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Sound—Day 17© Copyright Darrell Anderson. My journey with Slackware continues. I’m thinking I might stick with Slackware. I like the underlying philosophy despite a lack of intuitive configuration tools. This a classic proverbial double-edged sword. I like the simplicity but I also know that means a dramatic increase in time investment to customize the environment. That means lots of frustration because of a lack of knowledge. I finally enabled sound on my multi-boot system. After perusing and eventually performing a text string search in the Slackware documents on CD, I could not find any information about configuring sound. Perhaps I missed that information. Considering how much contention sound cards provide many people, I thought this lack of information strange. There should be a section in the Slackware How-To titled Configuring Sound. After browsing an online discussion forum I discovered a simple three-step process for configuring sound in Slackware:
This procedure worked the first time I tried. I urge the Slackware maintainer to merge this information into the general How-To. This entire procedure must be run from the command line. The typical home and small business user once again will stick with Windows or Macs. Perhaps a clever KDE developer can create a nice front-end to this process (hint)? I booted into KDE and heard all of the preconfigured system sounds. I want to disable some of the event sounds—there are too many, but I prefer audio feedback for certain events. I am not into playing MP3s or audio CDs on my computer, but I do like basic event sounds. Nonetheless, that battle is done. Still, I have to wonder how much the Microsoft and Apple people snicker when they see this nonsense. They might be proprietary and closed source, but they have learned a thing or two about usability. Because I am multi-booting and have so many partitions, I configured my fstab for non-automatic mounting all of my hard drive partitions. Then I created some simple bash scripts so I can manually mount non-Slackware partitions instead of mounting every partition at boot-up. I placed those scripts on my desktop. I did this for my Mandrake 9.2 system as well. From both my Mandrake and Slackware systems I can access any partition on my hard drive quickly and easily. I like this approach because having more than one system allows me to repair problems in other systems should I experience fat finger syndrome while modifying anything. Sure, the live CD is nice and portable, but short of a hardware failure, having more than one system installed directly on the hard drive is faster and more convenient. I want my white mouse pointer back. Sure, I can live with a black pointer, but I want white—my personal preference. In KDE 3.3.1 there is a white mouse pointer option, but I do not want any underlying shadows. Distracting. In KDE 3.1.3 all I had to do was enable one check box and I was done. I don’t care to dabble with the overhead of themes. I want a simple white mouse pointer. Strangely, however, a few days later, somehow I ended up with a white mouse pointer. Out of curiosity, I tried to restore the black cursor and I cannot. Talk about confusing! Finis. |
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