others installing methods. It has more than one CD or DVD, you can download via FTP/HTTP/rsync or Torrent. I have Internet connection, so I think I only need to first DVD. If I was wrong, I just download second disc and burn. Two archs are available, i686 and x86_64.

While downloading, I was reading its documentation. I felt it's like Arch Linux, or any distro relating to KISS philosophy. But it should be a simpler installation.

The installation has only text mode, but we can have Framebuffer support while installing. My computer booted from DVD at 4:43 with USB keyboard and I chose 800x600x32 VESA mode, which is the largest one in screen resolution. It support to install with Software RAID. Doesn't have auto partition. I use cfdisk (there are other two utilities for use) to part one swap 2.1G, rest are root fs ext3. It will let you to format by choosing from text menu, you don't have to use mkfs manually. Then you can choose if you want to use expert menus, I chose not to. If you say yes, you can finely choose C libs/compiler/include files/... packages. I only add one more group, network-extra, because I need PPPoE and I don't know if network group already has it. Now, the Frugalware is installing 1141 packages for me, it's about 4GB unpacked size, took around 23 minutes to complete the package installation.

The following steps is installing GRUB bootloader, setting root password, creating a normal user, hostname, network connection. It shows dhcp, static, dsl, and lo. I set up static, then dsl. Next items are hardware clock, console mouse, X screen resolution. I use 1680x1050.

Done, took less than an hour.



It took about 50 seconds to login screen. The resolution is 800x600, would try to solve later. Default session is KDE 3.5. The first task is updating packages, but there is no PPP link. pppoe complains missing of /etc/ppp/pppoe.conf. After manually set one in /etc/ppp/peers, I have the Internet connection. So I ran pacman -Syu, amazingly no package need to update.

Now back to video problem. I don't have DRI. I installed nvidia package and removed libgl and libglx because of conflicts. Downloading speed is around 1 MB/s. But it seems to have problem to insert kernel module, I got an error "No such device". I updatedb, and check for nvidia.ko, it's there. So, I rebooted, it asked for a password to do that. I broke X. Reinstalling libgl and libglx with pacman -Sd libgl libglx, trying to reboot *figures crossed*.

I tried to see if this nvidia driver (173 series) support my card or not, it seems that I need to use legacy 96 series driver. I switch to console to run installer. The installer needs to compile kernel module, after few enters and rebooting, I saw nVidia logo! But the resolution is still wrong. however I have DRI (glxgears: 1,791 FPS) now. After manually edited xorg.conf and restarted X, I have 1680x1050 now.
I plugged my camera and imported those photos, but I can't see them and there is no ufraw package. I have to use my laptop to do the job, don't want to use more time on it.

The Adobe Flash has installed by default for Firefox 3, and audio works.

Well, I think that's all for this install. Honest speaking, I didn't encounter any real problems so far. However, I think it's definitely not for a newbie of Linux, especially those don't know how to solve a problem. Installation process is less an hour, it's not fast nor slow. You don't have to run any Linux commands if everything works fine. It takes about 4.8 GB storage for default options. The only drawback is booting takes too long, especially before init.

(This post was written within Firefox on Frgualware Linux 0.9)