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xorg.conf -Day 33© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I installed Mandrake 10.1 on my test box. Slackware’s lack of hardware detection utilities proved too frustrating. I was uncomfortable with my X setup on that box. I intend to remain with Slackware because of the underlying philosophy of not getting in my face, but I need some tools to initially help me configure my systems. Once configured properly I can dispense with other distros. The first thing I noticed about the Mandrake installation is the graphical process. No surprise. I won’t continue the debate about graphical, ncurses, or text based installations. I will say only that for people migrating, if GNU/Linux is ever to “dominate the world,” that the choice should be obvious for which mechanism to use. The typical computer user expects a graphical interface. The Slackware distro has much to offer people, including newbies, but without a modern installation and helpful hardware configuration tools, Slackware likely will remain a niche product. Perhaps that is what the Slackware developer desires. However, like every graphical installation environment I’ve encountered, as well as stand-alone graphical programs that run independent of operating systems such as partition editors, the default mouse interface is always for right-handed users. This is strange and unnecessary. In such environments, there are no context sensitive pop-up menus. Therefore, either mouse button should work when selecting program options. Nope, left-handed mouse users must either reverse their brain or hands to use the mouse. Nonsense! I also noticed the Mandrake installer uses GTK, meaning the Cancel and OK button are opposite to where most people are accustomed. Another reason I dislike GTK. I decided to install everything in one partition. I was not going to allow the Mandrake installation to contaminate my existing elaborate partition scheme, even on a test box. I used cfdisk to create a large 6 GB partition. I got momentarily confused when I was presented with the Mandrake partition and mount section of the installation. None of the options made grammatical sense to me for what I wanted to do. That’s a problem with us technical writers—we tend to read literally! Additionally, Mandrake had sniffed out my partition scheme from my existing Slackware fstab and wanted to install everything according to that map. Mandrake totally ignored my new empty partition. I finally figured out that all I had to do was manually delete each entry of the proposed partition scheme and enter “/” for only the new partition. However, once again I had the same CD problems experienced earlier. I kept receiving error messages. I think the drive is faulty, but that is the only one I have right now, unless I want to swap drives from my first box. Nonetheless, although the Mandrake installation provides Previous buttons throughout most of the process, I saw no way to gracefully terminate this section of the Mandrake procedure. So I pressed the reset button and repeated the installation. The installation proceeded past the previous point of error. I accepted the default program installation, which thankfully for me, did not include GNOME or other window managers. I just wanted the basic KDE installation so later I could have access to the Mandrake tools for configuring X and my video card. Like previously, I still had problems with installing one file. Odd behavior. The rest of the installation was routine. However, because Slackware does not provide automatic support for a wheel mouse, I did enjoy the Mandrake utility. The utility provides a nice graphical interface to verify buttons and wheel operation. Nice (hint). Since this stuff is open source and free software, perhaps the Slackware developer could migrate this section of code. The video section automatically selected the Voodoo Banshee (generic) X server. I accepted that selection. I also selected Xorg 6.7.0 with 3D hardware acceleration. For the CRT monitor I accepted the automatic selection of 1024 x 768 @ 70 Hz. Although in a previous section I instructed the installation to ignore installing a bootloader, in the final section I noticed the configuration was nonetheless set for the LILO bootloader. That angered me. I hate any installer that tries to outguess how I want to boot on my computer. I changed the configuration to GRUB because I found no “none” option. I only could hope that if Mandrake installed GRUB that the version would be the same as I had already installed from Slackware. I noticed that Mandrake defaulted to running a bunch of unnecessary services. Mandrake also installs an X font server. To me, this is a waste of resources on a stand-alone box, but the Mandrake installation description declares that this service is necessary for X to run. Not true. The service is only necessary to run X on a Mandrake system. I do not use a font server in my Slackware installations. I rebooted and sure enough, Mandrake had overwritten my MBR. At least the GRUB version was the same. GRUB now pointed to the /boot directory contained within the Mandrake partition. While within Mandrake I changed the mouse for left-handed use. From within Mandrake I manually mounted my separate /boot partition and edited that GRUB menu.lst to include booting into Mandrake. After I restored my MBR I would not have to edit GRUB. From that stand-alone /boot partition version of menu.lst I copied the Slackware menu items to the Mandrake GRUB menu.lst. That way I would not have to use the Slackware CD or a boot floppy to boot into Slackware. Once booted back into Slackware I then would reinstall GRUB from there so the MBR pointed to my separate /boot partition. I would have to boot using the Mandrake GRUB only once. The plan worked fine. I rebooted (still using the Mandrake copy of GRUB of course), but selected Slackware. From within Slackware I then performed a grub-install /dev/hda to restore the MBR. Reboot back to Mandrake. Then I ran glxgears. After all, my primary reason for installing another distro was to see if I could better tune my AGP video card and X environment. In my Slackware configuration I achieved only 93 frames per second (fps). In Mandrake 10.1 I averaged 720 fps. Hard-core gamers will snicker at this number, but I welcomed an 8-fold increase for my old hardware. This is a test box only. I will investigate the Mandrake configuration and hope I can migrate those changes to Slackware. Of course, the Mandrake people do not install a GUI login option for root, but I am in no mood for such nonsense on an isolated test box. I edited the KDE kdmrc file to allow a graphical login as root. Spare me the religious priesthood incantations about logging in as root or logging in as root in X. I don’t share your beliefs or your concerns. Mandrake did perform a hardware shutdown, something I don’t know yet how to configure in Slackware. I will try to migrate that process as well. In all, installing Mandrake as a temporary measure likely will pay for my time. I will make appropriate changes to Slackware and migrate those changes to my primary box as well. One nice thing now about having a second box for testing is I need not worry about destroying my primary box. I hope to install WINE or Crossover Office and continue using my primary box in a multi-boot manner while sharing as many files as possible between my two operating systems. Besides, my nice, shiny, new LCD monitor is connected to my primary box and the K6-III+ is actually slightly faster than the Pentium II Celeron. The AGP card is faster than my first generation 3D card so I suppose the comparison is a wash. Nonetheless, the K6-III+ box does seem snappier. However, now I can practice compiling on the second box without tying up my primary box. That is well worth the effort getting the second box running. Finis. |
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