On Fri, 25 Feb 2022, Bill Barry wrote:
What kind of major issues installing slackware? I would think the best laptop is the one you have. I don't think they have not improved dramatically over the last few years in any dimension that will matter to you. You don't need a high end gaming graphics card or an expensive gpu to do machine learning do you? The most relevant thing that has improved are SSD interfaces, but even there I would not think you really need a cutting edge SSD drive. You could just figure out what the problem is with the installation.
Bill, I'd much prefer to get the Dell running consistently. It's met all my needs as a portable work station since I bought it. And it has a fairly new 500G SSD installed (and I think it's a Samsung; I don't have the specs recorded here.) The two issues I've encountered (which did not appear in earlier Slackware versions on it) are: 1) Booting hanging when loading ntpd, despite rc.ntpd (the script that loads it on demand) is not executable. Doesn't happen every time which makes it difficult to diagnose. 2) Inability to log in as a user. There's no error, only a return to the login prompt. Again, intermittent, but has not happened on any desktop or laptop I've used since I switched from Red Hat to Slackware in 2003. Thanks, Rich
