Back into Slackware again
Posted on August 2, 2004
First off, it’s pretty hot out there. Of course it doesn’t help that I was wearing a dark grey long sleeve shirt outside, but I’m expected to dress nice for work.
I got Slackware 10.0 up and running on my computer, and I got the network going, so I must be doing okay. I got it to recognize my scroll mouse and I downloaded the current nVidia driver, but I haven’t edited the xorg.conf file except for the part about the mouse. I’ll have to edit it to recognize my JP106 Japanese keyboard and to get it to use the nVidia driver so I can run Blender, which needs GLX/OpenGL to run. I’m slowly moving stuff from the hdb to hda. When I have most of the essential stuff on hda, I will probably fdisk (format) hdb and just use it to hold Blender and/or music files.
I keep toying with the idea of getting new stuff for my PC, but I want more stuff than I can afford. I will probably buy things one or two at a time. What I want/need is a DVD-RW, a flash media card reader (with USB), a new processor, more memory, speakers, a better graphics card, etc. I was looking at graphics cards today and noticed one of them required a hard drive power cable!!! That must do some serious computing if it requires more power than what it gets through the motherboard.
Shoulda known better
Posted on August 1, 2004
I should have known better. I was fooling around in Blender 2.33 for a little bit while slackupdate was installing the files. Not often, but occassionally, Blender 2.33 will freeze up while doing a render on my machine. I thought it was only on complex models, but I guess it happens on simple models too, because that’s what happended last night. When that happens, any interaction with the machine is impossible. I can’t ALT-TAB, or change desktops (it’s a Unix thing), or even CTRL-ALT-ESC (*nix version of CTRL-ALT-DEL). I even tried to CTRL-ALT-BKSP, which is a major *nix key command, but to no avail. So I put on a movie, hoping it would clear up.
After the movie (American Grafitti), the lights on my hub were still going full speed, but the Blender issue was still there. I pondered what to do and ended up hitting the rest button on my PC. In hindsight, it was probably not the best idea. The computer rebooted, and went to LILO, and I found I couldn’t get into Slackware (no surprise), but I couldn’t get into Mandrake either. I have (had) Slackware on a 40MB hard drive (hdb) and Mandrake on a 120MB drive (hda). I don’t really use Mandrake all that much, but I do use the hard drive space (mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda) and voila I have a ton of space. It was handy having Mandrake in case something happened. Since I couldn’t get into Mandrake, I had to try and reinstall either Mandrake or Slackware. I mainly use Slackware on the hdb drive, so at first I decided to try and install Slackware over Mandrake, but that didn’t work due to a corrupt CD-R. So I ended up reinstalling Mandrake on hda.
Mandrake is quite nice, but it is more of a beginner’s Linux. It doesn’t offer the configuration choices I want and expect, where Slackware does. Mandrake does a good job of setting up the network and recognizing my video hardware, but doesn’t recognize my Japanese 106 key keyboard. Anyway, I got Mandrake setup and proceeded to download Slackware 10.0 ISOs, which I just finished burning and will install shortly.
If I don’t come back in three days, send a search party ;-)
