VL N00b Alert!

[adamlau]

New to VL, but not necessarily new to Linux. Took a few advanced UNIX admin courses at UCLA (SunOS 5 then), played with FreeBSD from 4.x to 6.x, now on Xubuntu for most of my primary boxes. Former Windows XP and current Mac OS X user as well.  Outside of SLAX (my primary USB rescue media), I have virtually no experience with a Slackware distro. My first foray into the VL world was with RC1, but was initially turned off by the buggy installer. Installed 5.9, but it failed to auto configure network settings. Besides, I prefer the desktop defaults of RC1 and the fact that it auto configured my network device. Hoping you guys can help me get VL running the way I want and I'll take it from there.

[kidd]

Hi adamlau and welcome to VL.

The graphical installer is pretty new, and has some rough edges to polish.  If it didn't work for you, you can install it using old TUI installer (I suppose there's an option when booting the install media).  Reporting GUI installer bugs would be a good way to help devs improve it faster (there's a forum thread for it).

Btw, if you have experience with other linux/unices , vl shouldn't give you many headaches (at least, I hope so  )

Happy 2009 !
 
Edit: Writting 'happy 2009' made me recall 10 years ago when I was infected (well, cyber-infected) by Happy '99 worm.  It's been 10 years since then! (and I was a happy 15-year-old windows user by then)

[adamlau]

Thanks, kidd. Took about eight hours (moving configs over, compiling apps) for me to make the transition over from Xubuntu. Gripes include LILO, ntp in extras and modprobe fuse, of which I will ask a question of in another post. VL XFCE is much snappier and way faster (program startup, file browsing) on a 7200 rpm Seagate than a heavily tweaked Xubuntu XFCE on a 10K VelociRaptor. Except for when compiling programs where the faster hard drive zips along without a hitch. VL XFCE 7200 feels like right about where Ubuntu LXDE on a first gen 10K Raptor is at. Nice!

[tomh38]

Welcome to VL, adamlau!

With all of your experience, I'm sure you'll have a lot to offer the community.

I like it here.  I hope you will also.

Tom

[caitlyn]

First, welcome!

A lot of distros shifted back to lilo because grub didn't (and I believe still does not) support large inodes on ext3 filesystems and it doesn't support ext4 at all.  grub2 is supposed to fix that.  In the meanwhile lilo is still the safest choice. 

ntp being in extra instead of installed by default reflects the fact that this is a desktop-oriented distro.  I don't see why pulling something out of extra is an issue in any case.

You don't need to modprobe fuse manually.  If you go into the Services section of vasm or vasmCC you can just check the box next to fuse and it will be started immediately and at all future boots.  VL has a philosophy of starting only what's absolutely needed rather than starting everything and the kitchen sink as (X)Ubuntu does.  That's better in terms of both security and speed.  Of course, if you need something not started by default you have to turn it on

So... in short your gripes are about decisions that were made consciously by the developers, not about bugs.  I understand that you might have made different decisions and might have had a different design philosophy.  The VL developers have an excellent history of listening to community input.  Having said that I don't think any of the things you listed are likely to change.  I certainly wouldn't want them to.

In any case, welcome to VL.  I think you'll be hard pressed to find a friendlier or more helpful community.