3 days using i3 tiling window manager under Slackware

I have heard about tiling window manager for some time, but lack the initiative to test one.  Recently I finally got fed up with resizing two windows side by side and decided to give titling manager a test.

After some research from the web, I settled on i3 tiling window manager for its simplicity.  With the help from SlackBuilds, I got the window manager installed and run without hassle (I did recompile the cairo with xcb support (from current) and use the latest i3 release version 4.5.1).

It took me a while to get familiar with the key bindings.  Thanks for the good documentation, I got used to it quickly and customized the configuration to suite my own needs.  No longer do I need to fight with the mouse to place the window to gain the last pixel.  Wow, I wish I should try it earlier.  It just simply awesome! Oh, and awesome is another good tiling window manager too ^_^.

I have used various window mangers and DE during the years of using Slackware.  From the beginning, it was fvwm, fvwm2, IceWM, window maker, GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, blackbox, EDE, E16, E17, fluxbox.  Now I am simply sold to the tiling manager and won't go back to the normal one.

Problem with wireshark 1.10.0 in Slackware 14

I just tried to compile wireshark 1.10.0 under Slackware64 14.0, using the build script from SBo.

It compiled fine, but running with segmentation fault.  It seems wireshark itself try to use libnl3 but libpcap in Slackwre is using libnl (version 1).  After adding configuration "--with-libnl=1" to force wireshark to use version 1 of libnl, it does not crash anymore.

But it did not use gnutls, it seems the version (3.0.23) in Slackware is too old, it required at least 3.1.10.  Currently, the latest stable version is 3.2.1, but it requires update nettle to 2.7 also.  I ended up update the gnutls lib to 3.1.12 to compile wireshark with tls support.

It seems Slackware-current does not update gnutls library yet, hope next version of Slackware could update the gnutls version to a newer one.

PS. seems nettle 2.7.1/gnutls 3.2.1/wireshark 1.10.0 works fine after I recompiled the 3 packages.

git error message '... does not point to a valid object'

I tried to sync my local git repository to the remote server and got some error messages saying certain objects are not valid object: "... does not point to a vlid object".

After searching the net, these two commands solve my problem:

git remote prune origin
git gc --prune=now

After that, re-sync my repository without problem.