Slackware 13 setup

Ok..

tonight is one of these days I say to myself... time to blog

and what else to blog about than the amazing slackware linux...


Since the "official announcement" of slackware going 64 bits; and me braking my old mobo installed slackware64 current on my pc... It just worked like a charm besides the little customer things... like me not liking KDE4 and stuff..

Last week slackware team made the official release of version 13 stable... so ofcourse I went to slackwarestore in a honest attempt to buy a DVD... then saw like... ok it worth 50 bucks...

... not that i don't feel like it doesn't worth the 50 bucks but... (i'm short lately) i got myself a nice black tshirt and started downloading.

This time I made a CLEAN install wiping out all my HDD's and installed everything...

so here i go with my "setting up slackware" guide.

• Optimizing LILO

Slackware still use lilo... why?
simple... IT WORKS!

by using the old known linux loader you are loading a basic system that then has to load all your crap... no need for extra parameters... and let's face it; configuring lilo is way simpler than GRUB.

Just add compact to the top of your lilo.conf

• Optimizing rc.M

There are parts of this script that doesn't need to be loadead every single boot.
I personally comment outthe fc-cache and ldconfig lines. One only needs to be run after installing a new font, the other after installing a new library.

Note: I use to do this since i had old and slow hardware.. but with my shiny new build with 8 GB of ram... i don't notice the extra processes

• Setting up ALSA

Back on those days that I went from redhad (yes... I sometimes feel bad because now I know rpm based system sucks) this one was one of those tricks you feel good when find out.

alsaconf
/etc/rc.d/rc.alsa start
alsamixer
alsactl store

Make sure you do the last one... because it will save the settings... otherwise you'll have to run alsamixer to be able to hear something thru your speakers every single time.

• Setting up X

Ok... this one i wasn't going to post about; but since amd took the time to release a driver that WORKS (even if they drop support for linux for many old but still rocking cards with the release of their crappy 9.3 catalyst) the actual ones works pretty well.

since i build this machine I started to miss my nvidia 6300 256ram... I feel nvidia drivers for linux are superior but hey... amd did something good...
they don't send you a pre-compiled module anymore.. they send you sources so their ati-installer actually compile the kernel module...

every single time the fucking module didn't load and you startx... it halted the system bad...

• Configure the system to boot into X

The only real advantage that I see on this one is having your wife not bitching arround... ok that wasn't the real one.
The real one is that by enabling booting into X you are able to shutdown the machine logged as a mere user...

Edit “/etc/inittab” and change the default runlevel from 3 to 4.

• Windows Emulation

This one is an important one because lately i've been playing starcraft again.. (starcraft2 is comming out next year and i want to rock on that one)
anyways... if you are not willing; or just don't want to install windows on a Vbox or something...

Install wine (duh!)
run the winecfg
Enable support for misc binaries:

edit “/etc/rc.d/rc.modules” and uncomment the following line:/sbin/modprobe binfmt_misc

Then add the following to “/etc/fstab”:

none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc defaults 0 0

Now add the following to “/etc/rc.rc.local”:

echo ':windows:M::MZ::/path/to/wine:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register
echo ':windowsPE:M::PE::/path/to/wine:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

From now on; every *.exe file will be executed by wine...
I think it needs to be rebooted to work... don't remember....

do it anyways.