Updating Slackware — 5

I found more issues while testing the upcoming Slackware 15.

I saw stderr messages about my /etc/host.conf file. I have the following options in the file:

    nospoof on
    spoofalert on
    spoof warn

Searching the web indicates the spoof options are not supported in the glibc resolver libraries. The Slackware 14.2 man page indicated the options were introduced in glibc 2.0.7 but never implemented. The Slackware Current man page indicated support for the options was removed after glibc 2.24. The glibc change log confirms the host.conf spoof code was removed 2016-12-27. Based on that information, whether using an older host.conf file or updating to Current from 14.2, those options never were useful. The options are irrelevant in 14.2 but creates stderr spew in Current.

Yeah, I haven’t touched my host.conf file in many years.

Despite the icon theme selected, in my testing the Xfce power manager systray icon is flat, likely defaulting to one of the “contrast” theme icons.

I saw repeated messages of file /var/lib/alsa/asound.state lock error: No such file or directory. Both the directory and file existed. 0755 permissions and root:root ownership.

Using alsactl -L in rc.alsaavoids the errors.

Both aplay and speaker-test functioned fine.

Booting with rc.alsa not executable (chmod -x) also worked.

The only cure I have found is using the -L option.

When booting directly to runlevel 1 I saw another oddball message: Current bug: netlink error: failed to retrieve link setting/No such device. The network controller card is a Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet using the r8169 module.

Running ethtool produced the spew. I did not find any clues online or in the logs. The spew did not appear when booting to runlevel 3.

While networking usually is not used in runlevel 1, I never have seen this behavior. I discovered the bug because my rc.local[_shutdown] scripts use ethtool to ensure wake-on-lan (WOL) is enabled. I resolved the problem by modifying my scripts to send ethtool stderr to /dev/null.

A weird bug appeared again when booting directly to runlevel 1. I would randomly see one to three blank lines with the rc.font stdout spew (launched from rc.K).

The bug did not appear when booting to runlevel 3.

Normally when booting to runlevel 3 I saw the following:

    Setting the console font:
    Loading 256-char 11x22 font from file /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/ter-122n.psf.gz
    Loading Unicode mapping table...

When booting directly to init 1 there would be one to three blank lines between the two “Loading” messages.

I could not replicate the bug when running rc.font manually in runlevel 1. My solution was to move launching rc.font and rc.keymap to the end of rc.K.

When using bash history the search term was highlighted, which never happened before. This new behavior is caused by changes in the readline command. I removed the highlighting by editing /etc/inputrc with set enable-bracketed-paste off.

I noticed fc-cache was not working correctly.

    /usr/local/share/fonts/OTF: skipping, looped directory detected
    /usr/local/share/fonts/ttf: skipping, looped directory detected

I resolved that in /etc/fonts/local.conf by removing /usr/local/share/fonts and creating two lines, one for each subdirectory:

    /usr/local/share/fonts/OTF
    /usr/local/share/fonts/ttf

Another annoyance was testing a fresh install of Current. When using the mount command I saw a significant output spew about cgroup file systems. Digging into this I found the default behavior of /etc/mtabin the Slackware installer was changed to a sym link to /proc/mounts. I found some comments in rc.S that this is the new default, but the snippet of code still supported using /etc/mtab as a file. Removing the symlink and replacing with touch /etc/mtab eliminated the useless cgroup spew.

On the T400 laptop I was seeing kernel: intel_powerclamp: No package C-state available. My solution was to add blacklist intel_powerclamp module to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

With the change to using PAM, I was seeing message-of-the-day (MOTD) spew when logging in. The old /etc/login.defs supported not displaying that text. The only solution I found when using PAM is using touch .hushlogin.

The journey continues.

Posted: May 17, 2021 Category: Usability Tagged: Slackware

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