Slackware64-current with KDE Plasma in Parallels Desktop on macOS

Introduction

I like working from macOS (Catalina, 10.15). I have my habits since 2006 and, now, with iTerm2 + zsh and a few plugins, plus other software (TextMate...), life is good. But there will always be that one moment in your work life where you find yourself wishing you had a GNU/Linux distro at hand, just to try something real quick. Anyway, that's my case.

Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a conundrum: I have the bad habit of getting every distro with a package manager FUBAR in a few months' time. Yes, I'm looking at you, Debian, and at your derivatives [OpenSUSE: you're ok; for everyone else: YMMV]. In macOS, I'm using Parallels Desktop, so at least it's easy to save a working version of the virtual machine before attempting things. I have had some very good luck running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed in Parallels Desktop in the past years, but for some reason when I installed it yesterday it... Didn't ran, and just spent time taking 100% of the processors in the VM (I let it run on 6 cores, 4GB RAM, 1GB video RAM) while trying to load the desktop, after an installation process that went quite well.

I decided to go back to my early teenager-years distro: Slackware, and to what's in my opinion the best desktop environment of this time, KDE Plasma (I've always had a soft spot for Enlightenment, howerver, and I find that the Solus distro gives good options and a nice desktop [with Budgie/Gnome/Mate/Plasma available], for anyone wanting something simple -- but it doesn't work well in Parallels Desktop). Due to a specific Wifi driver in the beginning of the 2000s, I had to use Slackware and recompile the kernel to get Internet to work. I learnt a lot. Would that still work in 2020? Yes, with a few limitations.

Limitations

Let's get right now to the limitations: I haven't been able to install Parallels Tools. As such, I don't have access to my macOS folders from Slackware, neither can I resize the Parallels window to have the X server change the resolution. I tried installing Parallels Tools using the "hack" of deleting the check for requirements (particularly the package manager) but it borked my Xorg install, so use at your own risk.

Installation

Installation itself went smoothly: download the DVD in torrent, select it as boot device in Parallels, and choose your packages. I did make one more partition than needed, for /boot/, because I knew I wanted to go the grub way. I deselected all the KDE packages, as they are part of the KDE 4 version. After installation, I choose to not install Lilo and followed the procedure here to install grub at first install.

After the first boot, I created a user, and followed the mkinitrd procedure here, just to have a cleaner boot. I initially tried adding my configuration in /etc/grub.d/40_custom but after a few updates & upgrades the new kernel was automatically added to grub.

Upgrade

I followed the system upgrade procedure here: blacklist the kernel in /etc/slackpkg/blacklist, manually upgrade the kernel and modules (by downloading them from one of the mirrors), update the initrd, and finally select a mirror for slackware64-current in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors. 

 

A last grub update :

 

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

 

Then: 

# slackpkg update gpg
# slackpkg update
# slackpkg upgrade slackpkg
# slackpkg upgrade glibc-solibs
# slackpkg install-new
# slackpkg upgrade-all
# slackpkg clean-system
# slackpkg new-config

Then a reboot, for luck.

Plasma 5

Installing Plasma 5 can be a bit daunting, if you look at the readme file. But, thanks to AlienBob and Epsi, the procedure is quite simple. First, make sure your system is up-to-date and everything, then manually install slackpkgplus. Enable (add) the ktown repository in /etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf, and continue the procedure following Epsi's instructions (update GPG, update, etc.).

As root, I deleted (just for luck) /etc/X11/xorg.conf-vesa and didn't run X -configure. With Parallels Tools, I had the "EE No usable screen(s) found" error in X, but by default this seems to work fine! 

Finally, as a user, I launched startx just to make sure, and then in xwmconfig I selected the Plasma Desktop.

When I was sure that everything was setup right, I changed the init to level 4 in /etc/inittab, and rebooted to KDM. I was able with a bit of fiddling to get my MacBook Pro keyboard working with the right layout in Plasma, and to configure zsh as I wanted (in Konsole).

That's it! If you had any luck installing Parallels Tools and getting X to work in Slackware64-current on Parallels Desktop, please let me know. If you have questions about my setup, I'll be happy to answer them in the comments.

WeTabOS to pure MeeGo

OK, I must warn those who are reading this text: more than I'm used to, this post is going to be really nerdy, maybe not in the best meaning of the term. This post will describe in details how to remove the WeTabOS from the WeTab internet tablet (http://wetab.info).

Brace yourselves, and get a lamp 'cause there's gonna be some grues.

First, why wouldn't I want to use the WeTab OS? Well I found the Graphical User Interface truly horrible, lacking any ergonomics engineering. While the core of the system, based on MeeGo, seemed to be good and usable (hey, a terminal accessible from the WeTab Market! Adobe Air supported out of the box!), the G.U.I. just didn't made it. The right panel always visible, the ugly virtual keyboard, I could go for hours. Ok, maybe minutes, but STILL.

Being a geek, I also wanted to try some other tablet operating system (or linuxes particularly packaged for these tablets, like JoliCloud). I use a N900 phone every day, so MeeGo, the successor to Maemo, seemed the way to go. I grabbed a disk image on their website (http://meego.com/), took the one with Chrome Browser (labelled "MeeGo v1.1 for Netbooks (Google Chrome Browser)")(there's a E.U.L.A. http://download5.meego.com/netbook/meego-v1.1-netbooks-google-chrome-browser). There's a good how-to for creating your own USB booting device, there: http://meego.com/devices/netbook/installing-meego-your-netbook, the guide is pretty straight-forward and adapted to all operating systems. The partition table of your USB drive can be either MBR or GUID (I tried with both) thanks to the WeTab having an Extensible Firmware Interface 'bios'.

Now that you have your USB drive, it's time to prepare the WeTab to boot on it. Simplest way: using the PLOP bootloader, instructions here: http://wetabz.blogspot.com/2010/10/using-plop-boot-manager.html. Basically, all you have to do is download a binary of PLOP here, copy the .img and the .bin to /boot/extlinux/, and add the entry to /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf with vim or gedit (sudo is your friend here).

label plop
menu label ^plpbt
KERNEL memdisk
INITRD plpbt.img
menu default

I removed the "menu default" from the WeTab OS entry and added it to PLOP, just to be sure that if the keyboard isn't recognized I'll be able to boot PLOP.

So, that's it. Plug your USB drive, reboot the WeTab, don't forget to plug it to its AC adapter, and to maintain the 'soft' button as soon as the blue led lights up, and select the 'plop' entry (the quickstart button (the thingy on the upper-left of the WeTab, near the camera) can act as a selector in PLOP: one push to go down, hold to select the entry). If everything goes well, the MeeGo boot menu should appear. It didn't worked when I choose "try MeeGo", so I did an install (I already tested that in a virtual machine in OSX to be sure), and I entirely removed the WeTab OS. It should be feasible to dual- or triple-boot (plop is good for these kind of things), but I didn't wanted to spend disk space for multiple OS. Anyway, once the image is copied on the WeTab's disk, you can reboot. If you haven't done that before, now is the time to plug your USB keyboard in the WeTab.

At that point I had an error at boot, the famous "init: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes.". Just shut down the device, wait for a few seconds, and reboot.
If there's an error, or you have to leave the first screens of the MeeGo boot, don't panic: at the startup prompt, login as 'root', password 'meego', and type 'firstrun' on the command line, it'll relaunch the registering process for the new user.

Then, to activate the virtual keyboard! Again, MeeGo's website is useful for that. Basically what you have to do is add repositories to the package manager, and refresh the repositories :

$ sudo zypper addrepo http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/1.1/handset/repos/ia32/packages/ handset
$ sudo zypper refresh

then, do a '$ sudo zypper install meegotouch-inputmethodbridges', and '$ sudo zypper install meegotouch-inputmethodkeyboard'. You can do that either by plugging an USB mouse to the WeTab and selecting the Terminal in the Applications menu, or switching to the command prompt by alt+F2 or ctrl+alt+F2.
Now we are going to say to the system that it can use another input method by modifying /etc/xdg/autostart/meego-im-uiserver.desktop, adding the '-target name' and the "X-MEEGO-NB" at the end. name refers to an entry in /etc/meegotouch/devices.conf. For the WeTab, good values are 1366x768 for the X and Y resolution, and 250 and 200 for ppiX and ppiY.
Reboot! ('$ sudo shutdown -r now' or ctrl+alt+backspace)

Now you should have a working virtual keyboard! Congrats.
For the hard but last part: getting the touchscreen to work! Yeah, that thing didn't worked, from the first boot. MeeGo chooses to attribute to it a USB driver, and that is not working. At all.
So, another helpful post from Samiux's Blog, http://samiux.blogspot.com/2010/07/howto-ubuntu-1004-on-gigabyte-touchnote.html, is going to help us a lot. If you choose to install Ubuntu or some other GNU/Linux distribution based on it (Kubuntu, etc.) then you're in luck, because that bug has already been patched in the main branch (read the informations here).

Alas, we have to get dirty again. if you look closely, the post from Samiux's blog describes its touchscreen as a 'Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0eef:0001 D-WAV Scientific Co., Ltd eGalax TouchScreen', on the WeTab it's a 'ID 0eef:72a1 D-WAV Scientific Co., Ltd' (to check that, run a '$ lsusb'). We have to change the instructions in order to make it work.

In /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, add this line : 'blacklist usbtouchscreen'.

Another thing that changes is that MeeGo doesn't rely on GRUB to boot: the WeTab has an EFI 'bios', so it's extlinux again (I say again because the WeTabOS uses it too) that manages the boot. Instead of the 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i8042.noloop=1 usbhid.quirks=0xeef:0x1:0x40"' described on Samiux's website, we have to append this after the last line in the first entry: 'i8042.noloop=1 usbhid.quirks=0xeef:0x72a1:0x40'. Note that I changed the second hexadecimal value to match the one from our 'lsusb'.

You also have to add a file in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ section. '$ sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/05-evdev.conf' (or whatever your preferred editor is, at that point I had already installed VIM) (again, thanks to Samiux), and add in this newly created file:

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "eGalax"
MatchProduct "eGalax"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "evdev"
Option "SwapAxes" "off"
Option "Calibration" "2 4100 11 4099"
EndSection

Another thing that changes: it's not Debian, so we don't have to create the .deb for xinput_calibrator like Samiux describes. Just a '$ sudo zypper install xinput_calibrator' will do the job.

Now you can reboot and enjoy the touchscreen.

And... That's it! Now you can play with it, install OpenOffice (really easy) and Firefox, impress your friends, patati patata.

P.S.: It may (or may not) have been easier to just remove the 4tiitoo UI from the WeTabOS and put MeeGo's one in place, but I'm really not sure about that. Let's say that technically, it should work (after adding the MeeGo repositories to yum, deleted everything related to tiitoo, then having installed MeeGo's UI).
Do not hesitate to ask questions here about the procedure or about MeeGo, I'll try to answer them as best as I can. Google is also (and always your friend), as are the guys on the MeeGo forum.