Adventures in Linux: One Week of Slackware 12.0 (Geek Alert!) 2

I upgraded the laptop last week.

Rather than do an upgrade installation, which can be a tedious process, I backed up all my data files to the file server, including crucial configuration files such as the Samba and the rc.firewall configuration files. rc.firewall is the current iteration of the old Projectfiles firewall.

I then fdisked the puppy down to bare electrons and loaded Slackware 12.0 from scratch, with the default 2.6.51 kernel. In the process, I got rid of a lot of stuff I’ve played with and abandoned over the last couple of years, but which was still hanging around and taking up space.

It was worth the effort. The machine boots faster, multi-tasks faster, and swaps less. Memory intensive tasks, such as doing parity checks on downloaded files and “unraring” large downloads, used to noticeably and annoyingly slow down multitasking.

Now, such tasks sometimes noticeably slow down the multitasking, but they don’t annoyingly slow it down.

After getting the basics working, I installed Dropline Gnome, not because I like Gnome (I don’t like how it looks or feels), but because a lot of the software I do like to use needs Gnome libraries (for you Windows types, libraries are sort of like *.dlls).

I did find a couple of oddities.

I had to run alsaconf to get the sound card working. In previous installations on several computers, I’ve not had to do this.

par2cmdline doesn’t seem to like Slackware 12.0, but gpar2 works just fine to perform the same function.

Google Earth crashes X Server. I don’t use Google Earth much and have plently of other computers to run it on until I finish trouble-shooting it.

In fact, I’m so happy with Slackware 12.0 that I installed it on my file server (that 10-year old Pentium IBM PC 300 that used to run the website) today. From fdisk to back on the network with anti-virus and firewall and receiving a backup from my work computer–three hours, counting smoke breaks. (No, I haven’t installed Dropline Gnome on it and probably won’t–it’s a server. It’s just supposed to sit there and quietly serve).