Slackware 9.0

[Doogee]

hehe im going to download that, among other things tonight, but we are broke so im still not getting my new harddrive, AARRRGHHGHGHGHG im going crazy, it hurts me *prof frink noises*

[Calum]

finally! slack 9 arrived yesterday and i installed it on hda8 to get used to it before i replace red hat with it. it works!

i can't believe it works! well i can after what people have said but it is so nice to have a system that doesn't tell me what to do! i know linux is about freedom of choice and so on, but mandrake and red hat never seemed to take that choice quite as seriously as slackware does. also i haven't found any bugs! my sound card, video card, zip drive everything works perfectly! i did have to add a couple of lines to the init files and write the fstab and all that, but that's easy when helpful people have told you how, anyway i am waffling now but what i mean is that slackware 9 is a lot nicer in my opinion than mandrake 9 or red hat 8 or a few other well talked about linuces. that's just first impressions though. we shall see.

I'm really impressed by xfree86 which seems to have no problems with my video card, and gnome 2.2 seems to be pretty much bugless compared with previous versions. haven't tried out the new kde yet or the new gcc even. i'll be compiling openoffice 1.0.2 at some point though so we'll see.

one thing i have noticed with slackware actually, when i shutdown -h now it does bring the machine to a clean halt, but does not physically power it down like rh and mandrake did. i am told i need to compile acpi power support into my kernel to fix it.

[Doogee]

congrats on slack, i agree slack (9 especially) is the best distro ive used.

Once you've had slack, you'll never go back

haha im a genius, i made that up just now.

Any way ive got no idea about the shutdown thing, have you tried # /sbin/poweroff ?

[Calum]

not yet, but what i really want id for shutdown to work the same as it does in red hat, the reason for this is that i would like the 'shutdown' button in kdm to work properly and switch the machine off too.

so when you do this shutdown, does your machine switch off properly? if so, are you using one of the kernels from the slack cd? if so, which one? the thing is that shutdown -r now works fine, so i know it is capable of restarting the machine, why not switching it off?

[Tux]

It's these new motherboards, you need to load acpi support in the kernel. Then it will shut it down properly.

[Calum]

yeah, tom told me that on the NTL forum ( www.newtolinux.org.uk/forum/ )too, i just haven't got round to it yet.

[Calum]

hey, i have another quick question about slack 9.0
this time it is regarding vfat support. slack 9 appears to have vfat support but it only supports the 8.3 filename thing, no win95 style long filenames are supported. this is a bit annoying but it really comes into its own when you realise that even when you copy the files from the vfat disk to the ext3 one, the filenames are still cut down to 8.3 size! so all your files are called things like "instal~1.gz" and things.

a couple of other niggles, despite setting a UK keyboard in rc.keymap, all GUI apps seem to think i have a US keyboard, plus all my fonts look crap.

anybody got any good ideas about these, i know they're all normal humdrum moans, then do let me know, in the meantime it's no big drama i am sure i'll figure it out eventually.