My wife has a desktop that used to be for desining work, very powerful at that time, I mean ten years ago, sure the OS was windows. Now it’s abondoned though still enough for my daily work, I am trying to find the right operating system accourding to the parts in the box:

  • CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 @3.4GHz x 8
  • Memory: Kinston DDR3 1600 8GiB x 4
  • Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro K620
  • Motherboard: ASUS Z97-P
  • Disk: WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD PCIe3.0 500GB
  • Network card: Realtek 8111GR Gigabit
  • Audio: Realtek ALC891

The release of Slackware 15.0 is the reason I bought this NVME SSD, after tried several other Linux distributions, I finally decided to rest with Slackware though encounter some difficulites, hereby is the major problems.

EFI partition or not?

As my machine start under UEFI mode, GPT table, so before the installation starts, there is a need for hard drive partition, EFI partiion is a MUST have.

Partition 1: nvme0n1p1: 300M : EFI System
Partition 2: nvme0n1p2: 500M : Linux File System for /boot
Partition 3: nvme0n1p3: 16G  : SWAP
Partition 4: nvme0n1p4: 50G  : Linux File System for root /
Partition 5: nvme0n1p5: 397G : Linux File System for /home

The filetype in command fdisk:

  1. EFI System: 1
  2. Linux File System: 20
  3. SWAP: 19

Then the EFI System partition NEEDs to be formatted as vfat file system:

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/nvme0n1p1

After that you will be ready to type the master command “setup” to install it.

Option: Or maybe before partition the disk you might want to clean it by excuting this command in advance ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=10M’

Nvidia driver

As my card is Quadro K620, the default installed driver nouveau needs to be removed in advance, so that’s the procedure:

  1. slackpkg remove xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist
  2. sbopkg -i nvidia-kernel
  3. sbopkg -i nvidia-driver

The package sbopkg is a tool to download and install from https://slackbuilds.org and it’s not there after system installation, you need to grab and install it from https://sbopkg.org. A pre-built package of 0.38.2 is here.

One note, to install Nvidia driver, you need to switch to text mode, logout your desktop in advance.

Regarding install packages through command sbopkg, I personally perfer to use Queuefiles which can automatically install another package if it’s required, in short, it makes job easier. To create the queue file, just type:

sqg -p <package> # this will build queue file for a single package

FCITX Chinese Input method

fcitx is already installed if you choose FULL installation but not started yet. To make fcitx5 the default input method, please add these lines to your /etc/environment (or .profile or ~/.bash_profile):

    GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx
    QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx
    XMODIFIERS=@im=fcitx

Logout or restart and enjoy it.

Others to do after system installation

  1. Create regular user by command adduser
  2. Configure sudo to easy daily work
# visudo
(...)
%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
newuser ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL  # add this new line
# Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin" # remove the # to let regular user can run command *installpkg* etc.

For the rest you may visit TuM’Fatig’s website and Dieken’s Slackware Journal

Error: Startx failed after kernel upgrade

Some may use the following commands to upgrade the Slackware system:

#slackpkg update
#slackpkg install-new
#slackpkg upgrade-all

Everything should works except one thing, the Elilo, if above command upgrade kernel, the Elilo will not update its configuration automaticly, thus need you to do it manually before reboot.

  1. mount /boot/efi
  2. cp /boot/{vmlinux,vmlinuz-generic} /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware
  3. /usr/sbin/geninitrd
  4. cp /boot/initrd.gz /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware

The above copy dummies could be replaced with command eliloconf.

Command geninitrd could be replaced with command mkinitrd, in order to use right options for command mkinitrd, the following command could be excuted in advance:

/usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -k 5.15.94 # Kernel version 5.15.94

In order to ommit kernel upgrading, we can blacklist them by editing /etc/slackpkg/blacklist.

For the topic about initrd on Slackware, there is a long discussions on linuxquestions.com.

Also the Slackpkg extension Slackpkg+ can handle this kernel upgrade problem automatically as long as you uncomment set PLUGIN_ZLOOKKERNEL=enable in /etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf.

Finally hereis my elilo.conf:

chooser=simple
delay=1
timeout=1
default=vmlinuz
#
image=vmlinuz
        label=vmlinuz
        initrd=initrd.gz
        read-only
        append="root=/dev/nvme0n1p2 vga=normal ro"
#
# Linux bootable partition config begins
# initrd created with 'mkinitrd -c -k 5.15.94 -f ext4 -r /dev/nvme0n1p2 -m usb-storage:xhci-hcd:xhci-pci:ohci-pci:ehci-pci:uhci-hcd:ehci-hcd:hid:usbhid:i2c-hid:hid_generic:hid-asus:hid-cherry:hid-logitech:hid-logitech-dj:hid-logitech-hidpp:hid-lenovo:hid-microsoft:hid_multitouch:jbd2:mbcache:crc32c_intel:crc32c_generic:ext4 -u -o /boot/initrd.gz'
image=vmlinuz-generic
	initrd=initrd.gz
	label=generic
	read-only
	append="root=/dev/nvme0n1p2 vga=normal ro"

Adjust the fonts

The default fonts including Liberation and wqy-zenhei are not tea, hereby to blacklist it and change to Noto sans.

sudo slackpkg remove wqy-zenhei-font-ttf
echo wqy-zenhen-font-ttf | sudo tee -a /etc/slackpkg/blacklist

mkdir -p ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d
ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/{70-no-bitmaps,70-noto-cjk}.conf ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d