Episode: 3528
Title: HPR3528: Slackware on a netbook
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3528/hpr3528.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:59:51

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3528 for Wednesday 9th of February 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Sackware on a netbook, it is posted by Archers 72 and is about 6 minutes
long and carries a clean flag. The summer is, a response show to HDR 3512.
Hello, this is Archers 72. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. In this episode is a response to
Jezro on Ald Hardware. So inspired by him and Stoltz pulled out my Acer Spire 1 and installed
Sackware on it to see if I could get a little bit of use out of it. The time of this recording,
Sackware 15 and not come out yet. So I have Colonel 4.4 installed on it and the Spire 1 is a netbook.
It's 1.6 gigahertz with only a giga-ram. But it did a decent job of starting Firefox when I had
everything installed. It does run a little warm at about 45 degrees Celsius, so I pulled
apart for that reason and also because the fan was making a bit of noise occasionally.
Which I had mistaken for the hard drive going. So I put a solid state drive in just to make sure
that that was not the problem. I pulled everything apart. The fan had only two little heat sink pads
between the CPU and the GPU and a thin piece of metal for the fan. So that is probably why it
doesn't cool that well. I didn't have any spare heat sink pads to replace it with. So I just took
the Arctic Silver that I had on hand with the helps that it would take it down by a couple of degrees.
I also oiled the fan bearings since I had it apart. The first thing that I decided to change
on the default install is to make it ignore the lid switch so that I could keep this closed and run
headless. The command is echo on greater than symbol. Slash this. Slash bus. Slash ACPI. Slash
drivers. Slash button. Slash dollar sign. Platform. Column 00. Slash power. Slash control.
My system did not recognize the command so I had to kind of guess after the slash button. Which one
it is. I just took my best guess. What was first and list after I did an LS on the button directory.
Clear screen by using control L is not in a default install of Slackware. So in .bash RC I bound
the control L to the clear command. It didn't stick between reboots so I went ahead and entered
an NF statement. It said if there is a bash.rc that it will source that file and put that in .bash
underscore profile. The other thing I did is the Laylo menu is two minutes and so I edited the
Laylo.com to take it down to five seconds. Using the timeout it's at 1200 which is there's 600
for every minute so that 1200 is two minutes and 50 puts it down to five seconds.
Next is adding a custom bash prompt. The first example I give includes the date, the username,
the domain and which directory you're in. The second one just includes username and domain.
The last thing I did was fix a problem that I was not the authorized to control networking as
regular user. So I did pseudo user mod dash capital G net dev dash a and my user.
I think I'm going to go upgrade to Slackware 15 now.
I'm not sure what I'm going to use this netbook for now but I'll be sure to include a new
episode if I do anything interesting. Thank you for listening.
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