Have been using slackware 13 x64 for a while, about 2 months, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a review for the same.
The system I am running the *nix on is a laptop powered by a
dual core amd turion [RM 70, 2 Ghz], with
3 gigs of ddr2 memory,
250 gigs of seagate momentus sata2,
nvidia 9100 m and 9600 m gs,
broadcom gigabit ethernet adaptor BCM5764M
atheros AR928X wireless adaptor
nvidia realtek HDA audio ALC888
acer crystal eye webcam
LG usb 2.0 dvdram
synaptics touchpad
the model num of the lap : acer 7530 G
The install was made using the official dvd iso image downloaded using the torrents. Burnt the image to a dvd rw, and rebooted the machine. I had a previous installation of linux, so partitioning was not a headache, anyways, here is a glimpse of my partition table:
Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3b813b80
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1305 10482381 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda2 * 1306 6528 41943040 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 6529 11748 41929650 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 11749 30402 149825536 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
Yes, partition 4 has been a pain and I think it is possibly since it is an extended windows partition. When the partitions were created at first on this hdd, I did not know whether it was possible to have more than 4 primary partitions, and hence the things have been created as shown. Skipping my misery, lets move on to the next step, as you can guess, slackware got installed on sda2 with sda1 for swap.
Went in for a full install, it was a breeze. Upon reboot, slack successfully discovered all devices, well almost all, more on it ahead…
For first, the drivers for the nvidia adaptor did not load, the open source version “nv” is not good enough for compositing, and since this version of slackware has compositing enabled by default, there was just no way I could live with the nv or vesa drivers. Going to the kde control panel and disabling the desktop effects did not help either. Neither running xfce or fluxbox help. Everything was so damn sluggish. So I went over to the nvidia website, no not the one you get when you google, fish I hate google now, it always give you what it wants and not what you want, no matter how specific and precise you are. I hit the nvidia ftp site directly, ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/ and downloaded the latest drivers, 185.19 when I downloaded them, and as I write this review I am downloading 190.36. Further on, I also went ahead and recompiled the kernel and stripped down things I did not need, added support for the inbuilt memory card reader, changed the kernel preemption mode to make it more desktop oriented. After reinstalling the kernel (to know more about compiling custom kernel, visit kernel.org, or read the help downloaded with kernels, if you have the source installed, goto /usr/src/linux, and read the readme), to make it more elaborate, here it is :
#cd /usr/src/linux
#make menuconfig
configure the stuff as you like, enable file system support as built in for you root fiesystem, rest all can be in form of modules, except if you have a system booting up and getting a hostname and id over the network in which case you need to enable the ethernet driver as built into the kernel.
#make
builds the kernel
#make bzImage
creates the image, copy over image to /boot
#make modules; make modules_install
creates modules and installs them
Once I rebooted over and installed the nvidia drivers, I headed straight for KDE 4.2.4 and I was so surprised. I was expecting the thing to be sluggish as I had heard so many reviews saying that KDE 4 was slow no matter how much resource you throw at it. I should say that well I think KDE 4 is more resource hungry as compared to KDE3 or GNOME, but that statement is simply exaggerated by one too many. KDE4 is beautiful and in my opinion it beats vista and windows 7 right in the face. Here are two screen shots:
For a desktop user, all that is needed is in there, Firefox 3.5 for browsing the internet. Pity that slack does not have the x64 version of adobe flash pre installed, but you can always download that and install it. What you get is the libflashplayer.so file and you copy it over to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins, and if you are running firefox, when you copied over the file, just restart firefox and its done. Flash 10 is not something that is in synergy with linux. It is not well polished and is hungry. Every time I ran a flash video, my lap fans went awry.
More to be posted…
