vostro Slack on Vostro June 25, 2010 It'd been a while since I last upgraded Slackware, so I decided last Monday that I'd do just that. All in all, it was a whole lot easier to set up Slackware 13.1 on my Dell Vostro 1500 than it was on Slackware 12. Compositing (in X) basically worked out of the box after I . Oh, and As I did last time, I'll just focus mainly on getting the hardware to work. Just for reference, in case something doesn't work for you due maybe to permissions, my user account is part of the floppy, audio, video, cdrom, plugdev, power, and scanner groups. Also, my console uses the framebuffer, i.e. I have vga = 791 in my lilo.conf. I consider something working out-of-the-box if I don't have to install anything extra (e.g. drivers) for it. So if it's just a configuration issue, it's considered working out of the box. It sort of doesn't make sense, but that's just how I group these things. Processor System Board RAM Power Button Brightness Keys (Fn + Up and Down Arrows) -- both in X and in Console TrueLife Display Hard Drive CD/DVD Burner Keyboard USB Ethernet Suspend-to-Disk
Note: The command is: echo -n disk > /sys/power/state Suspend-to-RAM
Note: The command is: echo -n mem > /sys/power/state Internal Microphone
Note:The capture device is muted by default. Just run alsamixer (in terminal), hit tab to get to the capture devices, turn up the volume on everything and enable Capture by pressing the spacebar. Alternatively, you can use kmix and check the checkbox under Capture to enable it:


Sound
Note: It's muted by default - just open alsamixer, unmute everything, and type:alsactl store Built-in Webcam
Note: I'd recommend getting and setting Backlight Compensation to 0 and White Balance Temperature, Auto to 0 to improve the framerate in lower light conditions (e.g. indoors) like this:uvcdynctrl -s 'White Balance Temperature, Auto' -- 0
uvcdynctrl -s 'Backlight Compensation' -- 0Note on Compiling uvcdynctrl and libwebcam: You'll need to modify the CMakeLists.txt file in libwebcam and uvcdynctrl to get it to compile. See this link for details:

After that, you can use uvcdynctrl to adjust the white balance manually. Run this to see your webcam. To get an approximate framerate, just divide the number of frames successfully processed (when you quit mplayer) by the time for which you ran mplayer:time mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:outfmt=mjpegAnd assuming you've enabled your internal microphone and have your speakers unmuted, you should be able to capture video with audio using mencoder. Here's the command I've been using:mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:outfmt=mjpeg:forceaudio:alsa:amode=1 -oac pcm -vf dsize=1.33\|640:480 -ovc lavc -o test.avi -fps 25 Multimedia Buttons (they Just Work™ in KDE) Synaptics Touchpad
All right. So this one is borderline out-of-the-box. I didn't have to install any drivers, but I did have to copy over my configuration settings from my old installation, which would probably take a long time to figure out for a first-timer. . Built-in Memory Card Reader
Just look for /dev/mmcblk0 when you insert your memory card. You can mount /dev/mmcblk0p1, which is your memory card's first partition. Wireless (Dell 1395)
Follow the to install both b43-fwcutter and the firmware. If you're using Slackware 13.1, you're probably using linux-2.6.33, so follow the second set of instructions (entitled "You are using the b43 driver from linux-2.6.25 or newer") for installing the firmware.

After you have the driver installed, you'll have to turn on the wireless interface before you can connect to access points (I'm noting this because I didn't have to do this when I used ndiswrapper in Slackware 12.1):ifconfig wlan0 up S-Video IR