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Slackware 10.0 Preliminaries—Day 15© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I’ve had some time to rest and my journey with Slackware continued. I’m using KDE 3.3.1 on aging hardware, but Slackware 10.0 is more responsive and snappier than Mandrake 9.2 with KDE 3.1.3. I always have tolerated Mandrake 9.2 only as a learning environment. My hardware is old but hardly obsolete. A 400 MHz K6-III+ CPU with 256 MB of RAM is not Charles Atlas but also not a 90 pound weakling, yet Mandrake 9.2 and KDE 3.1.3 is slow. So far I am pleased with the general improvement in speed. I also like that now in KDE the Konqueror file manager can be preloaded at boot time. Opening the file manager now is a more pleasing experience and similar to my Windows environment. Although many people bad-mouth KDE, I like the environment. I think a key is disabling the way many distro developers tend to customize KDE to their liking. I use a plain KDE environment, with little eye candy and few bells and whistles. That explains why KDE runs better on my aging hardware, but more importantly, why KDE is more eye appealing to me that what I have seen from other distros. As is well known within the Slackware community, the distro maintainer tries hard to avoid patching or tweaking packages. Thus, unlike other distros, what one sees of KDE in Slackware is the orignal KDE package from the KDE developers. Many people are surprised to see KDE in this original and pristine condition and change their opinion thereafter. KDE is not ugly. That effect is caused by distro developers. Although I am accustomed to Mandrake 9.2 and the System V initialization sequence, within the first few hours I quickly grew to appreciate the BSD-style rc.d setup used in Slackware. This seems a more straightforward approach to me, and I like that kind of simplicity. Many of the Slackware configuration files also are liberally documented with notes to help people. However, there is much that does not set well with me! Slackware provides no bells and whistles, and only a few configuration applets. Well, yeah, I knew this because Slackware is known as a minimalist distro. I was forewarned. That doesn’t mean I will avoid being frustrated. My experience as a technical writer enables me to recognize usability problems and often, almost instantaneously. Perhap my expectations are too high for what a minimalist distro should do out of the box? Please understand that I am not declaring Slackware a bad distro. Hardly! Slackware is already beginning to grow on me as my upcoming journal entries will reveal. However, there are many “little” things that could be done to improve Slackware without a lot of effort. After finally being able to boot into Slackware, I edited the inittab to boot into run level 4 (GUI) as my default. This was something I learned a long time ago, but nonetheless, finally I thought, I’m making progress today! Here is something that could improve Slackware—ask users which kind of boot sequence they want. Simple and easy. Newbies are never going to warm to command line logins or editing inittab. However, after rebooting into a graphical login, I ended up booting into GNOME instead of KDE. That puzzled me because my previous startx command from run level 3 started KDE. Additionally, I was confused because during the Slackware installation I selected KDE as my window manager. What was happening? I did some pondering and browsed around the rc.d init files. Then I discovered the rc.4 file. The GNOME display manager—GDM—is the default login manager. Aha! I commented out those lines. I rebooted thinking I should now slide straight into into KDE. I got something that looked like the bare-bones KDE login manager. So far so good because I realized I had not yet customized that tool. However, I again booted in GNOME! Aargh! Further investigation of the login manager revealed that the default window manager was GNOME. That likely got set when I mistakenly booted into GNOME the previous time. A click of the mouse and finally, after much mystery (and some screaming), I was booting directly into KDE. I see another Slackware usability problem here. The developer asked what I wanted to use as my window manager, but did not ask which display manager (login manager) I wanted to use. Because the rc.4 script defaults to the GNOME DM, the foundation is already there for confusion. I recommend improving the Slackware installation by asking users which DM they want to use and then adjust the rc.4 script accordingly. The next thing I did was time consuming and that was to configure my KDE desktop. I thought seriously of saving time by copying the configuration files from my Mandrake setup, but I was unsure if the older 3.1.3 files would contaminate my new installation. So I booted into Mandrake, scribbled notes about my desktop and setup, and then went back into Slackware. Finally I was getting things the way I wanted! Finis. |
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