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Install Notes for Extra Packages (Slackware)

July 27, 2006

1. When installing OpenOffice 2.0.3 in a Slackware Linux system, get the .tgz file from www.linuxpackages.net. The available set of install files from the OpenOffice.org site is a collection of rpms, which when I tried installing, gave an error telling me that /bin/sh was not found (though it really is present in my machine).

2. Picasa for Linux is actually the Windows version configured to run using wine. Quite ingenious feat, but I resent the fact that a Windows binary is residing in my Linux machine.

3. Audacity is created to run on a GNOME-based environment. Since Slackware 10.2 eliminated everything related to GNOME from its install tree, I have trouble making Audacity run on my machine.

4. Rosegarden (a MIDI composer application) requires that the kernel is customized for low-latency-requiring processes. Since my system uses a stock Slackware Linux kernel, a warning is displyed everytime I start Rosegarden.

5. K3b (a CD-burning frontend for KDE) requires several libraries that are not in the stock Slackware installation. I’d have to download them as well in order to make K3b run. During program start, it immediately notified me that the current user does not have root priveleges, and offered an option to run a setup program to fix the problem. However, I’m wondering why when I select the option that would run the setup program, nothing happens. I tried reinstalling the packages after encountering  problem with K3bSetup, and then things went well.

Posted by ronnie at 6:14 pm | permalink | Add comment

Trying out Gentoo

This morning I was able to install OpenOffice, Picasa, K3b, Rosegarden, and a slew of other libraries to further customize my Linux box.

However, in terms of getting optimized software for my computer, I could say that not all have been compiled for an i686-level processor (I have an AMD Athlon XP processor).

So here I am trying out Gentoo, a ‘metadistribution’ as the developers would call it. I can have the option to boot from the LiveCD I’ve just downloaded and install a clean Linux system by downloading the source to the packages I need and compiling everything.

I’ve booted the LiveCD (I’m using it to post this message). Shortly I’ll try compiling everything.

I hope things would go well. 

Posted by ronnie at 4:42 pm | permalink | Add comment