Slackware tips — quick and easy things to make the box work better

Here are a few quick tips to make Slackware work a bit better.

Groups for your primary user account

When creating your first user account, make sure you pick the right groups.

Slackware is a bit unusual as far as Linux distributions go in that it doesn't create a user account during the installation process.

After the installation is complete, you need to log in as root with the password you chose during the install. Then create an account with adduser. I do this before starting X:

# adduser

It's pretty simple. Just fill in the information requested.

The key is to add the right groups. In order to have control over the CD-ROM, plug-in USB drives and audio, I type in the following additional groups for my first user account (i.e. my account:

audio,disk,floppy,video,plugdev,cdrom,wheel

If and when you create additional user accounts, you can either add them to these groups or not. It's up to you. I'd probably leave out a few of these for my additional users; I don't think they'd need disk or floppy, and I wouldn't want them to have wheel.

And if you forget to add your user account to a particular group, go to /etc/group as root and add your user to the appropriate group or groups.

Note: I could do this in the console with vi, but when I'm in X, I use Mousepad. Feel free to use your favorite GUI or console editor.

I open a terminal, su to root and do this:

# mousepad /etc/group

When I'm done, I save the file in Mousepad and close the window.

Want to use sudo?

I've grown accustomed to using sudo, so I add my user account to the sudoers file *— for which you MUST use visudo and NOT a direct edit on /etc/sudoers — while logged in as root (either directly or by su to root:

# visudo

the sudoers file comes up in vi. You do know enough vi to get by don't you? I can hack my way through vi well enough, and this is one of those cases where a little experience with the default text editor in Slackware and most other systems comes in very handy.

Unless you are already somewhat proficient in vi, look for an online tutorial and figure out the difference between the edit and command modes and how to move your cursor around, delete text, etc.

Back to the sudoers file. Many Unix/Linux gurus may cringe at my advice, and I'll just say that I'm concerned here with a desktop system, not a server. For a server, especially an "important" one, permissions must be finely grained and mostly restricted, with some users getting more permissions than others.

But for a desktop box, if you as the sole or primary person maintaining the box wants to use sudo, just add yourself to the sudoers file right below root:

ROOT    ALL=(ALL)    ALL
MYUSERNAME    ALL=(ALL)    ALL

Use your user name, not MYUSERNAME, of course.

Save the file in vi (in command mode, which you reach with esc, type :wq and hit Enter), and you will be able to sudo.

I guess Ubuntu got me in the habit of using sudo, even though lots of things require su to root (like using visudo), and I like to have it at my disposal.

Get your wheel mouse working right

Even though the Slackware installer asks me what kind of mouse I have — it's a wheel mouse (you know, with the scroll wheel), it is never properly configured.

I dutifully enter IMPS/2 during the installer, but the wheel never makes the screen scroll.

So I edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to fix the problem:

# sudo mousepad /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then I change this:

# The available mouse protocols types that you can set below are:
#    Auto BusMouse GlidePoint GlidePointPS/2 IntelliMouse IMPS/2
#    Logitech Microsoft MMHitTab MMSeries Mouseman MouseManPlusPS/2
#    MouseSystems NetMousePS/2 NetScrollPS/2 OSMouse PS/2 SysMouse
#    ThinkingMouse ThinkingMousePS/2 Xqueue
    Option "Protocol"    "PS/2"

to this:

# The available mouse protocols types that you can set below are:
#    Auto BusMouse GlidePoint GlidePointPS/2 IntelliMouse IMPS/2
#    Logitech Microsoft MMHitTab MMSeries Mouseman MouseManPlusPS/2
#    MouseSystems NetMousePS/2 NetScrollPS/2 OSMouse PS/2 SysMouse
#    ThinkingMouse ThinkingMousePS/2 Xqueue
    Option "Protocol"    "IMPS/2"

The line I changed is in bold for emphasis.

Slapt-get

I used to update my Slackware box the old-fashioned way, by bringing down the security patches from the Slackware site by FTP and then using updatepkg to install each one individually.

Now I do two things differently: First, I use a faster mirror — anything is faster than Slack's main FTP site — and second, as of yesterday, I use slapt-get.

I got slapt-get from the GNOME Slackbuild site, and after my first attempt at installing GNOME didn't go so well, the second time I installed Slackware this go-round, I commented out the GNOME Slackbuild mirror (I can always uncomment it later) and updated my Slackware packages only. (I recommend that you get slapt-get from ... the slapt-get people, as I detail below).

Once you find and install the proper slapt-get package for your version (mine is 12.0), go into /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc as root to select a Slackware mirror, and, if you used the GNOME Slackbuild version of slapt-get, to comment out the GNOME Slackbuild mirror until you're ready to install GNOME, if you (or I) ever are.

At this point, I'm pretty happy with Slackware the way it is, especially with slapt-get, so I'm holding off on adding GNOME.

You could always get slapt-get from its "official" site. The easiest thing to do is to find the precompiled slapt-get package for your version of Slackware, download it and use Slackware's pkgtool utility to install it.

I haven't yet installed Gslapt, the GUI for slapt-get, but I plan to do it in the future. It's also at software.jaos.com

I've said in the past that I feel a little squirelly about using slapt-get to install NEW packages, the only reason being that I don't know enough about it, but for updating official Slackware packages, I feel really, really, really good about it.

The last time I used Slackware, I fell behind in my security updates, mostly because you need to use upgradepkg and can't make it easier by using pkgtool directly. (Believe me, there are a lot of EASY Slackware console utilities that, in some ways, make Slack a cakewalk to configure).

Once I used Wolvix, which is based on Slackware 11, and which includes slapt-get and Gslapt, I saw how easy it was to update a Slackware box. Slapt-get levels the playing field vis a vis Debian quite a bit.