From Pine View Farm

I Miss Slackware Linux 1

My laptop, which is my primary computer for daily use, is a Dell 1545 which came with Ubuntu. It works fine, and I’m a believer in “if it ain’t broke etc.”

Linux can be especially dicey as regard wireless, because many makers of wireless devices do not make Linux drivers or, if they do, they do not make good Linux drivers.

And the wireless in this thing works great, so I’m not touching it.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to write some posts on Geekazine about installing and using Slackware (you can read them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6). As part of doing that, I upgraded one of my old inherited desktops to Slackware Linux 13.0 and configured it up.

The main thing I have accomplished is to remind myself of how much I prefer Slackware to any other flavor of Linux that I’ve tried. It is a little more difficult to get running, but a lot easier to maintain and configure.

Tonight, I set up the Samba sharing and got the shared directories on the network for backups, then fired up the firewall using rc.firewall.

The last challenge was getting Opera to run. It installed without errors, but, when I tried to start it, it didn’t.

So I opened a terminal window as root and started it from the command line, like this:

    cd /usr/bin
    ./opera

It threw an error message that it needed the file libqt-mo.so.3.3.8.

The whereis command revealed that there was no file in a default Slackware Linux 13.0 installation whose name started with libqt-mo.so.

I teleported into my Slackware Linux 12.2 box and found the file. In fact, I found about six files whose first name was libqt-mo.so. I scp’d them all over to my Slackware 13.0 box to the /usr/lib/qt/lib directory, which was the name of the directory in which I found them on the 12.2 computer.

Still no luck. Opera continued to complain that it could not find the file in /usr/lib/opera/10.10.

Never one to use a scalpel when a hammer would do, I muscled them right into
/usr/lib/opera/10.10.

Bingo! Opera ran.

It’s busy synchronizing itself right now.

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1 comment

  1. Graham Bell

    March 9, 2010 at 4:33 am

    I run Slackware 13 on my laptop + my childresn PC with Opera.
    I also had this problem. This is a common easily resolved problem with Slackware. Its the price you pay for other benefits in slackware. Happens with a lot of products installed if not installable with slackpkg so opera not unusual. The package management is good as you say but its not as integrated as on onther distros which integrate KDE or Gnome and alter the base KDE GNOME code and default locations to integrate more completely into thier products.
    You should have the libqt-mo.so file in Slackware 13. Best to search the old fashioned way cd / ; find . -name “libqt-mo*” -print  Also check slachpkg search qt3 to ensure you have qt3 slackpkg installed. If not install it.
    qt3 gets installed under KDE so the library for me was in  /opt/kde/lib/qt3/lib . I installed KDE in /opt
    What this means is that opera needs /opt/kde/lib/qt3/lib in its LD_LIBRARY_PATH it does not have this path and wont find the library. Easy remedy is ln -s /opt/kde/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mo.so.3 /usr/lib/opera/10.20/libqt-mo.so.3
    You could probably edit /usr/bin/opera shell script where LD_LIBRARY_PATH set up, have an LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /etc/profile numerous ways.
    As I said above you get this kind of issue with slackware because slackware installs KDE as KDE intended, opera as opera intended. It does not mess about with the linux components. This is beneficial because you can remove KDE and replace with Gnome , remove any linux product easily. Theres a clear distinction between the slackware base and the products installed on top, opera KDE etc. With other distros ubuntu in particular theres a lot more integration. Youd find all your librarys neatly tidied into a common location.  opera would install and find the library but the simple .deb installations are ubuntu debian specific.
    Both approached have their benefits. Slackware is a more dificult install than the more popular linux distros requiring some linux familiarity but no where near as complicated as something like gentoo which requires comprehensive linux experience. Its true after install and when installing new products there can be a little adjustment necessary but these are logical and if not obvious to the user will add to the users understanding of linux.   A distro such as ubuntu is a much easier install however you pay the price if it does not work it can be a lot more complicatead to fix.
    P.S If you download a prerelase opera like 10.50 alpha you may find the install.sh missing, if so its the same a the install.sh for 10.10 only diference:
    Amend opera-version=10.10 to read
    opera-version=10.50
    This effects the install dir. If you try 10.50 and dont like
    Simply run the 10.10 or 10.20 install.sh  you would end up with /usr/lib/opera/10.10 and /usr/lib/opera/10.50 etc
    The /usr/bin/opera gets amended with correct OPERA_BINARY_DIR so no need to deinstall.
     
    P.S 2
    I have tried OPera 10.10 + the 10.20 and 10.50 prerelease software Linux + windows. Im a little disapointed with 10.50. I like the waist basket and some other features but 10.20 which is alpha test seems more stable than 10.50 and thats what Im using for the moment.  10.50 even on the Windows release (Windows not now alpha/beta test) seems a bit too buggy. Linux, 10.50  Used 4th Mar 2010 source Trying to print on slackware with 10.50 crashes. VArious other issues.
    10.20 + 10.10 can print to file then cat file | lpr-cups fine but cant print direct?
    Im very new to 10.50, aren’t we all. Only been out a matter of days. In 10.50 most annoyingly the address box seems to behaves identical to the search box. Like to type g mysearch to search for myserach on google is same as just typing mysearch. When not all access is through a proxy this is very annoying. I type helpdesk to be resolved locally I don’t want to google helpdesk and be asked after the event did I mean http://helpdesk yes ofcouse I mean http://helpdesk. Typing g or y before a search is little effort. Typing http:// before everything not to be search engined , arggghhhh Imagine particularly if you had a slow connection a reason why many use opera for turbo feature. Opera 10.10 10.20 very good , very logical, a few too many bugs though. 10.50 new speed promises good but at the expense of stability and even more bugs.