One of the common things that happens in the open source world are things that do not work. I've been using Linux/FreeBSD for ages, and KDE for just as long, and my general expectations for things working are still pretty low for a lot of things. I guess being dumped at a console the first time installing Linux will give you that perspective.
Anyway, I've recently done some upgrading: Slackware64 13.0 on my HP TX2500 series laptop. It's a pretty shiny laptop with a lot of built-in peripherals. I haven't previously gotten a copy of any distro to work well enough on it to be considered useful, so I've been using Linux through VirtualBox with the pre-installed Windows Vista. That worked reasonably, but is not the same as having a real system.
So here are a few of the things that have amazed me in the last two days:
- Slackware is still as much of a pain to install as it has always been. However, once installed, it has a lot less that needs configuring than in the old days. I typed "init 4" and was happily presented with a working kdm.
- Xorg 7.4 is pretty nice. Without an /etc/X11/xorg.conf even existing, it simply starts by itself with some sane defaults, detects some peripherals, and even has some of my multimedia keys working out of the box. This used to be like pulling teeth on any distro, nevermind slackware.
- My built-in Broadcom 4328 wifi mostly works with ndiswrapper. Admittedly, this was more stable on Mandriva on this machine, as it sometimes fails to register wlan0 upon reboot. If you use this machine and you can't find 64bit wifi drivers, email me and I'll help you out.
- Once I added the wacom kernel module, it automatically started working in X. It's not perfect (non-stylus touch isn't turned on, and I haven't tested pressure sensitivity yet), but it works well enough to use without having to screw with X. Speaking of which, the scroll functions on my Synaptics touchpad work automatically as well. That would be unheard-of a few years ago.
- The built-in webcam works without doing a thing. Tested it with kopete.
- The x86_64 fglrx 9.8 drivers install and work perfectly. Kwin effects work, and everything flies. Good job folks. (This has not worked on any other distro I've tried on the laptop. Cheers to the slackware team.)
- Konqueror, when set to report a firefox 2.0.x user agent string, renders and uses the full version of gmail, including chat. I've never been able to get this to work before, so kudos to the Konq/khtml/etc. teams.
- I'm checking out KDE trunk (the machine has 4.2.4 by default) and subversion asked if I wanted to store my password in my kwallet! Wow! I'm not sure how it's doing this (dbus?), but it's the first time I've had a console-based application ask this. I know that KDE is migrating to git soon, but still, I'm impressed.
That's it. Basically, I'm really happy about the small amounts of configuration that is required these days, and the high level of integration. I'll buy everyone a virtual beer (KDE, slackware, Xorg, kernel, etc.) which may turn into a real beer when I see you.
Cheers
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