Once Again a Slacker

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 24 Sep 2006 11:28:59 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

I couldn't get the VPN software I need for my new job to work in Puppy Linux, and I wanted the machine to be multi-user anyway, so I installed Slackware, a perennial favorite of mine. Doesn't boot quite as fast as Puppy, but KDE is definitely more full-featured, and no speed slouch, even on my old 800 MHz machine with 384 megs of RAM. I just did the default full install.

I had one problem, though. When I logged in to KDE as non-root I received the following dialog box:

Sound server information message:

Error while initializing the sound driver:

device: default can't be opened for playback
(Permission denied)

The sound server will continue, using the null
output device.

I google'd without much luck, but finally found the solution. The sound device is only readable by root and the "audio" group. So I used "System/KUser" to add my users to the "audio" group. Presto! Sound!

KUser Groups tab

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Slackware Blues

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:51:09 GMT

In their infinite wisdom, the Slackware gurus chose to stop including Gnome and the Gnome libraries. I attempted yesterday, for many hours, to get a version of Gnumeric to compile in my Slackare 10.2 installation. GTk library dependency hell. And I couldn't find any of the libraries pre-compiled at LinuxPackages.net, nor would some of them build from source. Looks like I'll have to try installing GWare, since KSpread sucks weed: slow, flaky, crashed on importing my big Gnumeric file so I had to import it as text, wierd keyboard assignments.

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