Episode: 2666
Title: HPR2666: Slackware Post-Install
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2666/hpr2666.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 07:12:18

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This is HPR Episode 2666 entitled Sackware Post-Install.
It is posted by Mirashaden and in about 30 minutes long and carry the next visit flag.
The summary is a quick and dirty guide to getting Sackup and running after it's installed.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello world, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio and you probably already knew that.
I'm Mirashaden and you probably already knew that too.
So today I want to talk about what's a little bit of a homecoming for me, I guess.
Before we do that, before we get into it, I just want to say I'm not feeling 110%, I actually
recorded this episode once already and didn't like it, so I'm re-recording it.
Yeah, I'm a little under the weather, excuse me, so if you hear me cough or sneeze or something, just overlook me.
So, yeah, recently I was, if you listen to any of my other episodes, you'll know that I was a big fan of CrunchBanglinics.
And it came at a time that was just perfect because it was a very,
I don't know how to put it, it was a very hackable sort of distro, like there was a lot of effort
put into making sure that everything was controlled with text files and had relatively saying
defaults that ran on open box with conky intent too and it was, it was very, very nice.
I very much was taken with CrunchBang and then the, I don't know what you want to call him,
the project leader or whatever, he ended the project and the community decided to continue
it as Bunsen Labs and Bunsen Labs is great. I tried to use it for a while, there's nothing
wrong with it, I know that sounds like I'm gonna start with a big list of things ever wrong with it,
but I'm not, my problems with Bunsen Labs actually have absolutely nothing to do with Bunsen Labs,
it's the Debian base that it's built on top of that I don't care for. I'm actually never been
much of a Debian guy, so I started looking around, I'm not a fan of System D and so we used
to say Linux was all about choice, but if you choose not to do System D, you're choosing
to go from a choice of about 400 distros down to about 4 distros, that's not entirely accurate,
but it's pretty close. Yeah, there's not, there's not many distros out there that, that are
non-System D, and also if you choose to not go the System D route, you're also choosing to drop
Nome 3, is it? There's a lot of System D dependencies, I think, I don't know, I don't really keep
up with Nome that much anymore. I wasn't really taken by Nome 3 anyway or really even the GTK
3 look of the apps, so that was one of the things that was cool about CrunchBank and Bunsen Labs,
it was that I could keep a lot of my apps on GTK2 and they looked pretty nice, at least I think,
I kind of like the way GTK2 looks, I know it looks a little dated, but it still looks cool, you can
get a pretty good look at them. Anyway, so moving away from that and trying to find something else
was hard, I kind of looked around and I couldn't find anything that I really liked that really
just made me happy. There are some other distros out there that are sort of, I don't want to say
derived from, but more like inspired by CrunchBank, and I'm aware of those, there's CrunchBank Plus Plus,
there is Arch Labs, and the guy who did Arch Labs, I'm pretty sure, I think his handles
Dobie or Dobie or something, I'm sorry if I mispronounced your handle, dude, I'm totally sorry.
He's pretty active in the Bunsen Labs forums, and I think they used a lot of his work to do
there's a community edition of Manjaro based on open box that looks significantly like a lot
was taken from Arch Labs, but it didn't do it for me either, it's one of those things that it
looks great in the screenshot, but when I install it and start playing with it, I wanted to
breaking things way too easy, and I'm like, what's the deal here? Why is all this stuff breaking,
just because I do very simple things? And some of that's probably my own fault too,
because I'm not a, you know, I'm not, I'm gonna say this, I'm not really an Arch guy,
and I don't have anything against Arch in and of itself, like I actually was super duper excited
to try Arch at one point, and the, then they started doing things like, they were really quick
to jump on SystemD, of course, but they've also been one of the early distros, and they were,
I don't think they were the first, but they were the, one of the big distros to just dump 32-bit
support, which kind of hurts me, I know it's old, I know a lot of 32-bit processors are old,
but I still have a lot of that hardware, and I still want to use it sometimes, that may sound
crazy to people, but you know, it is what it is, I have it, it still works, I want to use it,
and I don't really, I don't feel like I need to justify myself for that, if I have it,
and I want to use it, that's my business, so there, it is what it is, but uh,
so I couldn't, I couldn't find anything that made me happy, I looked around and I looked around,
and so what I wound up actually doing is going back to Slackware, so I was actually a Slackware
user for many years, I was happily a Slackware user for many years, the only reason
why I wound up leaving Slackware initially was I went to college and I was working, I was going to
college full-time and working full-time, and I just did not have time to, to do all the wonderful
things you need to do to get Slackware up and go, which really isn't that bad, I think more of that
was just in my head than, than anything maybe, but I did want something that was, uh, essentially
crunch bang, like when I came across crunch bang I was like this is perfect, this is exactly what I
was looking for, um, and it made me very happy, and so I used it for a while, and installing software,
you know, it is a little bit of a chore to do on Slackware because it's not as simple like,
okay, so do I get installed, whatever, and it does everything automatically for you,
it's not like that on Slackware, it's not like that all on Slackware, but um, but that's okay,
there's tools on Slackware to kind of ease the, the, the pain of that too, um,
so a lot of people are going to get their software from slackbuilds.org, and they're probably
going to use a tool, um, nowadays it's very common to see people using SBO, PKG, and I'm no different
in that respect, um, it is kind of nice to, uh, just be able to, uh, say okay I want this program,
whatever it is, uh, say it's Audacity, and you go to the slackbuilds page here, I'll do this
real quick, so it's actually accurate, let me go to, um, there we go, I knew it was in my history
somewhere, I'll go to slackbuilds, and then we'll look up Audacity,
and there it is, and it's listed under the audio category, and it's, it'll tell you at the
bottom, this requires lame and WX GTK 3, so in order to install Audacity, you'll have to grab
those dependencies too, so if we open those in separate, separate, uh, tabs, you can see that
lame is, you can get that by itself, and it doesn't have any dependencies, and it doesn't look like
WX GTK 3 does either, so you can just pull those down, and you can actually with SBO, PKG, you can
queue those up, all in one queue, and it'll just go down the line, uh, building them and installing
the packages, um, but, um, anyway, the point of this episode, the reason I wanted to, to get,
to do this episode, wasn't so much about, um, my personal experience going back to slackwear,
which that was really cool, uh, it was one of those, it was kind of a neat thing because when I,
when I first, uh, got it up, up and running, I was like, man, why did I ever leave this? This is
beautiful, and then I had to go and, uh, install something, and I was like, oh yeah, uh, it takes a
very long time for this to build, but that's okay, that's okay, actually, I got the time to do that,
now, um, but yeah, uh, nothing, nothing on this, in this world runs like a slackwear machine,
um, of course you could make that argument for any distribution, whatever your favorite
distribution happens to be, um, every distribution has, even though people will tell you, oh,
that's all the same, they're all the same, it's the same software, but they're not, every
distribution wires that stuff up a little bit differently in every distro, whether it's Debbie,
Interferdora, or slackwear, they feel just a little bit different, some of it is responsive,
the responsiveness of it, some of it is just, uh, the way the system moves, and just, I don't know,
you, uh, you get a tune to it over time, there's a certain, uh, bonding period, I guess you would say,
um, certain symbiosis that takes place when you, when you get your system up and running, and, um,
um, the slackwear has this very, just, it's insanely stable and fast, even if the software may not,
the, the downside is you're not going to get like the bleeding edge of software, which is okay,
like I mean, a lot of times that don't really need the bleeding edge, um, and I'm fine, so, uh,
what I really wanted to talk about, uh, I'm not going to go into the specifics of the
slackwear installation, uh, if you've never, if you never use slackwear or you've never installed it,
maybe you've put it off because you've heard it's really hard to do, or, uh, it doesn't have a pretty
graphical installer, it's not necessarily, people say it's not user friendly, I have never found
slackwear particularly hard to install, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, uh, the first
time I ever installed slackwear, I was, I wasn't much more than a noob myself, really, um, it wasn't
particularly hard back then either, um, the installer isn't graphical, but as long as you
followed through the steps and read what was on the screen, you were fine, uh, so it, you know,
nowadays some people may not be as comfortable using a program like FDisk or CFDisk to partition
their hard drive, and that's okay, I mean some people are probably just going to boot off of
something like Jeep Parted or whatever, and partition their hard drive, and that's okay too,
if you're more comfortable with that, um, and the installer will see the partitions and format
them whatever you want, um, and then, uh, unlike other distributions though, whenever you do the
slackwear installation, uh, and everybody should, I think at least once in their life run, run
slackwear, you might find you like it, um, then you might find you hated, I don't feel like there's
a lot of middle ground there, people you generally either love it or hate it, um, and that's okay too,
but, um, you should at least try it once, uh, there's, I'm not going to talk really about the, uh,
the installation process itself, what I will do is direct you to the installation guide, um,
the, I guess it's the quote-unquote official installation guide, it's at docs.slackwear.com slash
slackwear install, or I think it's, uh, I can't remember if that's exactly it, but I'll put the link
in the show notes so you can get to it, um, it covers the regular installation, and, um, I'm sure
there's also quite a few YouTube videos out there, I'll find one in link to it in the show notes as well,
um, pretty, pretty easy to, uh, to install slackwear, but unlike other distributions today,
like most of the time, most people are probably, you know, you install it and then you're ready to go,
right? slackwear is not like that, there's some post-install stuff you gotta do to have, uh,
your system up and running and ready to go, so some of that is because slackwear hasn't
changed a bunch of stuff over the years, and they, they still kind of kept to some of their old
Unix heritage, uh, I've, I've read on places, uh, of all the Linux distribution slackwares, the
closest to its Unix heritage, um, also a lot of things in slackwear you'll find are vanilla,
they don't rewire things, they don't patch any software, it's as close to how it comes from
the developers hands as, as you can get, um, so you can kind of make the system what you want it to be,
um, but the reason why I wanted to do this is because, uh, you know, it wasn't very difficult for me,
even after all these years to get slackwear installed and up and running, uh, kind of new in the back
of my mind, uh, you know, even though it's been a few years, uh, since I've been on slackwear,
what I needed to do to, to be up and running, and there is actually on the slackwear docs page,
docs.slackwear.com slash slackwear beginners underscore guide, um, that walks you through some of the
post install process, I'll link to that too, but, um, whenever I looked at it, some of the stuff
seemed like it was a little out of order, um, specifically like it will cover some of the things
you need to do to get slack PKG up and running, but it goes over that before you have your network
up and running, which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me because if you don't have your network
working, uh, slack PKG isn't going to do any good. So, uh, we'll talk about that in just a minute,
um, but I just, yeah, I want to briefly go over this. I'm not going to go in super, super in-depth,
but figure, uh, I can share with you the steps that I usually follow that for install slackwear,
um, to get the system up and running so that this, you know, this post install guide that they
have in the docs may not be so daunting for you if you decide to do this. So, uh, once you get the
system installed, um, the, the guide will tell you the first thing you can do is create a user
account and yeah, I think, I think I might have did that first as well. I didn't actually log into
the account right away because there's still a lot of stuff you need to do and it's just easier to do
it as root, but I think I did go ahead and add my user account. So, um, there's two ways to do this
in slackwear. So, there's a command called ad user and there's another command called user ad.
And so, I know that it's easy to get mixed up. Ad user is essentially a interactive script that
will ask you questions about the new account and set it up for you. Kind of walks you through it
a little bit. Um, the other method is to use the user ad command, which the, just to give you an idea,
the example they have on the page is like user ad-m-g users dash capital g will floppy audio
video CD round plug div power net div LP scanner dash s slash bin slash bash slacker. So,
you can see it's a very long command, but you can just run that one command and you're done.
Ad user takes a little longer. Um, but once you've done that, you can log into the account,
you can log out as root. I don't do that right away, like I said, because there's some other
stuff you want to do. It's easier to do is root. Uh, the next thing it talks about is make slackwear
speak your language. This is not something I, I might be wrong, but I know that I know the
installers in English. And I think I cannot remember now if the installer gives you the option
to change the language when you install it. I don't remember. Um, anyway, it's not something I usually
have to deal with. So I basically skip this section, but you might want to read it. It's, uh,
I think actually in the guide, it links you over to another document about, uh, uh, localization
and slackwear. So I'm going to move on because, um, English is my native language. So,
that's not something I had to deal with. And I don't want to speak to something that I,
I really don't know about. Um, so configuring the package manager. I'm going to skip that for now
because that's what I usually do. I usually go down here to configure the network. Now,
if you go, if you're following along in the guide, the configure your network part is very
complicated and it's very in-depth. Okay. And it's probably if you're not familiar with a lot of, uh,
this kind of stuff in Linux, it's probably going to confuse you, especially if you're new to all
this stuff. Um, however, okay, I'm going to share with you a great secret of, um,
of how to get your network up and running the slackwear really, really quick. Okay. So essentially,
and there's nothing in here that's wrong in this section about configure your network,
but most people I feel are just going to want to get connected to the network and start doing
and just not think about it anymore and just start doing what they were going to do. Um, the easiest
and fastest way to do this is to as root CD into the slash Etsy slash RC dot D directory.
I believe it is. And, um, I'm not where it's at. Yeah, that's it. Um,
um, slash Etsy slash RC dot D. And then in that directory, there is either RC dot wicked,
that's WICD or RC dot network manager, all one word, all over case. Now, what you do next is going
to depend on whether or not you want to use wicked as your network manager or if you want to use
network manager as your network manager, I use network manager, but I know a lot of people
out there like WICD. So whichever one you want to use, you just CH mod plus X, one or the other,
and that will make that that executable and then that serviceable run, um, when you're whenever you
boot like wear up. Um, also, um, I'm trying to think once you, uh, once you go graphical, I'm
sorry, brains are wondering a little bit, I'm doing two things at once. Um, once you, once you go
graphical and something like, I think by default, Slackware uses KDE, but it ships with a few other
window managers. I usually just use a window manager, but, and usually it's something like
flux box, I'll be honest with you. Um, but I'll have to admit, like early on when I'm getting things
right now, getting back in the swing of things, um, KDE has made life a little bit easier
for a few things. It's a very, very, very nice desktop. If you like a full on desktop environment,
it's very pretty and it's got all the bells and whistles and it's super nice. I really like KDE,
but it's just, I'm not really a full on desktop kind of guy, usually just, I like a window manager,
because it's kind of out of the way and doesn't use a lot of resources. But, uh, whenever you go in
there, you can get your, your network manager, whether it's wikid or network manager to, uh, connect
to wireless or whatever. And then you can, uh, work on getting wikid or your, uh, slight PKG.
Um, so what slight PKG is, this is a section we skipped earlier called configure package manager.
The easiest thing to do is, uh, to, uh, go to slash, at sea slash, like PKG slash mirrors,
there's a file there, just edit it with whatever, uh, nano or VIM, if you're a VIM guy or gal.
Uh, or whatever, but, uh, you do have to edit it as readable leave and then just, uh, you can look for a
local mirror in that list, uh, and uncomment it or you can do, there's a URL at the top
that is an HTTP URL and it, uh, it'll have a warning above it about not using the FTP, uh,
URL, uh, but that HTTP URL is redirect URL and it will try to figure out the, uh,
the closest mirror to where you're at and use it. Um,
once you uncomment it out and then save that file, you'll want to run slight PKG update GPG
and then slight PKG update. And once that's done, uh, whenever you actually use slight PKG,
generally the order, it's, it's posted in the, uh, in this document, uh, it lists the, uh,
that order to run them slight PKG update and then slight PKG install new and then slight PKG
upgrade all. Uh, there's also slight PKG clean system, but you don't really need to do that in this
removing from like one version of Slackware to another. Um, but, uh, slight PKG for those of you
who don't know or don't use Slackware is not designed as a, the type of package manager you're
probably thinking, you're not going to install new software with it. All it does is really
update the packages that Slackware ships with. So if there's been updates to some of those packages,
SlackPKG, I'm sorry, SlackPKG will pull those down and install those, uh, but that's really
it. Uh, you can sign up. There are a couple of mailing lists, uh, that they will send out, uh,
um, whenever there's like security updates or patches or whatever kind of let you know,
you might want to run slight PKG because there's been some changes and, um, not that big of a deal,
it's not that hard. Uh, once you're at this point, you're, you're almost, you're almost
in the home stretch. So the next thing you want to do probably, this is a step that a lot of people
tend to skip over because it's switching to a generic kernel and there's probably as many arguments
for as against, um, if you're on modern hardware, the really the argument is it's not,
if you have gigs and gigs of RAM, if you're on like a, you just bought a new laptop and it's got
32 gigs of RAM, you're probably not going to notice the few megabytes that you save by switching
to a generic kernel from the, I think it's huge.s is the default kernel. Um, but for me, I,
I'm a fan of efficiency, um, which is kind of silly sometimes when you, in the Slackware world,
since you're installing a whole bunch of software out of the box, but that's okay. Uh, it's also kind
of tradition too. It's not, it's part of the Slackware thing you, you, you get off of the, uh,
huge kernel and then switch to just the regular generic kernel. Um, and I do that and it's not
terribly hard to do. Uh, basically there is a script and slash user slash share slash mk
i net rd called mk i net rd underscore command underscore generator dot sh and you run that script
and it will barf out a command for you to run. It basically will look at the system. It's like,
okay, this is command you need to run to generate a new, uh, ram drive, essentially. It's an
i net rd dot gz image. And then, um, once you've run that, you just need to, um,
ho and by the way, you need to run that as root and then, um, you'll need to go and edit your
lilo dot comp file and slash Etsy. Um, and there's, uh, the examples for how to do this are actually
in that document too, but it's, there's just a, a line that you have to change to the new, um,
i net rd and point it to the, uh, the, uh, the root, like slash dev slash sda one or whatever
the re partition. And then, um, where the image and stuff is. And then, uh, after you save that, you
have to run lilo dash v to make the changes permanent. And then you can boot to the generic
kernel. Um, what you'll want to do is make sure you don't erase the lines for the, the fault
kernel until you have booted into the generic kernel and make sure that it works and that
everything works the way you expect it. Because if something gets borked up, you can go back to
the huge dot s kernel and figure out what went wrong without having to like reinstall everything.
Um, so some of the other stuff, um, I'm not going to really cover here because it talks about
configuring x if it needs to be most of time. Actually, you know, I've never, I haven't had x
misfire like that in a long, long time. I think the last time I had issues with getting x configured
on slackware was a long, long time ago when, uh, I had an old pinning for system with an
Nvidia graphics card. And I had to, uh, but what was great was it was easy to thing to fix. Like,
it was just, uh, I just pulled down with w get the, the Nvidia driver installer back then was
like, uh, just a package that you would just run from the command line. And for whatever reason,
this was horribly just a horrible pain in the ass to do on devian, but on slackware, it was nothing
like there was, um, because slackware is configured by default. Um, those next thing was going to talk
about is it defaults just boots up in the command line. So if you want it to boot up to a graphical
log in, you have to set that up. And that's covered in this document as well, but it's not something
that I usually do. Essentially, all it is is sitting the default run level. Um, from, I think it's,
I've taught my head and it's three to four. Uh, but, and that sets it to do the graphical
boot and that'll start, uh, I don't even know what display manager slackware ships with them
assume it's KDM because they use KDE, but I don't know to be honest. Um, but that's it. I mean,
once you, once you've added your user, you get your network up and running and you're, uh,
and you get slack PKG configured and you get your, um, you switch to the generic kernel. Then, uh,
you can, you can get going. Uh, one other little quick thing I will say about the, the whole
configuring x section, uh, there is a quick little command, uh, for those of you, uh, just starting
out, it might make things a little easier, uh, that you can run if you're logged in as your regular
user and not root, um, I usually leave the default, um, set for root to KDE so that if you log in as
root and then type start X, it'll just boot into what do they call that X defaults or whatever.
No, I don't think right. I can't, I don't know. I'm not feeling well. Um,
but whatever, if root and you type start X and KDE comes up, um, but from my regular user,
I'll, I'll set it to whatever just window manager usually flux box, but there's a little command
that you can type to make this easier for you. It's, um, it's xwm config all one word and it'll
let you just select from the installed window managers, which one you want to be the default for
your user so you don't have to edit anything. And I say that because I know there's going to be people
new to slackware that doesn't like manually editing everything. Um, and that might make your life a
little bit easier. Um, but yeah, that's, that's basically it. Um, once you get that accomplished,
you can log into your system and have fun. Um, start installing software, which is going to take
you a while because it's, uh, you're going to be building that stuff from source. All right,
let's slackware away. But, uh, I will digress. Uh, yeah, it's, this has been Mirror Shades and
you guys have fun and I'll see you on the next one.
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