Comments for Written and Read

Comment on Conceptual layers of society by Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 22:20:07 +0000

I have experienced this to a certain degree myself. People have often asked me, “how do you know so much?” But once at a baseball game, where I was rifling off information about who-knows-what, a nearby fan asked, “wow, what’s it like being right all the time?” It was a big helping of humble pie.

Comment on Open source snobbery or why awesome is almost, but not quite enough by mjjzf

mjjzf — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:45:26 +0000

Wifi-Radar, perhaps?
Anyway, I came across this:
http://task3.cc/190/networkmanager-on-slackware-13-37/
- so NM is certainly an option. Also, since I use my own network 4 out of 5 times, I could probably make do with wpa_supplicant.
This *is* weird, though.

Comment on Open source snobbery or why awesome is almost, but not quite enough by Bjarke Todbjerg Nielsen

Bjarke Todbjerg Nielsen — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:41:19 +0000

At the moment I simply use network-manager, but I don’t actually recall what I used in Slackware. Probably WICD . I seem to remember that there was another WICD like application which I may have used, but the name escapes me.

Comment on Open source snobbery or why awesome is almost, but not quite enough by mjjzf

mjjzf — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:26:22 +0000

Maybe it is one of those IBM-hardware-pretending-to-be-standardised things. Do you use WICD?
Interestingly, after I have screwed up my Fedora install by pulling out a lot of services and modifying my Lxdm, it is actually much nicer. So right now I am… less distressed.

Comment on Open source snobbery or why awesome is almost, but not quite enough by Bjarke Todbjerg Nielsen

Bjarke Todbjerg Nielsen — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:15:55 +0000

Morten; Well, that’s a valid point – cramping your Slackware system with a bloated kernel from some other distribution might somehow defy the purpose of Slackware. It would definitely show you whether your problem was solely a kernel thing, though.
ipw2200 you say – I use that firmware on the thinkpad. Mine is a PRO/Wireless 2915ABG wireless chip which seemed to work well in Slackware.

Comment on Open source snobbery or why awesome is almost, but not quite enough by mjjzf

mjjzf — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:37:49 +0000

Bjarke,
Yeah… about that.
Funny thing is, the reason I use Slackware is simplicity. Doing the setup and fixing up the scripts is so transparent that there is not a lot of work to it. And as you say, you and I have built a kernel or two in our time, though it has been a while in my case.
I actually suspected the firmware, since the IPW2200 requires something extra – but that is apparently updated, so there shouldn’t be an issue.
To be honest, most distributions drive me crazy. I love Debian in so many ways, but the dependency handling, as in I am just going to install this, this and that, because you may at some point conceivably need it can drive me up the wall. So I expect to be troubleshooting alongside my daily system.
I am also considering a Slackware downgrade, since I build most things from Slackbuilds.org anyway. That will also fix my suspend and resume issue (well, only resume, actually, but… you know).

Philip,
The only PAE issues I had were with the RHEL family, and I got the impression that their big iron-approach means that they basically Can’t Be Bothered(TM) with non-PAE hardware.
I am taking Crunchbang in as well – your approach to Openbox is exactly how I like it.

Comment on Open source snobbery or why awesome is almost, but not quite enough by corenominal

corenominal — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:23:42 +0000

Another vote for Debian. It is well worth the bit of work required to get into it. Also, I think it should gain bonus points for being a 100% community run distro. Regarding the PAE issues, Debian’s 486 flavoured kernel should be fine for your system

Comment on Open source snobbery or why awesome is almost, but not quite enough by Bjarke Todbjerg Nielsen

Bjarke Todbjerg Nielsen — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 10:23:42 +0000

Being forced into distro exile due to some small, yet annoyingly persistent bug is frustrating. Somehow, knowing you, I’d think that you’d be more satisfied installing Slackware and giving the troubleshooting a real go For instance, you could download the entire source tarball for the actual kernel configuration used on your Fedora system and try compiling it in Slackware. At least i presume that Fedora packages an easily portable kernel tarball – Ubuntu and Debian does.
That being said, taking Debian for a spin is not a bad idea. Personally I haven’t bothered about using Slackware for a while, for the simple reason that I can’t put my finger on anything that needs changing in the default Debian install.

Comment on Open source snobbery or why awesome is almost, but not quite enough by Steven Rosenberg

Steven Rosenberg — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 23:21:44 +0000

Try Debian. I’ve found that it “fits” more hardware than anything else.

However, some of your trouble might be due to things in the kernel that every distro picks up.

You can always ride an older Slackware release — they seem to patch those forever.

Comment on Newsbeuter – RSS reader with good podcast features by mjjzf

mjjzf — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:16:27 +0000

Thank you for the comment. As I say, I use Newsbeuter particularly for the podcast aspect - if you just need to read RSS feeds with text, Snownews is slightly more straightforward. Of course, I have uploaded my Newsbeuter config files to my Owncloud installation. As for TinyTinyRSS, I have used and recommended it but note that there is no development on it at this time, and setting it up is kind of clunky.