Slackware 15 newbies

Posted 07-17-2023 at 07:42 AM by Projectile
Updated 08-22-2023 at 11:19 AM by Projectile (Monday-first-day in KDE5)

Standard user account
Just like in Windows, it's a bad idea to run everything as administrator (aka "root").
Run the `# adduser` command to make a standard account for yourself.

Textmode multitasking
You don't have to run `startx` as soon as you're logged in: use the Alt-F1, Alt-F2, Alt-F3 combos to switch between terminals.

Disabling history in the shell
If you're like me, you don't want the history to be preserved across sessions.

.bash_profile and .bashrc

Code:

unset HISTFILE

Poor man's CCleaner/BleachBit
KDE5 provides the Sweeper program.

Simple blue prompt
I like the prompt to be the base working directory.

.bashrc

Code:

export PS1='[\[\e[1;34m\]\W\[\e[m\]] \$ '

Aliases
Use aliases for your favorite commands. Be warned, it's very easy to get carried away and abuse this feature.

.bashrc

Code:

alias ls='ls --color=auto'

Do you miss Total Commander?
Krusader is what you're looking for! Or, for something more like Norton Commander, run `mc` in a shell.

Do you miss good old Winamp?
Use either Audacious and XMMS. By default Audacious doesn't look like Winamp but you can change that in the options.

Monday should be the first day of the week
In KDE5, right-click on the clock, choose "Configure Digital Clock..." and go to Calendar -> First day of the week.
A more extreme approach is changing the locale from "en_US" to something such as "en_150". Be warned that this will affect spellcheckers and screenreaders.

Saner clock in KDE5
Right-click on the clock, choose "Configure Digital Clock..."
My preferences are for "Time display" to be "24-Hour" and "Date format" to be "ISO Date".

Saner clock in XFCE
You can get the same clock in XFCE by specifying the custom format:

Code:

<b>%R</b>%n%F

Drop-down terminal
In KDE5, just run Yakuake. In XFCE you will have to bind F12 to the command:

Code:

xfce4-terminal --drop-down

How to update Slackware?
You can either download the patches directory by hand, then run `# upgradepkg *.txz` or you can uncomment a mirror from /etc/slackpkg/mirrors, a fine choice being:

Code:

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-15.0/

Then run:

Code:

# slackpkg update gpg     # only the first time
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg install-new
# slackpkg upgrade-all

Then run `# slackpkg check-updates` from time to time.

My favorite program isn't in Slackware
There's a chance you will find it at SlackBuilds.org, good luck!

`apropos`, `man -k` and the UNIX manual pages from KDE Help Center don't work properly
Run `# mandb`. Be warned that it will take a long time.

How to run something as root in GUI?
Use `kdesu` like for example: Alt-F2 -> "kdesu kwrite /etc/lilo.conf"

How to enable hibernation?
First you need to have a swap partition, the size of which is recommended to be 1x to 2x the size of your RAM. For instance, RedHat recommends 8 GB swap for 4 GB RAM.
Second, you need to pass the `resume=/path/to/swap` option to the kernel. For LILO, just edit /etc/lilo.conf "append" line, for example:

Code:

append="resume=/dev/sda5 "

Don't forget to run `# lilo` to commit the changes.

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