Of all the distros I've tried (Mandrake, Red Hat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu), Slackware gives me the highest sense of freedom and of a "community".
I had already installed Slackware 9 on my old Omnibook (7-8 years old) and I managed to make every piece of hardware work (sound in ALSA, 3d acceleration, ACPI, PCMCIA, etc.).
When I recently decided to give a second try at Linux, I was pretty sure the latest stable version of Slackware would be the perfect excuse to refresh my limited linux skills.
Kernel
I don't rember exactly which kernel I chose during the setup, it was either the generic-2.6.21.5 or the huge-2.6.21.5Anyway, I recompiled the kernel using an old 2.6.5 config and everything went fine... almost.
See X sections for details.
This is my last working .config
X config
That's where problems began... startx produced a weird blank white screen either enabling dri or using the VESA x driver. In the beginning I thought it was just a xorg.conf problem, so I thoroughly checked out every single lines of my config.
Then, I thought it was the missing video refresh frequencies, so I put those on after an intense googling session.
I was at a dead end... nothing I could change worked!
And at last, I found a post on linuxquestions forum slackware distro subsection. In this post somebody had a similar problem with the i810 X driver.
Well, long story short, in the last Slackware version (12.0), the xf86-video-intel-2.1.0-i486-1 package has removed the i810 driver and put a sym link to the new intel driver, so after I did this:
I could finally startx and be a happy slacker :)upgradepkg --reinstall xf86-video-i810-1.7.4-i486-1.tgz
Stay tuned for more!
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