A Penguin in the Orchard

Slack Install 3:44

Slack’s done, with the exception of configuring the mouse and the X Window system. The network configuration is even working. The text screens in this install are laid out very nicely, I must say.

By default, Slack boots to runlevel 3 - a console window. There are options in the install for setting the text size in the console; a nice touch. I had to configure XFree via the xfree86config file, though, to get X fire off at all. I’ve reset the default runlevel to 4 (as opposed to 5 in many other distributions) in /etc/inittab. Once I ran the x configuration program, I was able to start x with the startx command. I Ctrl-Alt-+’ed my way through the available resolutions until I got to 1280×1024. I’m in the KDE desktop, now.

All in all, a little less than an hour and a half for a completely custom Slack install. I don’t know whether it’s my increasing knowledge of Slack, or whether the installer has just improved that much. It sure beats the heck out of the two days it took to install my first Slack distro.

Further details this week in Penguin Shell.