Long-lost Click: Wolvix again

(This post was originally written on April 24, 2008. In the days following, I was able to tweak xorg.conf and run Wolvix on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, on which it runs quite well.)

Finding my long-lost Wolvix post got me itching to run it again. I haven't had it on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) in some time. It did a good job there, but I wasn't able to turn off the annoying tap-to-click feature on the laptop's Alps touchpad, and I've been pretty happy with how Debian Lenny is doing that and more, so my use of Wolvix has dropped quite a bit.

If I could manage to get X configured properly on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt) now running OpenBSD 4.2, I'd be running the smaller Wolvix Cub (smaller than Wolvix Hunter, which I run otherwise) on the aging PC right now. The combination of the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers, plus the excellent choice of apps (it has pretty much everything I use day to day) makes the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Cub and Hunter two of the best choices out there — for me anyway.

Adding to Wolvix's flexibility, it can run as a live CD, or be installed in a traditional or "frugal" manner. I've chosen traditional installs, and the install process in Wolvix is excellent. It's easy to create as many partitions as you need, you get a choice of GRUB or LILO bootloaders, and once you do have it installed, slapt-get and Gslapt are ready to bring all the apps up to date from both the Wolvix and Slackware repositories. And the Slackware team continues to update version 11, which was first released in October 2006. Even Slackware 8 (circa 2002) seems to get an update every once in awhile.

All of this makes me very comfortable running Slackware and ... well ... Wolvix, because the two "big" Slackware-derived distros, Zenwalk and Vector, use their own repositories, and they don't support a given release for very long before moving on to the next one. This burned me pretty good one time; I was running Zenwalk 4.4.1, and it was working great, but an unfortunate invocation of the distro's update manager completely broke the thing after 4.6 came out. My machine wouldn't boot the 4.6 CD, so it was the end of Zenwalk for me.

I like Vector, but I like Wolvix even more. And I really like having Slackware's security team watching out and sending patches that flow right into my Wolvix installs with a few easy clicks.

I also like a Slackware-based setup that doesn't depend on KDE. If you have a fast-enough box, KDE is great. My Gateway laptop handles KDE very well, even though I prefer to use GNOME on it. But on my older, slower, less-memory-rich boxes, KDE is a bit too sluggish, and I like a well-appointed Xfce or Fluxbox setup much better. (Note on 9/15/08: My most recent Slackware 12.1 install on the Gateway, though not without problems related to X configuration, again showed KDE to be quite spry and Slack's default lineup of applications to be more than adequate.)

Ever try installing Slackware without KDE? It's easy to do. In fact, the excellent Slackware installer offers complete control, on a package by package basis, over what gets put on your box during the intallation. If you elect to leave out all of KDE, you can run Fluxbox or Xfce, but you get very few apps. And the install still takes up over 2 GB of space. No Abiword, no OpenOffice. I guess that would be a good time to add one of the many GNOME-for-Slackware packages out there, like Dropline GNOME (which wouldn't work on this non-686 CPU, I think, but one of the others will).

But again, Slackware's KDE-centricity doesn't leave the Xfce or Fluxbox user with a whole lot of applications. Sure you can build the system you want with Slackbuilds, Linux Packages or Robby Workman's packages, but I don't think it's a coincidence that there are three major Slackware-based distros (Wolvix, Vector and Zenwalk) that use Xfce as the primary desktop environment.

And being able to use a Wolvix CD to get literally dozens of applications I know and love makes things that much easier. Add to that my seeming inability to get GRUB to boot Slackware 12 (I'm sure using Slack's own GRUB package and script would solve my problem), and Wolvix has solved quite a few problems for me.

(Note on 09/15/08: While Wolvix does an excellent job setting up the LILO or GRUB bootloaders, I've since adopted a policy for dual- and triple-booting in which one distro, using GRUB, controls the Master Boot Record and chainloads into all the other bootable partitions on the drive, with every one of those OSes using their own bootloaders — whatever they may be — on their own root partitions. It makes swapping OSes easier and makes automatic updates of the various /boot/grub/menu.lst files work every time — not always the case with everything stuffed into the /boot/grub/menu.lst controlling the MBR.)