LinLog

The past couple of days, I've been trying to make my Slackware desktop not suck. OK, that's not entirely fair, but it's not completely off either. Slackware is a very capable distribution, but it has its down sides, and those are what I'm trying to remedy.

One project I started last night was getting the extra stuff on my printer working. I have an HP PhotoSmart 7760 with one of those built-in flash card readers. The printing works fine out of the box with CUPS, but the card reader doesn't function at all. For that, you need the low-level HPLIP drivers. The good news is, they weren't too hard to set up. Linux Packages.net had Slackware packages for HPLIP and all the supporting libraries I needed. So now I can mount flash cards inserted into my printer (for whatever good that does me). Now I can set it up with automount and I'll be good to go.

The other thing I tried out tonight is the Qt GUI for Swaret. If you're not a Slackware user, Swaret is an automatic retreival and installation program, in the same vein as apt-get. I've used swaret for a while, but this is my first experience with QtSwaret. I'm thinking this might be a good chance to learn some Qt, as QtSwaret is in serious need of work. It's a good start, but it's way, way to quite for comfort. Package management tools should give verbose feedback, or at least accurate progress bars. It also needs more error checking, because it took me a good three or four tries before I realized that the reason it wasn't actually doing anything when I click the buttons was because swaret wasn't in my path. A warning would have been nice.

Another annoying thing about it is the complete lack of documentation. For example, I was stupid enough to click on the "DB Update" button, thinking it was the button to run swaret --update, which is the command to update the package list. However, after the progress bar finished, I noticed that the system was a little sluggish and the hard drive was quite active. To my horror, it turned out that swaret was upgrading some packages! Apparently I clicked the wrong thing at some point, but it wasn't readily apparent because QtSwaret doesn't give much in the way of feedback. Oh, you can watch the output of swaret in a text window on a tab in the upgrade screen, but that only works if you get to that tab before you run anything, because the progress dialog is modal. As if a a stupid, inaccurate percentage reading is the most important information you could possibly want from the program.