Usage

Virtual Terminals

There are 3 virtual terminals (fewer than most distros, to save memory). You can cycle between them with L_ALT + LEFT/RIGHT keys.

Xvesa

Running startx from the LiveCD will run a script asking for your X config parameters. jwm and icewm are installed by default. Only PS/2 and Serial (COM1/COM2) mice are supported by default, but USB mice can be enabled by passing usbhid on the kernel command line.

Any additional options passed to startx will in turn be passed to Xvesa. For example, you could override the screen mode with startx -mode 0x011A (run Xvesa -listmodes to get a list of supported settings). Note the script will still prompt for a resolution/depth, but if you provide -mode, any resolution you specify will be ignored.

After installing to the HDD, startx will automatically save your X configuration choices in /etc/Xconfig. If you need to adjust your configuration, edit that file; you can also delete the file entirely and re-run startx to generate a new config. Running NOSAVEX=true startx will run the script without saving your chosen config, even on an HDD installation.

When prompted for a window manager, you can specify any command you want - for example, startkde or gnome-session (the script does not list all installed window managers)

DOOM

Just run doom (or doom -h to see options). Runs best from the console (without X) but will automatically run the X version if X is running. You can specify dimensions with doom -width X -height Y. It's DOOM, you can technically play it on a 386, but you probably don't actually want to. If you set up sound drivers, the game should auto-detect them for both effects and music. See the BasicLinux documentation, but for an example Sound Blaster setup:

modprobe opl3 io=0x388
modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330

Note that the game will not run in 8MB of RAM if you enable sound and music. You may need to run aumix to set the synth volume before you will hear music.

`ogdoom`

Also included is a particularly ancient version of DOOM, linuxxdoom-1.10. It exclusively runs in 256-color mode, which sadly, Xvesa does not support. So this will not function in the LiveCD mode, though on a hard drive installation, a proper XFree86 server can be installed from the CD repo.

Gimp

Gimp wants to load all of its Pattern files into RAM at startup. The version of Gimp shipped with BasicLinux includes 10MB of pattern files. Thus, no system with less than 12MB of RAM stands a chance of running Gimp out of the box.

To remove this requirement, all of the pattern files have been moved onto a disk image. By default, Gimp will see an empty patterns/ directory, and will function within 8MB of RAM. If you have more than 12MB of RAM and want to use patterns in Gimp, you can run:

mount -o loop /usr/share/gimp/patterns.img /usr/share/gimp/patterns

On a hard drive installation, you could then copy only the patterns you want to ~/.gimp/patterns and unmount the disk image. This would conserve RAM while allowing you to still use the patterns feature.

glibc2 and Opera

As of v3.5.1 Beta 1 Rev 6, BL-LCARS includes glibc-2.3.1 and Opera 8.54. Opera 9.64 can be downloaded from the BL-LCARS GitHub repo (see /contrib). There is no need to install any additional libraries.

Note that the original BL3 instructions for installing Opera involve installing the misc-lib package. This package breaks compatibility with some Slackware packages, notably ImageMagick.

To install all of the relevant Slackware libraries, you need:

glibc231.tgz
libgr.tgz
xlib.tgz
x-libs.tgz
opera-85.tgz

The original BL3 packaging (which breaks some Slackware packages) needs only these files:

glibc231.tgz
misc-lib.tgz
opera-85.tgz

Java

The ancient JDK 1.1.7 for Solaris (including/compatible with JRE 1.1), ported by the Blackdown `java-linux` porting team was provided in the original Slackware 4.0 contrib repo. The package kinda works as-is, but it includes "helpful" wrapper scripts which attempt to automatically set the JAVA_HOME, CLASSPATH, and LD_LIBRARY_PATH variables appropriately. They manage OK for CLASSPATH, but not so much for the others.

The problem is, these scripts don't work with some Busybox builtins, like basename and dirname. Even when I install the Slack 4 versions of shell utilities, it doesn't fully work.

I've modified the scripts to work well with BasicLinux. I've also added a manfile (run man java for info), and two examples:

hellorld which is a simple [verbose] hello world program to verify Java runs (source in /usr/local/java/examples/Hellorld.java)

javademo which is an X11 demo app pulled from the upstream JDK 1.1 package

My package will live on the liveCD in /packages/contrib/jdk117.tgz while the unmodified original distribution will live at /contrib/java/original in the repo. My package should work on BasicLinux 3 floppy-based installs as well.

Samba

The default smb.conf is set to share the entire root filesystem, unprotected, to any guest user with no password. Utterly insecure, but in line with the BasicLinux principle of being DOS-like and offering maximal "rescue disc" potential. This share is accessible from \\BasicLinux\baslin or \\<IP ADDRESS>\baslin

Unfortunately, the version of Samba shipped with BasicLinux is very old (2.0.3) which does not support SMB2 (not its fault, it hadn't been invented yet). SMB2 is the minimum required protocol for modern clients (Samba 4, Windows 10). For reasons unknown, Windows XP seems to be reluctant to connect as well. So SMB is likely not the best way to access your BasicLinux host.

On the plus side, smbclient works fine for an FTP-like SMB interface. Connecting to RetroNAS (Samba 4.17) from BasicLinux succeeds, but is limited to the older smbfs 2GB file limits.

smbclient \\\\<IP ADDRESS>\\<SHARE> -U <USER>

smbclient \\\\<HOSTNAME>\\<SHARE> -U <USER>

Even better, smbmount works to mount SMB shares as Linux filesystems. The mount -t smbfs syntax is mysteriously broken, but the following works:

smbmount \\\\<IP ADDRESS>\\<SHARE> -U <USER>
<prompt for password>
mount <MOUNTPOINT>

I have to install the nls_cp437 codepage* and smbfs first:

modprobe nls_cp437
modprobe smbfs

*nls_cp437 is built into the V4 kernel. This is the US codepage, you may need to install a different one

This is how I find BasicLinux-LCARS to be most useful: I can mount my RetroNAS instance, and dd a complete vintage HDD over LAN. Slow, but so far very reliable.

netatalk

The kernel is built with appletalk support, and netatalk is shipped. An example config is in /etc/rc.d, but is not activated by default.