Slackware Configuration
- Changing things that were configured during the installation:
- Run pkgtool.
- Choose Setup - near the bottom of the list.
- Select what you want to change - the list there is what was configured during the install - like services, mouse, X window manager, lilo, make a boot floppy, network settings, fonts. It should look familiar.
- Add a user - Slackware doesn’t give you that option during the install like many of the other flavors of Linux.
- Make a directory for the user - I’m not sure if I did something wrong, but I had to do this:
mkdir /home/ajlewis2
chown ajlewis2 /home/ajlewis2
- Run useradd (see man useradd if you need to use options like -u for a particular UID)
- Give the user a password: passwd ajlewis2
- Note: adduser will setup all those default user settings, such as, their name, UID, group, home directory, shell, expiration date, and information.
Set up and use dialup. I did this with a useless winmodem, but here is the process. I know it works, because I put an external modem on the machine and got online and surfed. I will assume that you actually did select the device during the installation - the part where it asks where your modem is:
- Run: pppsetup - put in the information - very easy I think.
- Run: ppp-go - it should dial up. ppp-off turns it off.
Configure X Window System
- Slackware sets X up as VESA; so mine worked right out of the box. Nice surprise there. But it works better after it is configured with the proper driver. I did this on two systems - Trident and NVidia - both work fine.
- First I backed up /etc/X11/XF86Config just in case this didn’t work.
- Run: xf86config - choose mouse, horizontal and vertical for monitor, card from card database. I selected the color depth and resolutions. I told it to go ahead and write XF86Config. I did startx and there was the Gnome Desktop.
- For fun, I closed X and ran ‘xwmconfig". Cool. I picked xinitrc.kde. Then I ran startx again and there was KDE. Nice.
Network Module - a little glitch
- For some reason eepro100 had been chosen for my network card. That wasn’t working. My card is e100. How to change modules?
- lsmod - yep eepro100 is there. Ok, remove it: rmmod eepro100.
- modprobe e100. Then lsmod - now e100 is there. How to make it permanent? I decided to add alias eth0 e100 to /etc/modules.conf:
- Restart the network - /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart
/etc/rc.d - where the startup scripts are.
- As mentioned before, rc.inet1 is the script for starting Ethernet. There are other scripts like rc.samba, rc.sendmail and the scripts for the various runlevels.
- Some scripts are executable and some are not - the exectuable ones are the ones you chose during the install under services. So if you want one to exectute during boot, you just do: chmod +x rc.whatever-it-is. After you do that, you can just start it up with ./rc.whatever-it-is start
Check for and install security updates
- See http://www.slackware.com/security for the list of advisories. I subscribed to the mail list for this.
- I got slapt-get and ran it for each of these advisories down to where they no longer mentioned 9.1. Instead you could download each of them and run upgradepkg <package-name>
Firewall - create rc.firewall, place in /etc/rc.d and make it executable. It will be launched from rc.inet2.
- Printer - My printer is HP !LaserJet 4L, an older and compatible printer for Linux. In the handy email from Patrick Volkerding sitting in the root Inbox, he gives his preferred way for configuring a printer. See [Printer Configuration for lpr using Apsfilter].
See Screenshots for a look at what pkgtool offers.
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tutorials/during/distros/slackware/slackware_configuration.txt · Last modified: 2008/07/20 21:08
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