Slackware 13 is ready

Slackware, the first distribution I have been using since 1995 , one of the oldest distributions, has released version 13. One of the most important to note is that this is the first version that comes with 64-bit port. Slackware Linux known as a stable and rock-solid distribution has its unique fans even there are many modern distributions suitable for beginners and experts.

More details about the release can be found in the release notes and in the changes and hints and packages text files.

Compiz on Slackware

I installed Slackware 12.0 on an old laptop (P3 , 256 MB RAM). This laptop has no CDROM and No Floppy drive. I installed it using PXEBOOT install method introduced in Slackware 12.0. It means, I have to boot from network card to get Slackware's installer running (Disk 1). Installing packages can be done using NFS. I'll story about that next time. :-)

The laptop's vga is i830M. I can use whether i810 or intel for the driver of xorg. To run compiz was a bit tricky for this chipset. After googling for awhile, I managed to get it running good. Your mileage may vary though.

Command to run compiz :
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=true compiz --replace ccp && emerald &

Note : emerald is the window decorator I have chosen to run. There are other window decorators but emerald is one of the famous.

Slackware Linux

Dear readers,

It's obvious thing to say that I really like Slackware Linux. Why? that's because of its stablity and simplicity. You know KISS? Keep It Simple Stupid!. You want to know Linux, learn Slackware. You want to get headache, you learn Slackware. :D . But once you master it, nothing beats it. For rock-solid stability of Linux, I gotta switch to Slackware. Mandrake could not fit the requirement. It has something to do with apic thing that got conflict with power management feature. This results in a hanging server . The solution always to hard reboot (by pressing the reset button). Don't get me wrong. Mandrake is a good distribution too but sometimes it contains unnecessary bells and whistles. For some reasons, it fails to run properly on certain machines.

To fix this problem (and after it gave me a lot of headaches and stomachache :P), I gave Slackware a go. Now after 3 days, I never notice a single hang and no slow whatsoever. This brings to happy users and the most important a happy system admin :-) . You can try access my webmail here.

Happy New Year!

A busy day for a lazy man

Today is so full of meeting from nine to 5. meeting packed day. I have a meeting with Flinders University regarding courses ShahPutra want to offered here. They have strict requirements regarding students intake, softwares and technology that we have here.

"We are very Java" - said Dr. Janet, the IT Head

The course will be offered is Bac. Of Comp. Sc And IT. I, as an system administrator should provide them with softwares required to run the program such as Java, C/C++, A web server (Apache), JDK 1.4, J2EE, Linux OS, Oracle and also MySQL. Thank god I can download the free edition of Oracle on Oracle website. That will save cost as our boss like. Students can run Oracle server on their own PCs and do their work.

Last night I read the RAID manual for the 10th times. I realized that for RAID 5, I should make RAID 1 first and booting can be done from it. I have three disks that I could make RAID 5. It is no automatic process for this as many installers do not support configuring RAID 5 on first setup.

Slackware is still my Linux distro of choice although many of my friends run some sort of modern distro like Xandros, Mandrake (now Mandriva) and Fedora. I just think that it is easy for me since i first started using Linux with it. I learned many essential things on Linux by using Slackware and also my friends told me that it is similar but not the same as BSD family OS.