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Left-Handed Mice — Day 14© Copyright Darrell Anderson. Okay, I ended my last journal entry obviously discouraged and frustrated. Time for a change in attitude! The next day I tried again to install Slackware, this time paying particular attention to my overzealous fingers. I again experienced no issues with my existing GNU/Linux partition scheme. However, while the installation routine was updating the GNOME documentation database, I noticed a segmentation fault error. I have no idea what that was all about. I also do not understand why the swap partition must be forcibly formatted. Why not be consistent as with the other partitions and allow the choice of formatting? After all, if the installation routine finds an already existing swap partition, and loads of other ext3 partitions, then a reasonable presumption is the swap partition is already formatted. Additionally, I dislike the default choice of formatting each partition. This is dangerous and gut-wrenching for people who already use a multiple partition scheme. I believe the best default selection should be the safest, which is no formatting at all. I finally was able to boot Slackware, but I received a boot error message that the root file system was not mounted read-only for file checking. This concept was foreign to me having come primarily from the Mandrake way of doing things. Of course, the Slackware developer does not support GRUB, which is the bootloader I use and therefore I had to manually create my boot entries for Slackware. Unknown to me, apparently I needed to add an “ro” parameter in the kernel boot line. Initially I had no idea why because this parameter is not needed for my Mandrake 9.2 boot. Eventually I discovered the difference is Slackware does not use a ram disk image to boot. With a ram disk image the root partion is not mounted until after performing a file system check. Without a ram disk image, mounting the root partition read-only allows file system checking. Regardless, I added the “ro” switch and the error message disappeared. Well, this all makes sense — in hindsight. Still, GRUB has been around a long time. I think the Slackware developer should support GRUB. Or at least provide some text files about hand-configuring Slackware with GRUB. I think the developer also could provide additional textual information to understand booting distinctions because many people who try Slackware are coming from an environment where initrds are common. Perhaps the information is there deep within a text file somewhere and I missed those sections. Of course, Slackware caters to command line advocates and when I finally booted into Slackware I was thrown into a command line login. No big deal for me, but I can imagine the effect on newbies. I typed the startx command. A KDE “first-time” configuration wizard appeared. Of course, the wizard never asked me if I wanted a left-handed mouse (hint to KDE devlopers), so off into the control center I went. The next thing I noticed was my scroll wheel not working. I have run into this problem before with other distros. When I was selecting the mouse in the Slackware installation script, I assumed an IMPS/2 mouse would be automatically configured with a scroll wheel. Oops — wrong assumption! I’m curious as to why so many GNU/Linux developers have difficulty with scroll wheels. Odd. A nice user-friendly Slackware solution is to provide an obvious selection option called Two-button mouse with scroll wheel. Problem avoided and solved. Because I am well acquainted with having to always hand-configure my mouse, my solution was to edit xorg.conf. With most scroll wheel mice X considers the scroll wheel as three buttons — one as a true button and one “button” for each direction: Identifier "Mouse1"Driver "mouse" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2" Option "Buttons" "5" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" Option "Resolution" "300" I also noticed that the KDE control center would not allow me to change the screen resolution to anything higher than 1024 x 768. I wanted a 1280 x 1024 screen because that is the native resolution for my new 17 inch LCD monitor. Aargh! Not yet being familiar in the new Slackware environment, I booted back into Mandrake and began the manual copy-and-paste process for updating the xorg.conf file. I already had configured Mandrake 9.2 for my new monitor and Mandrake provided some GUI tools to help. I think this kind of thing will discourage many people wanting to migrate to GNU/Linux. After rebooting into Slackware I had my mouse scroll wheel and a 1280 x 1024 screen resolution. I then mucked around with the KDE control panel to figure out how to stop that irritating bouncing mouse pointer. What in the world was the programmer thinking who came up with that idea? Oh yeah, as is typical in GNU/Linux, no sound and when I booted I received the infamous KDE aRts error message. Additionally, within Slackware, at this point I don’t know how to change the graphical boot login manager to the KDE manager. I know where I’ll be spending my time this evening — the internet, looking for information that in my opinion I never should have to look for. I started this journal entry with a different attitude, but I end once again frustrated. Sigh! I’ve been tinkering with GNU/Linux for the past two years, and unlike the opinion of experienced GNU/Linux people, one reason I never felt motivated to migrate was the continual twiddling one must do to get a system running as expected. I am going to continue my migration, but I am wondering if the minimal distro is the way to go. 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