NOTE: I've written more about Xfce since this post. This was just the first day. The blog is searchable and tagged. Also, you can add me on Google+ for relatively frequent updates about all things Slackware.
Today marks the latest stable release of Xfce, the lightweight yet full-featured desktop environment. I won't rehash all the features until I can get my fingers on them myself. If you're curious now (i.e., before I write about it), you can check out their website or your favorite Linux news source for more information.
That said, a quick look over the repos indicates that neither Pat nor Alien has compiled a version of Xfce after the 4.6 release. No, not even slackware-current has a newer build. 4.8 was released a little over a year ago, around the same time as Slackware 13.37.
I don't know if it was simply deemed unready at release time or if there is a philosophical or technical reason for not upgrading. I do know that Xfce 4.8 broke certain features for BSD users and that it began the slow march away from HAL, which Slackware still installs and presumably uses. So, for some there may have been feature regressions. I doubt that will be the case for us Linux users, the main audience for the Xfce team.
Since there aren't newer binaries available, I will attempt to build my own in the next day or two. If it succeeds, I'll give a full feature writeup and make my Slackware64 binaries available as a single txz, as Pat has it now. So, you'll only need to remove one package and install mine. If demand from my readership of several calls for it, I can probably borrow time on a Slackware (32-bit) machine to build binaries from there.
Is anyone yet having fun on Xfce 4.10?
As always, I welcome your questions, comments, and requests for future posts, whether they are related to what I've just posted or not. Also, I promise a return to the ongoing narrative and fun sometime in the near future. I just have too many projects going at once to promise a regular schedule.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
A brief note about boot speeds
Just a quick interruption to our narrative:
One of my big complaints at this point on my (as yet) brief journey into the world of Slackware was the slow boot speed. There are plenty of tutorials online about how to get your Slackware box booting faster. While it's true that you probably don't need to update your font cache or GTK icon cache at every boot up and you can get several of the init services to run in the background, all of these changes are greatly overshadowed by simply adding a line to your LILO configuration that reads:
The compact option tells LILO that your hard drive is okay to run at higher speeds. It's off by default since it causes problems for some users, but for the majority of computers, it should be fine. On my 5 year-old laptop it changed boot up time (BIOS to GDM) from "an eternity" to "way faster than I used to get under Fedora." I'll provide a precise measurement in seconds if anyone asks.
As far as I can tell, I haven't made much of a gain by commenting out the lines about updating the caches in my rc.M, as all the other previously slow initializations are running at full steam now. I'm a very happy Slacker at the moment.
Have fun!
One of my big complaints at this point on my (as yet) brief journey into the world of Slackware was the slow boot speed. There are plenty of tutorials online about how to get your Slackware box booting faster. While it's true that you probably don't need to update your font cache or GTK icon cache at every boot up and you can get several of the init services to run in the background, all of these changes are greatly overshadowed by simply adding a line to your LILO configuration that reads:
compactThat's it.
The compact option tells LILO that your hard drive is okay to run at higher speeds. It's off by default since it causes problems for some users, but for the majority of computers, it should be fine. On my 5 year-old laptop it changed boot up time (BIOS to GDM) from "an eternity" to "way faster than I used to get under Fedora." I'll provide a precise measurement in seconds if anyone asks.
As far as I can tell, I haven't made much of a gain by commenting out the lines about updating the caches in my rc.M, as all the other previously slow initializations are running at full steam now. I'm a very happy Slacker at the moment.
Have fun!
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
My Start in Linux
Welcome to my new blog about the joys of using Linux and free software.
I don't intend for it to be a how-to guide generally, though I will
soon share my present personal Linux setup and talk a bit about past
ones, and I will be happy to answer what technical questions I can.
Instead, I intend for this to be a personal story.
While it's true that this blog is named after Slackware -- and it's true I am a present Slackware user -- for the majority of my Linux life, including the very beginning, I was a Red Hat Linux user while there was a Red Hat Linux, and then I transitioned to Fedora. During my ten years with Linux, I have tried a number of distributions, and for a long time my brother ran a Slackware 10 box that I set up. So, I say I am newly new to Slackware. It had been a while.
I would like to point out at this early stage that I have not left Fedora for Slackware over philosophical or technical reasons. Rather, I am using Slackware again because it runs more smoothly on my aging laptop, and I cannot afford a new one. Fedora is a fine distribution, and so is Slackware. On the one hand, I appreciate the sanity and simplicity of Slackware, which reminds me of Linux as it was when I began using it, but with more up-to-date packages. On the other, I have been a Gnome-user from the beginning. Gnome SlackBuild is very good, but because it replaces glib, among other packages, it breaks certain minor programs and keeps me from building others. Also, this glib difference means I cannot go multilib without a substantial effort. Perhaps this is better: there are only two programs begging me to go multilib anyway. Perhaps I should do without them.
That is a story for another day. Today, I will talk about my start in the world of Linux.
***
My beginnings with Red Hat were largely accidental. My start with Linux came not too long after finding a book on Linux at my grandparents' house. Its pages covered four distributions that were popular in its day: Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, and SuSE.
In just a few days, I read it all the proper chapters and (I'm sad to say) a solid chunk of the appendices. Later that year, I would go on to read the IBM-DOS 3.3 manual in a similar manner (the fact that it was nearly 15 years out of date at the time only made it more appealing). I would re-read both of them several times.
I was enthralled, particularly because where school lunchroom chatter had lead me to believe Linux was even more primitive than DOS, I found an entire working desktop and an entire alien world to explore. We had built a new desktop the previous year, so I was allowed to do my experiments on the old family computer, a 200 MHz Pentium (with MMX!) with 16 MB of RAM and (best of all) a 4x CD-ROM drive. This was a time when, if I weren't so fixated on X, the entire system would be more than happy with 4 MB of RAM, so while it was junk hardware in the world of Windows 95, it played well with Caldera and Red Hat 6.
The book purported to come with CDs for all four distributions it covered, but sadly TurboLinux and SuSE were missing. I'm fairly certain that I've tried neither of those to this date, or if I have tried SuSE it was only very briefly. I don't know why I never tried TurboLinux, but for a long time we either didn't have broadband or when we did it would take nearly all day to download a CD set. Maybe it never promised something that excited me to be that patient.
As for SuSE, it was partly that factor, partly its similarity to Red Hat, and partly about Novell's alignment with the evil empire in '06. Somewhere between 2002 and 2006 the basis for my interest in Linux switched from being a curiosity about an alien world to a love of the free software movement's philosophy. How can I have possibly supported a company that believed in software patents?? I'm sure I have missed trying some great distributions, but I digress.
Do you remember remember your first time? Did it end in failure? Was it awkward? Were there creepy undertones to the whole affair? I remember that one of the Karate Kid movies was playing on the TV and my brother watched it while I spent the majority of the movie's runtime (including commercials) trying to get Caldera installed.
I think what set it apart from the other distro(s) available to me was its installation process, which was more automated. That's helpful to someone who has known what low-level formatting was for a matter of weeks. To the young mind, fdisk is even more transgressive fsck, and things get really exciting when one thinks of writing to the MBR. Genuinely, I got a rush from it.
The installation went smoothly until the very end. At that time, Caldera's installer included a tetris-like game to take the edge off the boredom of watching packages copy over to your hard drive. I forget precisely when I knew things weren't right, but an indicator would have been things going awry with tetris. Too often in life, this is the case. I think it got hung up along the way. Sadly, at the end of the night, I didn't have a working OS, and I didn't have Mr Miyagi's lessons to fall back on either.
So it was that by the accident of poor-quality CD pressing (and omitted discs) that my first working Linux distribution would be Red Hat 6. That is the story for next time.
I would love to hear what you think of what I've written, or what you'd like to read about in the future. Please don't be shy about commenting on this page or about adding me on Google Plus, where I share more geeky/Linux things and fewer personal things than I do on other social networks, so I'm more comfortable adding Internet strangers (please don't ask to join my other networks, strangers).
While it's true that this blog is named after Slackware -- and it's true I am a present Slackware user -- for the majority of my Linux life, including the very beginning, I was a Red Hat Linux user while there was a Red Hat Linux, and then I transitioned to Fedora. During my ten years with Linux, I have tried a number of distributions, and for a long time my brother ran a Slackware 10 box that I set up. So, I say I am newly new to Slackware. It had been a while.
I would like to point out at this early stage that I have not left Fedora for Slackware over philosophical or technical reasons. Rather, I am using Slackware again because it runs more smoothly on my aging laptop, and I cannot afford a new one. Fedora is a fine distribution, and so is Slackware. On the one hand, I appreciate the sanity and simplicity of Slackware, which reminds me of Linux as it was when I began using it, but with more up-to-date packages. On the other, I have been a Gnome-user from the beginning. Gnome SlackBuild is very good, but because it replaces glib, among other packages, it breaks certain minor programs and keeps me from building others. Also, this glib difference means I cannot go multilib without a substantial effort. Perhaps this is better: there are only two programs begging me to go multilib anyway. Perhaps I should do without them.
That is a story for another day. Today, I will talk about my start in the world of Linux.
***
My beginnings with Red Hat were largely accidental. My start with Linux came not too long after finding a book on Linux at my grandparents' house. Its pages covered four distributions that were popular in its day: Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, and SuSE.
In just a few days, I read it all the proper chapters and (I'm sad to say) a solid chunk of the appendices. Later that year, I would go on to read the IBM-DOS 3.3 manual in a similar manner (the fact that it was nearly 15 years out of date at the time only made it more appealing). I would re-read both of them several times.
I was enthralled, particularly because where school lunchroom chatter had lead me to believe Linux was even more primitive than DOS, I found an entire working desktop and an entire alien world to explore. We had built a new desktop the previous year, so I was allowed to do my experiments on the old family computer, a 200 MHz Pentium (with MMX!) with 16 MB of RAM and (best of all) a 4x CD-ROM drive. This was a time when, if I weren't so fixated on X, the entire system would be more than happy with 4 MB of RAM, so while it was junk hardware in the world of Windows 95, it played well with Caldera and Red Hat 6.
The book purported to come with CDs for all four distributions it covered, but sadly TurboLinux and SuSE were missing. I'm fairly certain that I've tried neither of those to this date, or if I have tried SuSE it was only very briefly. I don't know why I never tried TurboLinux, but for a long time we either didn't have broadband or when we did it would take nearly all day to download a CD set. Maybe it never promised something that excited me to be that patient.
As for SuSE, it was partly that factor, partly its similarity to Red Hat, and partly about Novell's alignment with the evil empire in '06. Somewhere between 2002 and 2006 the basis for my interest in Linux switched from being a curiosity about an alien world to a love of the free software movement's philosophy. How can I have possibly supported a company that believed in software patents?? I'm sure I have missed trying some great distributions, but I digress.
Do you remember remember your first time? Did it end in failure? Was it awkward? Were there creepy undertones to the whole affair? I remember that one of the Karate Kid movies was playing on the TV and my brother watched it while I spent the majority of the movie's runtime (including commercials) trying to get Caldera installed.
I think what set it apart from the other distro(s) available to me was its installation process, which was more automated. That's helpful to someone who has known what low-level formatting was for a matter of weeks. To the young mind, fdisk is even more transgressive fsck, and things get really exciting when one thinks of writing to the MBR. Genuinely, I got a rush from it.
The installation went smoothly until the very end. At that time, Caldera's installer included a tetris-like game to take the edge off the boredom of watching packages copy over to your hard drive. I forget precisely when I knew things weren't right, but an indicator would have been things going awry with tetris. Too often in life, this is the case. I think it got hung up along the way. Sadly, at the end of the night, I didn't have a working OS, and I didn't have Mr Miyagi's lessons to fall back on either.
So it was that by the accident of poor-quality CD pressing (and omitted discs) that my first working Linux distribution would be Red Hat 6. That is the story for next time.
I would love to hear what you think of what I've written, or what you'd like to read about in the future. Please don't be shy about commenting on this page or about adding me on Google Plus, where I share more geeky/Linux things and fewer personal things than I do on other social networks, so I'm more comfortable adding Internet strangers (please don't ask to join my other networks, strangers).
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