VL6.0-Light-Final feedback.

[gamfa]

Finally got final downloaded and installed today. Great job....I kinda hate giving up RC-2 though. It has been rock solid. The only thing I need to know is how to get rid of that very irritating cursor theme. There used to be an .icons directory in the users tree and a small modification in there would get you back to standard cursors. That dir. seems to have disappeared.

[nightflier]

To change the system wide cursor theme, edit the file
/usr/share/icons/default/index.theme
un-comment the one you want to use.

To change on a per user basis, create ~/.icons/default and copy the index.theme into it.

[toothandnail]

Yes you can use light to build pkgs for any 6.0 version.

You can safely use any non-proprietary video driver to build pkgs.

I think you will have fun learning how to build packages, and will find it isn't a lot harder than what you have already done.

Great! I downloaded Light this morning and installed it on the 4-gig partition. I discovered that vpackager wasn't included, so I installed it with Gslapt. I started vpackager and tried to figure it out just from the menus, but couldn't make heads or tails of it.<g> I think I recall a detailed explanation of using vpackager on this forum and will search for it.
--GrannyGeek

If you want to learn packaging, you might be better off with sbbuilder. It generates a pretty good SlackBuild file for you. You will still need to do a bit of editing, but the scripts are usually quite usable. sbbuilder has a lot of options, so it can handle a lot of different application types. I found it easier to use than vpackager, even though it is purely cli. It also has the advantage of generating packages that are usually good enough to distribute, which is something I don't think you'll get from vpackager.

paul.

[GrannyGeek]

Thanks for the sbbuilder suggestion. I'll definitely check it out the next time I have VL Light running. I don't have time right now to do much investigating.
--GrannyGeek

[gamfa]

Went to /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme and commented out the active "inherits=" statement and got back to the "plain Jane" cursors. That used to be in the users directory and it was still there in Light B2.

Thanks

[nightflier]

i had to install with linux edd=off (what is this?)

Looks like another technology which can be helpful or not:
http://lwn.net/Articles/9042/

If there's one thing that the Open Source community is good with, it is workarounds. A lot of issues can be addressed with command line options like you did.

[Tommy599]

Interesting. Too bad it doesn't give up sooner (there's no was my BIOS has anything like that). As you said, it can be deactivated easily so there's no problem.
(mmmm assembly code, haven't seen that in a couple of semesters.... brings back some  memories  )

[aging_geek]

I'm installing on a 200MHZ K-2, 256Meg DRAM, 20G hard-drive, logitech 3-button serial mouse, matrox millenium II 4Meg video card, and a Hawking rt2500 pci wireless card.

All appeared to be going well, including recognition of the old SB16 non-pnp ISA sound card, when, at the point of going to the multi-user mode with GUI (is that run-level 6?), the screen went solid black (except for a frozen white cursor in the upper left corner) and the machine became completely unresponsive. I can't get it to switch to a text console where I could monkey with "xorg.conf". All I can do to get anywhere, as near as I can tell, is punch the hardware reset button and try booting into text mode.

During the configuration steps near the end of install, I selected the default level of video setup automation and subsequently set as default an 800x600 display with 16-bit depth. I set it to boot into the desktop GUI mode and it hung at that point after installation, during the restart.

When I do boot into single user text mode, I'll study the xorg.conf file, but I doubt I will see anything that I will recognize as wrong. I say that because this is my second attempt at an install and I did get a look at the xorg.conf the first time. It looked reasonable to me, based on what I know about the video capability of the machine.

Any thoughts?

[nightflier]

I would recommend booting to text mode and running "vxconf", then test the settings with "startx".

If it still doesn't work, open your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and specify
Driver "vesa"
in the device section.

[aging_geek]

Thanks for that hint! I was able to get things to work with the VESA version of xorg.conf and then manually tweak that file to further optimize the display and get my old serial mouse to work.

Overall, so far, I would say VL 6.0 light is the best release I have attempted to run on this ancient hardware. I can't claim performance is "snappy", but it is tolerable, while still providing the convenience of a lot of GUI based utilities.

For those who are wondering why I am wasting time with this old boat anchor, it is because I particularly like the old Soundblaster-16 ISA for capturing audio, and I can't install that board in newer machines. My theory is that it has a relatively good S/N ratio because it operates on 5 Volts rather than 3.3 or 1.8, and it uses old thick oxide transistors rather than the inherently noisy, scaled down devices in newer sound boards. Even if that's bogus, it does have some functional features that I find advantageous in my particular audio setup, that don't exist in newer boards.

Thanks again for a good compromise between "light" and "convenient". Slackware and derivatives always have been good on this old machine.

[nightflier]

I agree with you regarding the recording quality of those old sound cards. I used to have a computer set up to record a favorite radio program, just using a cable from the headphone outlet on a portable radio to the line-in jack. The on-board sound system was worthless, producing weak, scratchy audio. I also tried some PCI cards without much luck, but an old ISA SB16 worked like a charm.

Glad you got it working. 

[Tommy599]

I'm starting to customize my VL6 Light and I ran into a few problems:

I ran wbar and wbarconf  and it caused it (pcmafm?) to freeze. Nothing worked, so I pressed ctrl+alt+backspace, logged out, logged back in but only a black desktop appeared, no icons only the taskbar, that worked.  I logged in as root, everything was as normal. I reinstalled pcmanfm and everything came back to normal in the user account (with the old settings, like nothing happened....)

Where do I have to add applications so they start at startup? I tried adding them to .bashrc with exec app &
I tried that with conky and wbar, but somehow they didn't appear. They were running (i checked with ps aux) but I saw nothing on the desktop. Conky eventually appeared (don't know how and why??) on the desktop...

Should I add the apps to /etc/profile.d/vasm.sh so they start at log in? I didn't want to touch that cause it needs root. Any advice?

[nightflier]

The Pcmanfm/Wbar combination was not tested in 6.0 Light, but I do remember it causing problems in 5.9 Light. There may be some incompatibility issues there.

To auto-start programs:
- Using IceWM; add the commands to the file ~/.icewm/startup
- Using JWM; add commands to the file ~/.jwmrc, in the section between the lines <Startupcommand> and </StartupCommand>.

[Tommy599]

Thanks!

Searched around a bit about the conky thing, it seems that pcmanfm doesn't play nice with it but I found a config that works:

Code:

own_window yes
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type desktop
own_window_hints undecorate,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

EDIT: when using own_window_type desktop if I click on the desktop, conky dissapears. I replaced it with own_window_type normal and it works properly now

EDIT2: I tried starting wbar but when it appeared, conky dissapeared (LOL) so I set conky's layer to dock and now wbar and conky are running happily together. Yeey.

EDIT3: I have to start wbar like this from the startup file:

Code:

exec wbar -bpress -pos top -isize 20 -above-desk &

and it works.



p.s. Conky shows me I have 102MB of ram in use while idle. top tells me the same. In rc1 I only had around 40mb. What happened?

[nightflier]

There were only minor tweaks from RC1 to final, nothing that I can imagine causing an increase in memory usage. Did you test it under similar conditions? Normally it is at minimum right after boot, but then tends to creep upwards with use. Even if you quit an application, it appears that some memory might not get released until needed. If you watch it over a day you will see the fluctuations.