Friday, January 29, 2010

Back with slackk13 ;)

I recently installed the Slackware 13 (as my Slackware 12.2 failed to resist my experiments :) ).Though the installation went easy but the successful run of the Slackware 13 was not easy.When the installation was complete first problem I encountered was startx showed me my XFCE screen & then hangs.The reason was that intel 82865 chipset does not work with standard Slackware 13.0 .So everyone out there with Intel 8 series graphics dont leave Slackware 13 cause you can’t run X within it.You just need to follow the post instructions(OR better update your system with current).

The solution is to compile a stable kernel.I used 2.6.32-rc5 and 2.6.32 and zen kernel patches(version mentioned in the post).
The kernel 2.6.32-rc5 showed errors regarding kthread.c.it had element ‘rt’ undefined in method kthread_bind() did a lot of reverse engineering and came to the conclusion that kernel 2.6.32.rc5 is buggy & then used a stable kernel 2.6.32 which ran successfully.
After all done I started X using startx I get Qt errors gooogling gave me reasons about that too.I found Qt too needs to be upgraded to Qt-4.5.
The best solution being the upgrade-all packages:

do slackpkg update
slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade-all
slackpkg clean-system
check and make sure that kernel 2.6.32-5-smp is installed along with kernel firmware kernel modules kernel headers and kernel sourc

Have fun! :^) I hope you find Slackware to be useful.
Saurabh Nigam