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The Stealth Desktop: Sight and Sound With Slackware 158

Posted by timothy from the but-slackware's-text-only-right dept.
sombragris writes "Many people think of Slackware as a distribution oriented to servers and experienced users. However, here's an article that shows how to configure sound and the X Window System in Slack, in a newbie-friendly way and oriented towards desktop usage. The article is a follow-up to Part I of the series, where the author introduced his vision of Slackware as a desktop. Enjoy!"
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The Stealth Desktop: Sight and Sound With Slackware More

The Stealth Desktop: Sight and Sound With Slackware

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  • X Slack?? (Score:4, Informative)

    by PeterPumpkin ( 777678 ) on Saturday July 17, 2004 @11:21AM (#9725317) Journal
    Installing X is already covered in the guide [slackware.org]. Slackware was my first distro, I don't remember having any trouble getting X to run :D

    • Re:X Slack?? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Alan Hicks ( 660661 ) on Saturday July 17, 2004 @11:53AM (#9725455) Homepage

      Throwing in a shameless plug here. Myself and some of the other BOZOs on alt.os.linux.slackware have been sort on-again off-again working on an updated release of that book. You can find that project here [lizella.net].

    • Same here. I had a friend on AIM to help me, but i think i asked a total of three questions...he just said, "Look at the config file...i think it's /etc/X11/XF86Config or something." And I did...and I got it to work. It really wasn't all that difficult. That was back in the good ol' days, though. Back when I was still in high school. Ahh, memories. Then I went to college and discovered FreeBSD. Then Gentoo.. Then DragonFly. And now? Sex. It's better than all of them put together.

  • Uhh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by toetagger1 ( 795806 ) on Saturday July 17, 2004 @11:22AM (#9725322)
    Any OS that I have to configure sound myself, I don't consider newbie-friendly!

    just my 2 cents

    • Re:Uhh (Score:3, Interesting)

      by PitaBred ( 632671 )
      So, when Windows doesn't work with sound or video out of the box, it's not newbie friendly?
      Nice troll.

      • Re:Uhh (Score:3, Insightful)

        by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 )
        Not that I blame you for the mistake, but I don't think he is a troll. Nor do I see that he is denying your conclusion.

        That said, follow the statement to its logical conclusion!

      • Re:Uhh (Score:2, Interesting)

        by toetagger1 ( 795806 )
        Yes,

        if ANY OS needs sound configured when it comes out of the box, it is not newbie friendly. That is exacly what I said.
      • Since when does sound not work on Win2k/xp/2k3? This is 2004. Hardware probems you had eight years ago with win 3.1/95 don't count anymore.

        That being said, if sound doesn't work, then yes, it's not newbie friedly.

        The original poster doesn't seem like the real troll here.

    • Re:Uhh (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Tr0mBoNe- ( 708581 )
      True, but getting the sound working isn't hard.

      Compile in sound drivers into the kernel, add the sound module to the startup scripts, and then find some easy to use interface... I used some obsure little program that was a series of command line statements like cvol 100 or cvol -r 100 for full or full right channel respectivly.

      Slack however is one of the most compatable distros out there... I have not had many problems installing programs with it.

      A thought just crossed my mind... Since when is Slackware.

    • Re:Uhh (Score:3, Informative)

      by 13Echo ( 209846 )
      Sound works out of the box on Slackware 10 (through ALSA). You will simply need to turn the volume levels up with the mixer.
    • Where is the author coming getting these ideas? The Slackware 10 install set up my sound and video without any feedback whatsoever from myself, and on fairly recent hardware too: onboard sound from an Intel motherboard and a Radeon 9000.

      All I had to do was turn up the volume when I logged into the gnome desktop, which I agree should be done for the user in the first place, but it is hardly worth whining about.

    • Re:Uhh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nwbvt ( 768631 ) on Saturday July 17, 2004 @12:31PM (#9725641)
      I disagree. Being a newbie isn't the same thing as being an incompetent moron. In fact, newbies generally refers to a class of people who have very little experience in something but are interested in learning. What better learning experience than something that has you do the configuration yourself rather than having some script do it hidden away in the background?

      Saying Slackware is newbie-friendly does not mean it is right for grandma, merely that it is a good choice for someone interested in learning about Linux/Unix but who currently has little experience.

      • Why on earth would you want to learn to do something as uninteresting as installing sound drivers into your OS?

        • Re:Uhh (Score:3, Insightful)

          by nwbvt ( 768631 )
          News for Nerds, remember? Some of us don't mind getting down and dirty with our computers.
      • Remember, he says this is for desktip USE not for "OS compilation fun"
      • yes, the best way to teach someone to swim is to throw them into shark infested waters, cause you wouldn't want them to learn in an enviroment thats easy.

        • Re:Uhh (Score:3, Funny)

          by nwbvt ( 768631 )
          And dancing naked through the forest isn't a good way to teach someone calculus.

          See, I too can make irrelevant analogies that in no way benefit the conversation.

  • But.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gfxguy ( 98788 ) on Saturday July 17, 2004 @11:23AM (#9725324)
    why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie friendly installations out of the box?
    • Nice troll.

      Getting sound to work amounts to uncommenting the correct chipset in rc.modules. Getting X to work, if it doesn't by default, amounts to running xf86config and picking the correct options (of which there are few) out of menus.

      It doesn't get any easier or friendlier, but it can treat you like a retard with all sorts of fancy auto-config wizards that may or may not work. And when things get more complicated, you'll be up a creek. Kudzu refusing to see that second ethernet card? Oops. On slackware

      • Re:But.... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gfxguy ( 98788 )
        Not a troll... sorry. How many newbies care to deal with two ethernet cards? More often than not, Mandrake (and other distributions) work flawlessly. The question still stands... if you want a distribution to learn how things work, slackware is fine, if you want a distribution where things just work (usually), you get something else.

      • Re:But.... (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        And the newbie reads your post as...

        "Nice troll.

        [random rocket science]. Hook up your modem to your BLT drive and run your emacs through your serial port to configure Free X configuration files to start the server and run your display through your fourth parallel BBQ port."

        Jeez. Think realistically, buddy. You honestly think a newbie is going to pick up on your process?

        Oh well. Rock on.
        -js

        • Re:But.... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 ) <john.oyler@noSpAm.comcast.net> on Saturday July 17, 2004 @11:56AM (#9725466) Journal
          Open up 1 text file that will always be in the same place, that will never pop up the "this is C:\Program Files, do you really want to see the files?". Find the line in this text file marked "This is for the blahblah sound card". Delete the # in front of that line, and only the #.

          Type startx, hit enter. If that doesn't work, type xf86config, hit enter. Answer all the questions it asks, and if unsure of the answer, it will usually tell you about a good generic answer. If you think you need to configure a video card, but you don't know the name of it, go shoot yourself.

          Those *do not* look like rocket science instructions to me, but maybe I'm biased. It's all intimidating if you haven't learned anything yet, right? Except this isn't all that much to learn, is incredibly valuable (at least in my own unimportant opinion), and can't be faked with some asshat GUI wizard.

          What's the alternative, mandrake with some GUI installer, which has a 45% of making it work auto-magically if its a stock Dell or IBM, and a 10% chance if you've installed even one PCI card on your own? There will be 4 or 5 different screens of the wizard, often worded ambiguously, that if you click on the wrong one, it may ot may not allow you to go back and fix it? And it is at least as many steps, isn't easily reversed, and provides a false sense of security.

          I just don't see that as an improvement.
          • >There will be 4 or 5 different screens of the wizard, often worded ambiguously, that if you click on the wrong one, it may ot may not allow you to go back and fix it?

            Why is a wizard a bad thing, yet the instructions you gave are not "rocket science"? Couldn't you get the same amount of clarity and easy in a wizard as you could with your instructions?

            Take a look at Apple UI. Lots of "wizard-like" UI. No command line interface. No guessing the video card. No guessing typing in startx or xf86config
            • You're either asking me if all the wizards I've seen are bad (they are) or if wizards *could be* good, if done right by the right people (*shrug* yeh, I suppose they could).
            • wizards are bad because they rely on other libraries in order to work which is one of the major problems windows has. Even the most basic stuff with windows and with these wizards in other distro's requires some other libraries to be correct. Now if those libraries are bad you cant install your new . So now you need to go reinstall those libraries, but wait, the wizard to install those libraries are broken, so now you have to go and install those libraries without a wizard, but you have no idea how to do
      • Actually it does get easier, with XFree86 (haven't tried with x.org yet) all you have to do is type X -configure (or is that captial C i always forget) as root and it will configure your XF86Config file for you. Then all you have to do is mv ~/X86Config.new /etc/X11/XF86Config. This is much easier than running the outdated xf86config script.

    • Re:But.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by munpfazy ( 694689 )
      >why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie
      >friendly installations out of the box?

      At the risk of being sucked into a religious war, I'll assume this is a serious question.

      The first response must be, what do you mean by a newbie?

      If you mean someone who have never touched anything but windows and has no experience with a unix shell or a text editor, and who doesn't have any close linux-head friends to turn to for help and advice, then I agree with you. Slackware may not be the best way to t
  • Im only new to linux. I've started off using Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Caldera and some other minor linux distros and i found that Slackware was the easiest to install, setup and maintain out off all of the above. I also like how the packages are not modified.

    • My slackware story (Score:2, Interesting)

      by praedictus ( 61731 )
      I've been using Slackware for over 2 years in a dual-boot situation (Win 98). It started off pretty simple with a Zipslack install to a dos directory, using loadlin to switch to Linux. Shortly thereafter I used part2.4.3 to create a true linux partition and swapspace, manually copied the installation from the DOS partition to the linux partition, ran LILO and got lucky on the first try.
      Still no X or sound, so first I downloaded an updated kernel (2.4.19 IIRC), then began filling in the required libra

  • I don't know where this guy comes from (Score:3, Informative)

    by xutopia ( 469129 ) on Saturday July 17, 2004 @11:28AM (#9725342) Homepage
    I've been using Slack 9.1 now since it came out and honestly I can't remember having as many problems as he brings up. Aside from having to run alsactl to lower the volume a bit I had no problem whatsoever with sound and video. X ran out of the box too. I also used dropline gnome which is IMHO a great DE package.
  • I would say "Here's an entire article on just how to get sound and X Window system working, to reaffirm the belief that this is not what it was designed to do, and that Slackware is meant for servers."

    That you can, with considerable tweaking, make something function as something else is not new. Yes, you can mod almost any car into making it a race car. Doesn't mean the original is a race car, not by a long shot.

    Kjella
    • The funny thing is, getting X working on Slackware isn't that hard. The most it's taken on any of the machines I've installed it on is a quick xf86config, or now with 10.0, an xorgconfig. It defaults to a basic Gnome desktop, which I happen to rather like myself. And as I've pointed out in another post, adding in Dropline Gnome makes it a top notch desktop platform.

      Yes, Slackware makes an excellent server system, but that doesn't mean that it's difficult to make it an equally excellent desktop system. Just
  • Initial configuration may be a problem, but you have to do it only one time, I still think slackware major problem is its bad binaries support [slashdot.org].

    I'm ok in promoting slackware for small office desktop (very limited applications, like a word processor and browser), but in such ocassions will not be the end user who will install/configure, but the support guy.
    • As it always should be. If you think that software installation isn't something that any user but the most clueful should ever be allowed to do, you're begging for trouble. The receptionist up front, who is always installing shareware games, elf-bowling and shit, check out her computer sometime. Norton has probably nailed most of the actual viruses, but there is almost certainly dozens of spyware applets installed.

      My favorite is "I thought we switched to Mozilla to get rid of popups". Walk over, and as she

  • User since 8.1 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brendanoconnor ( 584099 ) on Saturday July 17, 2004 @11:52AM (#9725450)
    A while back (whenever 8.1 came out) I decided to try linux. I read a few reviews, and what not. I first tested out mandrake. I had bought it at the store for a couple of dollars (less then $40, maybe less). I played with it for a while, but it just did not feel right.

    I tried Debian next, but apparently thats above my head cause when I got to the dselect area I was overwhelmed. Decided, perhaps not for me.

    Finally I tried slackware. What I really liked from the start was they had an entire book, for free, on their website that I could read for help. Although when I started the installation, I did not really need any help. Slackware has a great menu-driven installer. With some previous computer experience, and a little network know how, installation was a breeze.

    At the time the kernel supported my sound card, but did not compile in the drive automatically. Before I realized I could of just built the module and used it that way, I decided to recompile the kernel. Also a very easy task in slackware.

    Ultimately, I love the distribution, and have been using it since. I have a subscription so I get the latest distro in the mail a few days after it is released. Although truth be known I have no reason to even break the plastic on 10 because I have kept myself patched up and just do not need anything new. It does feel good to support Patrick and the slackware team. They deserve that, and much more.

    I will say you have to be willing to read and learn (which means 99% of the world just won't like it) to use slackware. But, once you have learned how, you realize just how great Slackware is.

    Brendan

    p.s. www.linuxquestions.com has distro specific forums. If you need help, try their first.
  • Article is toast, so this is just a guess, but here's what I'd do to get my desktop up (seeing as I've been using Slack on the desktop for 6 months now, I'm still pretty inexperienced).

    1. startx
    If that doesn't work, use the CLI configuration tool to write an xorg.conf to fit what you need on your system, and all it requires is a limited knowledge of what your monitor supports and what video card you have.

    2. alsamixer, and unmute sound.
    I have no damn idea *why* that defaults to muted, but it does.
  • Typical desktop users are not willing and not interested in reading a webpage to get the basics of their OS working. We can't keep telling them "Read the Freaking Manual".

    I recently installed Mandrake in a White Box Machine that I got on the mail with no OS. It took less than half an hour to even get my cable connection working. Most everything was auto configured.That I call a desktop distro.

    I have a sweet spot for Slack 'cause I started my Linux experience with Slackware almost 10 years ago. And I th

  • I'm glad the first Linux distro I ran was Slackware. It has a steep learning curve (compared to Red Hat, etc.), but the knowledge I gained while running Slack has been of great use to me later. I wouldn't know half of the things I know about how a *nix system (Linux in particular) works if it wasn't for all the sleepless nights I've spent configuring everything from soundcards to qmail on Slackware. Especially learning how to compile applications instead of just downloading a package has proven very useful.

  • First release to have some troubles with (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have been using Slackware since version 8.0 and 10.0 is the first version to give me some hassles. Mind you these hassles are minor compared to what you get with other distroes. I don't know what's wrong as I have used 9.1 on the same comp without these problems:

    1 - Xine, noatun, kaboodle don't play MPEGs without dropping most frames (mplayer works OK, though not as well as with 9.1). Likewise xine has troubles with DVDs

    2 - I had a really tough time getting sound to work (though not with KDE components)
    • I think the first problem is because of Xorg, since I upgraded to Xorg I can no longer use mplayer with -vo xv, something which worked fine with XFree86. I get some error message that says: The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec.
  • I never thought for myself when I got into linux. Someone told me 6 years ago 'Redhat is the way! Slackware sucks!' The recent versions of Redhat give me such a headache because the installations appear to make decisions for me. Slack doesn't. Not only that, but configuring slack is so much easier than Redhat. As corporate as Redhat gets, they come off as a microsoft of linux. Slack reaches back to the roots of linux.
  • In the past week I installed consecutively, Slackware 10 (cause I want to do a live cd and slax is awesome but I like gnome...) Yoper V2 and went back to Fedora Core 2 for now. Slackware is easy to install and all but it behave not that good on my hardware (nforce2 A7N8X) the good thing for me was that (compare to fc2) it reads mp3 and movies out of the box, the bad thing was that it didn't read them that well. I also had an issue with mozilla not accepting any submit in any pages (buttons or enter, think

  • Stating the obvious? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 17, 2004 @12:56PM (#9725755)

    Pardon me for stating the obvious, but a little rant is in order. Every linux machine can be turned into a desktop machine no matter what normal distribution you install on it. The normal in the previous sentence refers to linux distributions that aren't modified to be used as real-time operating systems, or have undergone serious modifications to suit some particular combination of hardware for embedded devices and even then, I'm quite sure it's still possible if you take into account the limitations these modifications imply.

    I'm growing tired of the glowing reviews of distribution X and company Y providing the best desktop environment available. People can run Gnome or KDE on any distribution as long as they know their favourite package management system, and if not then ./configure; make; make install has always done the trick. Oh, I'm not saying that it isn't a good thing that distributions are trying to provide desktop environments, in fact I think it's a great idea. But at the heart of the matter of it all lies that whatever distribution you run, you can ALWAYS run windowmanager X or desktop environment Y, usually without too much hassle.

    I've used slackware for years, and it was the first distribution I ever installed. I've used Redhat and Linux From Scratch, and lately I use Debian. But I've grown so tired of the endless debates of geeks preferring one distribution to another. It's all the same, just a little different, and even then you can still do whatever you want. Can we please stop our little holy wars, because the rest of the world doesn't care. If a person who is not a technophobe asks me what linux distribution to use, my answer always is "Pick one of the better known ones, and you'll be fine."

    Maybe this is a smug attitude of mine, but I don't care. If someone wants to run fedora, fine by me. Someone chooses debian, fine by me. Someone chooses windows, be my guest. But please stop being such zaelots, as it's hurting the community.

    • Mod parent up.

      This whole "this is a good desktop distro" thing is crap. I admin a couple hundred *nix boxes (Slackware, Solaris, OpenBSD) I can tell you that it takes very little work to get a nice desktop running across all the platforms. The idea that RedHat is a desktop OS and Solaris (or OpenBSD) are for servers only is nonsense. You just need to take the time to install the shiny software. Anyone with a little skill can take a Slack box and get it to match or beat any other distro in the eye-cand

  • Slack does make a good desktop (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eris_crow ( 234864 ) <eris_crow&eldain,com> on Saturday July 17, 2004 @12:57PM (#9725763) Homepage
    Slack does make a good desktop, but I won't say it makes a good desktop for everyone.

    The first distro I ever installed was Slackware 3.1 and used it and the other 3.x releases for about 3 years. Then I got tired of doing everything by hand and I switched to RedHat 6.2. I stuck with RedHat for several years after that, and now at work I deal with mostly RHE3, so the experience of using it paid off, but it was Slack that actually taught me how to do everything.

    When it came time to upgrade my system at home, though, I ran into trouble. I'd been using RH7.1 for a long time and thought that I would go to RH9, but the installer frequently crashed during installation and I'd have to start over. Then when I finally got it installed and working, I managed to bork it while trying to get audio and video codecs and software installed. I could have tried repairing by hand, I suppose, but it being a fresh install anyway, I figured it would take less time to just start over from scratch and reinstall one more time. No dice. The installer crashed again.

    I like RedHat, and I still run RH8 on a small print/mail/firewall server at home, but after the repeated installation trouble, I decided to go with Slackware. It is nice and conservative and I knew that it would at least install correctly, even if it needed a bit more hand holding to set up.

    So I got out my Slack 9.0 CDs a friend had burned for me and loaded it up. No problems. Not a single glitch during the entire installation. Everything was smooth as could be. Sound worked out of the box, and X configuration was easy with xfree86config. I compiled Window Maker and KDE 3.1 from source, and had no problems at all with them.

    Now I've got a clean, fast system with a low memory footprint, and it gives me no headaches. If there is anything I want to do, some program is already installed to do it, so even if I don't have the program I prefer, I've at least got a program I can use, and that is what counts. Downloading other programs is no big deal for me.

    I'm not the only one who uses this box, either. My wife uses it sometimes and she knows nothing about computers. But Gnome, Mozilla, and OpenOffice handle 99% of her needs, and she can deal with them without trouble. She still needs me to do updates, and configure things, though.

    So my judgement of Slackware today is this: it makes a great desktop for people who already know how to use Linux and already know how to customize things the way they want. For newbies it's probably too intimidating unless they are really interested in learning, but it can still work for them if a knowledgeable person is around to take care of details.

  • Wow sound!!!!111oneone - I think Strong Bad's Compy 386 [hrwiki.org] is going to be tough to beat
  • I am still sort of disappointed with GNU/Linux sound. (Saying GNU/Linux to show I'm not a penguin-hating man. Just trying to tell the truth.)

    ALSA was supposed to fix everything. Having two cards and switching between them easily. Configuring new hardware easily. It's easier than it was with regular OSS, but it isn't super simple. Or maybe it's just my config (debian unstable.)

    Anyone else have complains/solutions/great tools that I am stupid not to have?

    Thanks.

  • BIG fonts... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Skiron ( 735617 ) on Saturday July 17, 2004 @02:13PM (#9726097)

    Funnily enough, I installed Slack on my laptop 3 days ago. All went hunky dory... sort of.

    I use Fluxbox as desktopWM, and it all worked great - unless I fired up a KDE/Gnome app - then fonts went HUGE (Mozilla here) [linicks.net]

    Buit, having a few years ;) experience with Linux, I re-ran /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config and sorted.

    BTW, pre-compiled Slackware is soooooo fast - nearly as fast as Gentoo built on box.

    Nick

    • Try adding -dpi 75 to you X startup.

      startx -- -dpi 75

      or in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers make it read: :0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X -dpi 75

      This is a good hack around hi res monitors and xft screwing with font sizes.
  • They said "Slackware", "X-Windows" and "friendly" in the same sentence. LOL!
    Just kidding, you know we love you :)

  • Why? (Score:1)

    by CrkHead ( 27176 )
    I started a slow change from Windows to Linux in late '98 and tried out many different distributions and settled on Slackware pretty quickly.

    I have had installation nightmares with Mandrake, Suse, Redhat, Yellow Dog, and I'm sure there have been more. I have less trouble configuring Slack and keeping it updated. I did have to learn Linux in the process, but that was what I set out to do when moving from Windows.

    As updated versions of other distros come around, I give them a test drive on my laptop and

  • But why? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Scud ( 1607 )
    Okay, this is going to sound like a troll, but what does Slack have that makes it better than a more "polished" distro? With the one that I use, I slap the DVD in and it starts chugging away (after I do my own partitions manually of course, and select what software I want first).

    Configuration is not too much more than clicky here and clicky there.

    Before I get lambasted for running a "dumbed-down" distro (or being dumbed-down myself), once installed I do everything else with my favorite tools -- the comman

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