MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-10-08 |
| FROM | From: "Inker, Evan"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Slackware 9.1: The installation experience (in full)
|
Slackware 9.1: The installation experience (in full)
http://linux-universe.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1069
Slackware has always been a developer's or advanced user's product. It has
simplicity and speed. However, it lacks some of the tools the commercial
applications have for administration. So you'll need an intermediate level
of skill for this, particularly working with shell scripts to customize your
boot configuration.
I haven't used Slackware since the early days when you downloaded and
installed everything from the floppy disk. I was hoping things would be less
tedious installing over my Windows 2000 Dell Inspiron 8100 notebook with a
1.2 Ghz Pentium III-M. It would also prove challenging considering that it
had PCMCIA cards and wireless networking with which to contend.
Installation
The important part of the Slackware distribution consists of two CDs
containing the installation software. You can obtain the distribution via
BitTorrent. Since I don't normally use Python on my systems, and the
standard BitTorrent clients are Python-based, I used the Java-based Snark.
This worked admirably in downloading the ISO images. I didn't bother with
the other two disks since I didn't want the manual or source.
CD 1, like most distributions these days is bootable. You need to choose the
boot image most applicable to you. Generally, you can get through using
bare.i. It worked for my installation. Should you have a SCSI card, you will
probably want scsi.i as your boot image. You can experiment with the other
available images if either of these don't work for you. CD 1 also contains
floppy disk images and instructions if you need to bootstrap using a floppy.
Once you have booted, login as root, with CD 1 inserted in the CD drive. The
first of the installation trials await. Unlike some commercial versions that
have graphical interfaces for partitioning your drives, the user directly
uses Linux fdisk. This will destroy existing data on your drives so be
careful. You also need to know a bit about drives and their naming under
Linux so you can choose the drive(s) to partition.
Help in partitioning and installing packages is very sparse during the
installation so you generally need to know what you are doing and the
functionality of packages you choose to install. I would recommend that you
separate at least your /usr/local, and /home partitions from the root (/)
partition. This partitioning allows you to re-install or repair the main
Slackware distribution without damaging your custom packages or your user
data. Should the number of partitions you require be greater than four, then
you will need to use an extended partition and create logical partitions
under that. I usually make a primary partition the root partition (/).
You will also need to create a swap partition. Normally about twice your
physical memory should be sufficient for swap. Some people recommend even
less. For my system with 384 Mb of physical memory, even with Gnome, Galeon
with seven tabbed pages, OpenOffice with this document, an LDAP server,
sendmail and three terminal sessions running, I am only consuming 50 Mb of
swap and have 220 Mb of free physical memory.
Commit your partitions and remember which partition you have assigned to a
specific purpose. It helps to write this down in an administration log book
in case you need to revisit installation sometime down the track. Also
remember to make the root partition bootable if you have followed my advice
in making it a primary partition.
Now you can run setup, a menu-driven, text-based installation program. You
will need to format the partitions before continuing to the package
installations. The swap partition will be created first. You will then need
to select the other partitions, define their mount points and their format.
Many may choose to use ext3 formatted partitions, which has journalling but
whose format is based on ext2. I chose ReiserFS as this has advantages of
usage when you have many small files, as you might have when developing
software and it is fairly stable and been in field use for a few years now.
Once this is complete, you are ready to choose the packages to install.
The installation of packages fairly straight forward except for determining
the packages you need in a custom installation. The default lineup should
suit most people. However, as Slackware is intended for the intermediate
user, you probably will want to tailor the installation. I chose not to
install Apache, mod_ssl or the OpenLDAP server. My reasons for doing this
was to allow custom-built installations later. The LDAP build supplied with
Slackware works with the older Berkeley database and lacked some features
and I wanted Apache 2.0 and some special modules to tie in with my J2EE
framework. I also omitted Samba as again I wanted some custom services. I
included both KDE and Gnome although Gnome was going to be the default X
Window Manager.
Once you have settled on an installation, commit it and leave it run. You'll
need to come back at some point to insert the second CD to install KDE and
the remainder.
The final step is to define your configuration, including the networking and
then install the kernel image. The kernel image will usually be the same one
with which you booted the installation. Select it from the CD and then you
are ready to reboot your newly created Slackware system. The only problem
with the configuration is that it does not allow for multiple network
interfaces or selecting the network card. My Inspiron has both the wireless
LAN card as well as an inbuilt LAN card. Luckily, the system nominated the
wireless LAN card as eth0.
I ignored creating an emergency boot disk since I have the distribution CDs
to boot from and I wasn't using a custom kernel image.
Post configuration
I rebooted my system and immediately hit problems because the boot process
hung when it started probing the memory at 0x0800. I went back to the
distribution boot CD, logged in and mounted the partition with /etc on it. I
edited /etc/pcmcia/config.opts and removed the probe for that area,
contained in a line with:
include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0x800-0x8ff, port 0xc00-0xcff
That fixed the problem and when I rebooted Slackware came up without a
problem. The wireless network card, a Cabletron was picked up and the module
installed without a problem. I immediately had connection to the base
station and the rest of the network.
After reboot, you'll probably want to take customized configuration in hand.
The Slackware configuration is simple to work with. It is BSD-like, using rc
scripts to manage service start ups. There are examples in /etc/rc.d to help
with building your own scripts. I would recommend looking at rc.sendmail and
rc.sshd as example templates for installing your own services. For ntpd, I
used rc.sendmail as a starting point. /etc/rc.d/rc.6, /etc/rc.d/rc.M,
/etc/rc.d/rc.S, and /etc/rc.d/rc.K will be necessary master boot scripts you
need to modify for your custom services, covering startup modes and shutdown
modes.
I actually find these easier to manage than Red Hat's chkconfig. In order to
add more network interfaces, you'll need to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf.
The configuration is self-explanatory.
That is all that is necessary to configure your boot scripts. So an
understanding of shell scripts and some vi skills are all that you need to
customize your services.
You may also want to run alsaconf to configure dependent modules for your
sound card. Slackware 9.1 is built for the alsa sound service that is the
official sound layer for kernel 2.6.x.
The standard configuration is open with little network security. I would
recommend editing your /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny to tailor
external access to ports and services. I would also disable the ftp service
that is installed by default. In these times when SSH is available for
nearly all systems, you can use sftp to transfer files. You can use nmap -A
my.ip.address to check services and access on your exposed interface.
You can also install iptable rules as the Slackware kernels are built with
the iptables module. I have an /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall script and this is
already catered for in the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2 script. There are plenty of
examples for configuring your system to disable spoofed packets, drop ICMP
packets and so forth.
The Slackware system boot is very fast. For my system, it takes 10 seconds
to boot to the login prompt. When it was a Windows 2000 system, this would
be about a minute to boot to a login prompt.
Gnome and applications
Traditionally, I have worked with KDE since I had previous familiarity with
CDE in Solaris and Unixware. However, there were plenty of reviews saying
that Gnome had evolved to a very useable system with good font rendering. I
was willing to give it a try. X configuration for the wireless, optical
3-button wheel mouse was easy and the wheel scroller works perfectly in
Gnome applications. The NVidia card configuration was more difficult as you
needed to grab the manufacturer's package, install it and compile the
interface. Further, you needed to replace the existing configuration with
the new X configuration supplied by the manufacturer and edit that for
things to work smoothly. However, I'm very happy with the 1400x1050
resolution.
The graphical environment finishes initialising in about 20 seconds. With
Windows 2000, it took about 4 minutes for everything to finish initialising.
To this day, I'm not quite sure what was starting up. So in comparison,
Windows 2000 took 10 times longer to get to the point where I could actually
use it productively.
I've tried Opera in Gnome. Although there are some nice features in Opera,
the font rendering was ugly, mouse clicks for selections were occassionally
faulty and the browser crashed from time to time. I switched to Galeon and
have had little problems so far.
I don't like any of the standard e-mail clients and this was one of the
stumbling blocks in moving to Linux for business. However, I discovered
Sylpheed which has many of the features in Microsoft Outlook including
filtering, e-mail signing and signature generation. It like all Linux
applications, runs much faster than its Windows counterpart and also takes
less time to start up. There are a few traps with building Sylpheed from the
source so we might offer up tips or the modified build scripts if people are
having problems. It is worth the effort though to get Sylpheed built.
OpenOffice 1.1 has worked without issue and the font rendering is smooth and
fast. At this stage I've got no complaints with it or Gnome.
Xine mostly works without issue although like most multi-purpose media
players does crash from time to time. It is more stable than the gxine
overlay application. With my video card, gxine crashes if I switch to full
screen mode. Xine does not suffer from the same problem. The only other
issue I found with Xine was that it used the previous Xine library (rc0a)
and it wasn't supplied with libdvdcss so you can't make use of menus and
navigation in DVDs. The omission of the latter is probably due to possible
legal issues for U.S. distributors of Slackware. I rebuilt the Xine
libraries and applications from the developer sources and found that Xine
has run properly with all the major codecs including the RealPlayer 9 codec.
Also, I can now access the DVD menus. Again, unlike Windows 2000, DVDs play
flawlessly and without any skipping or frame dropping, even while I am doing
something like editing this document in the foreground.
Summary
Slackware 9.1 is a fully operational distribution. It is intended for the
intermediate to expert Linux user. It provides power and simplicity for
these users. It is quite possibly the fastest booting complete Linux
distribution and yet provides almost flawless detection of most hardware
configurations. Apart from the things I've mentioned, I haven't found any
thing that didn't work properly from the install.
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