Got Rid of Windows
The most recent Edge Browser snake-install that popped up a window that had no obvious way to close was the last straw for me - I had originally bought a Thinkpad Legion Y530 to experiment with the Oculus SDK, and told myself I'd stick with Windows 10 for the mean time. Initially, I attempted to create a dual-boot, with Win 10 on one and Slackware on the other partition. Slackware 14.2's X11 version is a little behind - so I recompiled from scratch something more recent and since the laptop has an NVidia chip in it I thought it'd be easy once I had some more modern drivers in it. Oops! That was not the case at all. The Thinkpads have the Intel-With-NVidia-Overlay setup where the Intel video chip does 2d & everything else, and overlays the NVidia output on the main screen. I just couldn't get it to go into X11 mode after several hours of work, updating practically everything including the kernel & mods and most of the X11-related libraries, and installing NVidia's non-GPL driver. I gave up at the time and wiped it to go back to Windows 10 thinking I'd just tolerate it. So many obnoxious things eventually tipped my hand. I read up on using Slackware-current via some of the liveslak disk images, and the most bleeding edge one with Plasma5 as of late June this year booted into X11 effortlessly. Happily, there's a "setup2hd" script that pretty much drops a full Plasma5 version of Slackware-current on your hd. Score! After one false start using slackpkg to update everything and not realizing it defaults to the generic kernel setup instead of huge (Why would anyone not use huge kernel these days?) I had to learn some of the internals of GRUB and ELILO to fix it, and it's running swimmingly now. It recognizes 99% of all the hardware on the laptop - display switch, function keys, etc. It seems to last longer on battery now than when it was running Win10, which was unexpected.
It's not a bad thing that I've always built stuff from scratch or used slackbuilds, but slackpkg sure does make things easier at times. The next major release of Slackware, I think I'll wipe my main desktop and only use slackbuilds/slackpkg (or build slackbuild-style builds) so it's easier to manage and things like rebuilding ffmpeg to the latest version doesn't break half of my AV software.
Just Finished Reading: Peace Talks by Jim Butcher
Still Reading: Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, Every Tool Is A Hammer by Adam Savage
1 comment:
Though, in all honesty, my desktop will become a crazy mess of dependencies no matter what - and I kinda like it that way.
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