I installed Slackware 10.1 on elrohir<\/tt> over the last week. As I said before, it was mostly a normal ride, and Patrick Volkerding is to be commended for making such an excellent distro. However, I ran into two problems.<\/p>\n
1. First I will tell you about the most annoying issues. For annoyances only, this got me some grey hairs and gnawing of teeth! When I first booted into Slackware, I realized that sound was no longer working. When I tried to set my mixer parameters with alsamixer<\/tt>, all I got was the message “no mixer params found”. What could I do?<\/p>\n
Booting into XFCe4 gave me a hint: XFCe4’s mixer allowed for selecting among multiple sound cards. Sound card 0 was devoid of all mixer elements, but lo! Sound Card 1 was there, with all my old mixer elements. Thus, it was a matter of somewhat associating the main sound port with sound card 1, right? Not precisely… Sound Card 0 was identified as snd-via82xx-modem and my main card was identified as just snd-via82xx.<\/p>\n
I was able to get sound working by making \/dev\/dsp a symlink to \/dev\/dsp1. KDE, however, gave me some trouble. aRts (the KDE sound server) kept crashing until I awkardly had to force directing sound to \/dev\/dsp1 using OSS (the old, legacy Linux system as opposed to the new, state-of-the-art ALSA system now in use) as the underlying sound system.<\/p>\n
I was uncomfortable. Even with sound working, aRts would crash randomly; the mixer did not work, and definitely the situation was not to my liking. I tried everything I knew: I tampered with the \/dev directory, used the alsaconf<\/tt> utility (which was not helpful here), and countless other hacks. But then I went into the #slackware channel of the irc.oftc.net<\/a> network. I shared my problem in the channel, and soon one of the regulars, ka24<\/tt>, suggested I use lsmod and then to add the suspect modules to \/etc\/hotplug\/blacklist. I did so, and after a reboot, that did the trick. Sounds now works like a German toaster again!<\/p>\n 2. This other was much less annoying, but it worried me; and the problem was not exclusive with Slackware 10.1, but manifested itself with 10.0 as well, and the problem boy this time was OpenOffice.org.<\/p>\n Slackware does not provide OpenOffice.org packages. That’s generally fine; the vanilla installer available at the OpenOffice.org website<\/a> is good enough.The version I used in Slackware 10.0 was 1.1.2. This version gave me no installation problems. However, when I tried to upgrade either to 1.1.3 or (later) to 1.1.4, the farthest I could go in the install was to see the initial progress meter, and then the installer would always exit quietly. Thus, I was stuck with an OpenOffice.org version with known issues for use in my job; and OpenOffice.org is critical for it.<\/p>\n