exwm and SLIME

Recently, I installed Slackware 14.2 and exwm on a spare SSD in my gaming desktop so that I could have a minimalist but powerful environment for developing Common Lisp.

However, due to my Nvidia card, the usually simple and stable Slackware booted into a black screen. To remedy this, I booted into my Slackware USB rescue stick (the one that it makes you create on installation), opened up /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf and added “nomodeset” to the append string. My config ended up looking like this:

chooser=simple

delay=1

timeout=1

#

image=vmlinuz

label=vmlinuz

read-only

append=”root=/dev/sda1 vga=normal ro nomodeset”

Afterwards, I could *see* the result of booting into my Slackware installation. However, Xorg did not work until I installed the official Nvidia driver, which was an extraordinarily seamless process (in particular, since Slackware installs your kernel and header code on the box).

The Nvidia Linux drivers can be downloaded here, and on Slackware should be as simple as running the binary as root: https://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html