Continuing from Slackware Diary – 1
Fixed the prompt by copying .bashrc and .profile (renamed as .bash_profile) from my primary Ubuntu system. This works and I have nice color prompts in Slackware. Need to see if I have scripts from my previous Slackware days to add environment variables, aliases, etc. Life in Slackware means a lot of time on the command line.
The next task on my list was to install Flatpak so I could use apps from Flathub
As I mentioned before, I installed the beta version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on the same system where I had installed Slackware 15.0. The official release of that version of Ubuntu is out and I have accordingly upgraded that system. A few things that I have noticed so far:
Back in February I looked at the Slackware Linux web site. After years of working with Ubuntu, and occasionally its parent Debian, I decided to see if I could install Slackware and get it to work. I used it a lot in the first years of the current century. Could I still manage it now, or had the comforts of the Ubuntu installation process dulled my edge? From Slackware 15 – The old brigade:
Slackware is deployed using an ncurses interface, with a set of menus where you must make intelligent choices, including partitioning and package selection. And then, there’s LILO the bootloader. Not GRUB, mind! Feels a bit daunting, but then, if you’re careful and methodical, there should be no issues. That said, the approach automatically precludes Slackware from being a typical desktop choice, as most people would have no idea what to do with the installer.
As I wrote in September, my HP EliteDesk 705 G2 SFF desktop with an AMD PRO A4-8350B R5 processor was giving me messages about limited computer resources when using Zoom under Windows 10, though not under Linux. These sitll occur, even though I have added memory, taking it from 8GB to 24GB. This last time, I finally remembered to bring up Task Manager. It showed me that there was no memory problem, but that Zoom was using a lot of CPU. Why this occurs with Windows but not Linux is puzzling. For now I will have to have all of my Zoom sessions on that system under Linux rather than Windows.
I got a new 1TB SSD drive for Christmas. I used it to replace the 512GB drive that I had installed on my HP EliteDesk 705 G2 SFF system. That 512GB drive in turn went back to the old laptop I had taken it from. In both cases the copying was done by Macrium Reflect Free. There were no problems at all with the HP desktop, but the laptop refused to boot afterwards. So I got out my Linux USB boot repair stick and booted from that, ran the boot repair utility and everything was fine. Both Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux 20.04 booted cleanly.
So I now have two extra 256GB SSD drives. Don’t really know what I will do with them. For now they are mounted in enclosures with USD 3.x connections.
Many years ago I used Slackware Linux. I switched to Ubuntu because I was concerned that Slackware seemed to be essentially a one man show, and that seemed like a single point of failure. But Slackware was good to me, and I have not forgotten it. Recently Slackware came out with a new and up to date release and I am looking at it again.
The web site looks much like what I remember from 15-20 years ago. That is OK with me, although I would like to see some more current content. I decided to download the Slackware book in its pdf form. Firefox just hung when I went to that page. However, I noticed that it was an ftp site, not http. 20 years ago I was accustomed to accessing ftp sites using ftp tools, not web browsers. So I guessed that this was what once known as an anonymous ftp site, and that such sites could be accessed with the ftp command line. Feeling like Gandalf recalling a thousand year old spell, I opened a Linux terminal window and proceeded to type:
As I wrote previously , Mia (my wife) and I spent last weekend at Capricon, a Chicagoland science fiction convention. We went to most of the Capricons in the ’80’s and ’90’s, but in our first years in Minnesota the pressures of parenthood prevented us from going. Those have eased somewhat and we have been to most of the Capricons (and Windycons) since 2009. While most Capricons have been in the Chicago suburbs, this year the convention was downtown, at the Sheraton Grand Hotel.
Having done a memory upgrade to my HP EliteDesk 705 G2 SFF system, it was time to add more storage. It came with a 256GB SSD, and I added the 512GB that I had taken from an old laptop. Since I was leaving the original drive in place and simply adding a drive, the process was much simpler than in the drive replacements I have done. The whole thing would have been trivial if I had put the new drive in an external USB 3 adapter. USB 3 is fast, but imposing the USB/SATA conversion would add some overhead, so I decided to open up the machine and make another SATA connection. There was a free SATA power connector inside, but I had to add an extension cable to reach any plausible place to put a new drive. Fortunately, there was a free SATA data cable already present. I put the new drive into a 2.5″/3.5″ mount, but there were no holes to screw it into the obvious place. This is a problem I have faced before, and I used the same remedy: Duct tape.
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I have an old laptop which I do not use often. I had installed a 512GB SSD on it, but decided to replace it with a 256GB SSD so I could use the larger drive on a more modern system. Once again, I planned to used Macrium Reflect Free to clone the drive. This is a lot harder when you want to clone a larger drive to a smaller one. I had to delete my Linux partitions and shrink the Windows one with gparted on my Linux boot repair disk. My total space in use was well under 256GB but Macrium still objected. Examination revealed that I had forgotten to shrink the extended partition in which my Linux partitions had resided. So I fixed that. Still no joy. There was a big (>256GB) gap between the end of the extended partition and the last Windows partition. So I moved that partition inward to leave all the free space at the end. This finally satisfied Macrium Reflect Free and it was able to clone the drive.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 