Slashdot Mirror

THE GOOD

• LinuxCare's little bootable Linux recovery CD kicks ass. No bigger than a business card, it fits in the 3" diameter groove in CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive trays and has the potential to save your butt when lilo eats itself. They also had some Linux stickers that now adorn the case of my 386... (Yes, it runs Linux.)
• IBM had a presence. Although certainly not the largest or flashiest booth in the show, Quake 3 on a rather large plasma display attracted lots of attention. Dual PII-400 Intellistation + Voodoo 3 3000 + large plasma display. Mmmmmm. Thanks to the guys there for letting me get some game time on that mammoth thang...
• O'Reilly also had a presence, and their trade show pricing kicks much booty. Picked up a few books for 20% off list and got a shirt to boot...
• Mad props to VA Linux Systems for not only having a cool booth and giving away lots of stuff but for supplying the machines used for public Internet access. Their Debian boxed set is pretty cool and sports Learning Debian GNU/Linux from O'Reilly. (Yes, I was one of the people who stood around in line for ten or fifteen minutes to win this...)
• Thanks to the Sun and Rave Systems folks for all the free stuff. Learn to play Quake 2 without cheating before next year's show... :-) (Now where's my complimentary Sparc 5?)

THE BAD

• None of the shirts I got fit. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. I'm 6-foot-3-inches tall and weigh 295 pounds. Show me the big-assed shirts!
• The IBM guys told me that the Showcase had a T-1 connection to the 'Net. I couldn't verify -- the packet loss and latency was horrible on the connection. I'm hoping this is only because lots of geeks were pounding on the connection like a pack of wild monkeys...
• Food choices were few, and lines were long. Within the Galleria, your choices were Subway, some cafe whose name I don't remember, Ruby Tuesday's, and Chick-Fil-A. If you were bold, you could go to the movie theater downstairs and buy a big tub of popcorn. The group I was with walked across the street to another mall and ate at Arby's. Yum... I think.

THE UGLY

• Where the hell were the Slackware people? I wanted Slackware apparel... Hmmph.
• Linux merchandise places came out of the woodworks to hock their goods. Yay capitalism...
• Don't eat at Shoney's. Our group waited over an hour for food before giving up and leaving.

THE REST

• The andover.net/freshmeat.net/slashdot.org booth was smack dab next to the linux.com booth. Taken together, it looked like one big congregation of slackers with laptops. All things considered, however, I wouldn't have minded flopping down on the couch for a rest after walking around for a few hours...
• I will seek revenge against the guy in the Debian shirt who shot me in the arm with a Nerf dart... muahahahaha
• The Debian folks had a Sun Ultra 5 running XaoS, Netscape, and some Tetris clone in separate windows. Just for kicks, I maximized the XaoS window. Can we say slideshow?
• I had nothing interesting enough to trade with the lady at the VA Linux booth, so I didn't get one of those nifty enlightenment shirts. Dammit.
• NetBSD was there. Go figure.

Overall, it was a pretty cool show, but I wish I didn't have the 2-1/2 hour drive. It was put on very professionally and appeared to be very well organized. I was only slightly disappointed that the show wasn't any bigger... The nifty canvas bag attendees got and the included CD made up for that, though.

• The two Slackware Tuxen b("Bobbed" Tux and Tux as Bob (Sorry, don't have a URL, but it's Tux with Bob's pipe. I only know it exists because I have button with it on it from this year's COMDEX-Chicago.))
• Demon Linux Project (Using the Linux kernel with a BSD style setup) (An evil looking Tux with curved horns)

Hey, I was a Slackware guy! I still run it on my notebook.

You're trashing everybody who ran Slack because they didn't know Linux could be installed on FAT?

That was always a selling point of Slack. Anybody who installed Slack by reading the installation instructions (ie. nobody standing there saying "press enter here") knows that Slack has installed via UMSDOS for a looooooong time. Now there's ZipSlack, which is specifically designed to install on UMSDOS. Check it out here.

So be assured that all of the *real* Slackers know all about it. Any Slacker who says what you say they do is, well, a liar.

In a move hailed by the Green Party, Christopher Hitchens, and Italian PM Massimo d'Alema, the Labour Party announced that they will use Slackware instead.

"Finally Labour is going back to its proletarian roots" an enthusiastic Christopher Hitchens was quoted as saying, expressing his hope that the adoption of OpenSource "will hasten the demise of that bunch of inbred, brain-addled morons". Asked to specify who he was refering to (Labour or the Crown), Hitchens declined to comment.

Others were not so thrilled. An angry Richard Stallman summoned the British consul to his Boston office and upbraided the diplomat for "the imperial arrogance" shown by the crown by not referring to "Red Hat GNU/Linux".

Meanwhile the Conservative Party expressed regret that the Queen had not "shown support for free enterprise and Capitalism" by adopting Microsoft's Internet Server. A spokesman for the Tories added, "we'll have lots more to say about this on our web site, just as soon as we reboot".

• Linux.com
  
• Linux.org
  
• Red Hat Software
  
• Debian GNU/Linux
  
• Slackware Linux
  
  Thats all I can think of in the 10 seconds I took to write this. Hope it helps!
  

Yeah, this "cutting edge" crap is rediculous. Why release all this new software to all those users when it hasn't had time to be tested for stability/security? This is exactly why slackware stays libc5 and doesn't move to glibc2 since glibc2 isn't as stable or proven to be secure.

If some bug hits one of these packages, think of all the users who are going to have to download a new version since Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. are using "cutting edge" software instead of a stable version.

http://www.slackware.com.

Check out www.slackware.com for more information on Slackware 3.9/4.0.

--

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Please note also that Slackware 3.9 is available as well. 3.9 is just 4.0 with the 2.0.37pre10 kernel for those who are hesitant to use 2.2. Check http://www.slackare.com for more info.

I think you should mention ZipSlack... Installs as UMSDOS, so no reformatting or anything required, and Linux lives in (for example) C:\LINUX.

See www.slackware.com. (Although it seems to be down at the moment. :-P )

--

Slackware, the best distro ( IMO ) got sidestepped and given a 2 sentence overview. How pathetic. It deserves to be given at LEAST a semi-in-depth mention. The reason a lot of people, like myself, enjoy Linux is because of the power it lets you have over the operation system and not the other way around. Slackware embodies this power.... http://www.slackware.com

I started using Slackware when I was a Comp Sci major in college. My first kernel was 1.1.57 if I remember right and I had to learn quite a bit to get it running. All told, I think it took me a week and a failed exam to get my system completely up and running, including X.

I have thought about trying Red Hat, and I appreciate all they have done to help bring it into the mainstream, but a couple things have always kept me from doing it. I like the fact that with Slackware, everything isnt just prettied up into a nice rpm and ready to go. I need to make decisions about where things go, and how I want them configured. I need to actually read the README files and ensure I have what I need on my system, and this helps keep me fresh on whats out there and what is current. I also like the directory layout and other configuration layouts of Slackware.

While I have in the past (and will in the future) suggested Red Hat to some people, anyone who really wants to jump in and learn whats going on, I always suggest Slackware.

You can definitely mount your fat32 drives r/w under kernel >2.0.34 and with 2.2.*. Make sure you mount as type vfat instead of msdos so you may keep your windows long filenames, or you may get some Progra~1 junk for filenames.

If you want to boot a linux system off a fat32 partition, I would recommend using UMSDOS, which is a simulated Linux filesystem that can live on fat partitions. It uses extra files and funny file names in the directory for UNIX file permissions, but it feels slower than a native ext2 filesystem so you may not want to use it for performance reasons. One of the few distributions that supports UMSDOS is Slackware with their Zipslack. I just tried it out a couple weeks ago on a machine at home, and it is ok, but it's nowhere near the speed of my native ext2 system at school.

That's too bad. Your arguments aren't valid either. Let's go through and figure out why:

1) It lacks real package manager (ok, do slackware packages ever get updated after the distribution has been released or can I find "slackware packages" from freshmeat.net somewehere),

Well, there's pkgtool, which works quite well. It removes all files associated with the package, even tells you what files were removed via /var/log/packages so you can see if something got deleted that shouldn't have been (Maybe a shared file). But really, tar xvzf package.tar.gz;cd package;./configure;make;make install is not that hard, and gives you the chance to tweak things if needed (Ever use qmail with qpopper?)

There's also the slackware contrib directory, included on the cd and via ftp at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slac kware/contrib/.

And if you have no other option then to download a redhat or debian rpm, there's rpm2tgz, included with slackware 3.6, that converts an rpm package to a tgz package suitable for installation using installpkg or pkgtool.

2) 0% support (on Debian I am sure everything is up to date thanks to apt, on redhat there is at least an erratas webpage that lists fixes and updates)

Wrong again. Looking at http://www.slackware.com"> there is a lot of support there. They have a message board for technical questions, Install Help, a list of updated packages, etc. You can even email Volkerding and he'll reply.

Although by reading your message, it looks like you mean not support, but a way to see if everything's current. Well, you can just check the Changelog to see what he changed. You can find the changelog at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux /slackware/ChangeLog.txt. Not only does that notify you of security updates, but general updates as well.

3) It cannot be upgraded without trashing your system (when it is a 30 minute process on other distributions)

Really? I guess that my having upgraded from 3.4->3.5->3.6 without ever formatting must be a halucination. You have two choices. 1- Just install over the top. 2- Use pkgtool to remove your packages first, then run the install program. Takes me only 30-40mins to upgrade my system.

4) Never up to date (glibc2 ?)

Up to date is a relative term. If by up to date you mean the latest cutting edge beta libs and programs that haven't been tested thouroughly yet, well, I guess you're right. But OTOH, if you mean the latest stable libs and programs that have been tested, you're wrong. Remember, glibc2.0 won't be around long, and glibc2.1 is still beta, and still unstable. It hurts the linux community when a company puts out a distro that contains buggy software, as that pulls the general public's view of linux down to that of Microsoft. Just another company shipping products with bugs to get it on the marketplace rather then excercising a little patience and releasing a quality product.

5) It is a nightmare to maintain compared to other distributions.

I don't know how you maintain a box, but when I was working for a midsize ISP (Midsize for the area, about 1300 dialups) we used Slackware on all our machines. Rarely were upgrades needed, and when they were, we simply configured it on one machine, tar'd up the dir, and copied it to the others. We even got fancy and wrote a script to untar it, make it, then make install it. No need to worry about having dependancies, and no need to fuss with someone's precompiled binary.

Fact of the matter is, when you're running in most corporate environments, control of the box is an issue. With Slackware I just install and go. The times I've tried to use redhat, I ended up having to install several key components by hand because the rpm's didn't use the compile options we needed. Although as someone said earlier, FreeBSD is also a good option (Although I personally prefer OpenBSD as Theo is a security god).

That's all I read when ever I see ANYTHING remotely connected with Linux or OSS.
Why is that?
Where's Slackware or SuSE?

although i think Debian's the bet distribution, at work for some reason Slackware was the only one out of RH, Debian, and SW to recognize a really old and junky NE2000 clone network card...

I like Slackware better.

Besides, how great can the Inforworld Award be if the same company keeps getting it?