On Sat, 23 Jun 2001, Edenyard wrote:
> All the talk on this list recently regarding installing Linux got me
> worked up and also coincided with someone giving me a 4-CD set of
> Slackware V3.5 dated 1998.
That's about a 2.0.36 kernel? At any rate, it's quite
dated by Linux standards, meaning there have been quite a
few security exploits fixed. Depending on how you use the
machine, you might want to consider a newer version.
> I can run X by typing
> 'startx' at the prompt and it all runs fine. However, when I come out of X
> to get back to the prompt, the screen fills with @ characters where
> there should be spaces and IBM box-drawing characters appear where there
> should be text. I can still type (blindly), and enter such things as
> 'startx' (again) or 'shutdown -r now' and that seems to have the desired
> effect, but why is the screen getting messed up?
It sounds like the console isn't getting reset.
X doesn't do that to me, but there are a few programs
that do... (IIRC, earlier versions of Arachne did, or
maybe it was the way I had svgalib configured).
Anyway, the command 'reset' does it in Red Hat.
There's no man page, but the doc at
/usr/doc/util-linux-2.10f/README.reset certainly seems
to indicate the reset that lives in Slackware is
somewhat different than the reset in Red Hat and SuSE.
If the 'reset' command doesn't work on your machine,
try the meat of the RH/SuSE version, 'stty sane; echo -e \\033c'
> Also, can anyone recommend a mailing list that's as good as this one but
> that deals with newcomers' questions about Linux?
Usually people on alt.os.linux and/or comp.os.linux are pretty
decent. Depending on your news server you can also find one or
more which are specific to Slack, for instance, my news server
carries these:
alt.os.linux.slackware
mailing-list.slackware
- Steve
