About Jeremy

I am currently employed by the United States Air Force, and I am stationed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. I love Open Source, and Linux. I currently have a laptop running only Slackware 12.0, and my desktop has XP installed, but always has a virtual machine running with Slackware 12.0. I dabble in PHP and bash shell scripting, so you may see code pop up here and there.

First Impressions with Slackware 12.1

Well, I finally got around to installing Slackware 12.1 on my laptop. It is a Dell Inspiron 700m.

Specs

  • Intel Centrino 1.6GHz
  • 1024MB RAM
  • 160 WD Scorpio PATA HD
  • Intel 855 Video w/ 64MB Shared
  • Intel 2200 BG Wireless
  • DVD +/- RW
  • 12.1″ 1280×800 LCD Screen
  • 1394a Firewire
  • Broadcom 10/100 Ethernet
  • Secure Digital (SD) Card Reader

The first thing I noticed was that the installer was the same. Fine by me, I enjoy it anyways. Always simple to use and never problematic. But after the reboot I was greeted by a lilo splashscreen with Slackware on it. Looks nice.

OK on to the big things. After manually changing lilo to use compact (severely increases boot time), and editing my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to use the i810 driver for the video (it may have done this through one of the xorg setup programs, but I already knew what I needed), I booted into X. Surprisingly it came up at the default resolution of the monitor of 1280×800. In the past I always needed to use a resolution program. Awesome.

Then my wireless worked automatically. No downloading of firmware or recompiling of the ipw2200 or the ieee80211 modules. So far I am very impressed. I did try the SD card reader, and upon inserting the card the laptop froze. No surprise, I have never had any luck trying to get that to work.

But I must say. Initial impressions are very high. I will post more when I get further into it.


EDIT: Upon further investigating (transfering all my backup files and settings of an external), it seems that CPU Speedscaling isn’t working. The CPU is currently stuck at 600MHz, and as far as I can tell, there are no utilities included to change this. I guess I will have to build CPU Freq Daemon. I don’t mind this because I was probably going to build it any way, because I really enjoy the options it gives me.

Welcome

Well… this is the first post of hopefully many to come. In this blog/site, I will be using it as a dumping ground for anything geeky. This may include posting code snippets on something I am working on, to post a review on an item, to general discussion, or even about installing software/OS’s and hurdles that I had to overcome.

I welcome all comments (except spam), but if your comments are offensive, they may be edited so they don’t offend other readers.

I have been planning on creating my own site layout for this site, but I haven’t taken the time to do it yet. This will eventually happen, but I haven’t even started work on it yet.

EDIT: To claim my blog through Technorati.
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