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I have a pirated version of a linux distribution and other FOSS, I share the torrent only with you: http://www.slackware.com/torrents/slackware-12.2-install-dvd.torrent

Yup - there is.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4582957/slackware-12.2-dvd-iso

The latest Slackware 12.2 Linux distro.

Check the md5 sum though, just to be safe.

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-12.2-iso/slackware-12.2-install-dvd.iso.md5

Are you talking about this?

I hope not. I'm have used kubuntu since 0606 and been happy about it and recommended it to everybody. But I stayed on 0804 with still has kde 3.5, and now I'm looking for an alternative distro.

Ubuntu / Kbuntu are bastardized distros. Ubuntu has to learn that there's a difference between trying to create a more user-friendly distro and "more Windows-like experience". And Xubuntu is a mess.

Try openSUSE (and use this link to get all the media codecs with one click). Try Fedora. Try Mandriva Heck, try Slackware.

The kde developers said you can always stick with kde3, but truth be told you can't.

Sure you can. No one's holding a gun to your head and making you stick with fedora. I'd rather be drawn and quartered, personally.

As usual, Slackware is doing the sensible thing - slack 12.2 comes with KDE 3.5.10.

Hm, I'm looking at http://slackware.com/install/ which says,

2. Selecting A Boot Disk
Slackware Linux comes with many precompiled boot disks to use during the installation process. You want to choose one that best fits your hardware.

3. Selecting A Root Disk
You need to have a diskette with a root filesystem and the setup program in order to install Slackware Linux. There are several to choose from.

Surely I can't be the only one who's seen this this and thought, "Well, I've no floppy drive, so this is a non-starter for me"? Perhaps it'd be better to say "Slackware Linux comes with many precompiled boot disk images [my emphasis] to use during the installation process"?

Only later in the piece (http://slackware.com/install/setup.php) does it say that

You can install from another hard disk partition, floppy disks, an NFS mount, a pre-mounted directory, or from CD-ROM.

(/me reflects that he sometimes hears complaints like this about *our* documentation, and might now be slightly less inclined to respond to such comments with, "You didn't bother reading the next section, did you?" in future...)

yes I am a karma whore.

Slackware 9.0 was the first Slackware to officially not support the 386, sorry. You need a 486 now. (I know, technically all you need is a recompile to get it working for a 386, but that's a lot of recompiling. This isn't Gentoo here :P)

I have ran linux for about 5 years now, and ive stuck with one distro: Slackware
I have tried others (BSDs, gentoo, debian) And they all have cool features. I have found that slack seems to be the most versatile, and stable. Yea, it might suck to install apps (i compile the source myself, none of the slapt-get shit).
I think I will always use Slack just because you have the features that every other distro has .. Or maybe it doesnt try to cut out certain things, its a generic distro.

I'm surprised that many people, even my fellow Slackers, don't know about Slackware's mailing lists. In usual Slackware down-to-earth-and-keep-it-simple approach to things, you just subscribe to the security mailing list, and you get an email when the team has applied a security patch to a package in the 'current' tree. Simple, effective, and you never worry about having a patch pushed to you that going to break something. From what I understand (I'm not on the list, as I take Slackware proper and then do my own thing and keep my own package tree) they're patched as soon as upstream has a patch.

As for GP, I'd just like to point out that Slackware is the most 'vanilla' distro you're going to find; you can customize it, cut it down, mold it... I've got an old socket A Duron @ 900 MHz that cold boots to a ~50 Slackware distro (services included). I run iSCSI that I compiled (user and kernel sides) by hand with the libraries that I use. With dependency tracking and whatnot, if you want a single package, you might end up apt-getting/yumming 300 megs of Gnome and all of its services because somewhere something is linked to GTK, whose library is compiled with a different libc than the one you're currently running, and next thing you know, you're dropping in a new kernel, libc, a handful of services, GTK and a desktop environment because you wanted a text-only calendar that needed a single library. I'm exaggerating, but not by much. I had that problem on RHEL today - I wanted to install Zimbra, which needed fetchmail, but I wanted to get rid of all the other mail programs and just run Zimbra. So, I removed dovecot, postfix, and sendmail, which pulled out fetchmail because it needed an smtpdaemon. So, I yummed fetchmail back, and it pulled in exim with it to meet that requirement (even though Zimbra brings postfix with it... but it's not from upstream, so I can't let fetchmail use it to meet the dependency). To summarize, I wanted to remove three email programs, it took out four, and then made me put three back in. In Slackware the answer would have been './configure && make install', and to remove them I'd have 'make uninstall'. Just something to think about.

Sorry if I haven't been enough of a purist about this. I promise I won't inflate the version number again (unless everyone else does again ;)

http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#0

Plenty of people. Slackware jumped from version 4 to 7 because Patrick got tired of people asking him when he'd upgrade to "Linux 6.0".

Read: http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#0

If they really want to start at > 1 then at least talk them into something with meaning, try an abbreviation of the year. For instance start at version 8 if you release this year. Have 8.1 for a follow up released this year. This way there is a justifiable reason if your customs question you on it and the number actually conveys some meaningful information.

Heathen! You feeble Jack is puny and fails before the might of the Great Bob! Does YOUR deity have an entire Operating System based on his word? No! All he has is a wimpy game based on knowledge of the lame like Britney Spears! Denounce your failure of a deity and repent! Jack...PFFFT! I fart in his general direction!

Slackware

Famous last words.

Slackware

This looks like a good option?

1. Slackware for trhe Linux distribution.
2. Fluxbox for the GUI.
3. Then, you can use either the Gnome Slackbuild or the Slackbuilds files to compile Mono on your Slackware machine.

the front page may not change alot, but it changes, check the wayback machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.slackware.org

in each release Pat is removing the previous one...

but for those that really like slackware know that the real news arent in the front page, but in the changelog:
http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386

go there and you will see many news!!

in there you also see that managing a distro isnt fetching the packages and compile, it requires alot testing tweak up and vision... and the changelog only have the public things, Pat and many other people have alot of work behind the scenes

The number of available options for booting your Slackware installer is similarly limited: either you boot your computer from the bootable first CDROM of the Slackware CD set, or from the DVD, or using a USB stick. There is even loadlin, the DOS based Linux starter, but lets not concern ourselves with the past today. Slackware 12.0 abandoned the floppy boot altogether.

With this, all that was required of a given client machine was a functional floppy drive, ONE floppy disk, & BIOS support for floppy boot. Pretty straightforward.

No, you don't need a floppy. The ISOs are bootable.

In addition to keeping with the spirit of Linux distributions circa 1995, Slack seems to keep actual documentation from that era as well. The system requirements you list, plus:

Q11: Is it possible to install this operating system without a floppy drive?

The only answer involves using LOADLIN to jump into a linux kernel from DOS. Wow! I appreciate the simplicity of Slack, but their main FAQ could include at least reference bootable CDs - it has been 14 years.

So it's like UMSDOS? A good idea though, ZipSlack was the easy way to try Linux that got me started.

Yeah, cause no one uses FTP anymore, right?

No. You, sir, are full of crap. When you look at what's actually used and widely recognized in the world of Linux (especially for desktops), you'll plainly see that there are several "mainstream" distros that garner the lion's share of attention and represent the vast majority of the installed base:

In no particular order:

(1) Red Hat Linux

(2) Fedora Linux (community bleeding-edge source for Red Hat)

(2) Mandriva Linux (used to be Mandrake)

(3) Ubuntu Linux (plus variants, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc)

(4) SUSE Linux (owned by Novell these days)

(5) Gentoo Linux

Yes, we also have Debian, Slackware and many others that don't necessarily have huge commercial ties, but they're also the base for many commercial distros. You might be using Linux From Scratch, or one of several dozen other random distros with has an installed base of 100 users, but if that's the case you're pretty far from the average desktop or server Linux user.

My Apache logs tell the story pretty well. As Captial One might say, what's in your logfiles?

Bah!

Slackware 8.1 was officially released on June 18 2002, and is still officially supported (a security patch for CUPS was released on Nov 1 2007). I'm not sure what their policy is for when to drop support, though.

OK, I give up. Exactly whom or what is Pat?

Pat is Slackware.

What ever happened to minimal?

It still exists, you might want to give it a try...

But Linux goes to 11. :)
http://www.slackware.com/announce/11.0.php

Give slackware booting to runlevel 3, gnu screen, gnu coreutils, vim, lynx/links/w3m/elinks, lftp, rtorrent, and moosic a try. There are many others of course.

Nope. Slackware jumped from version 4 to version 7 because they didn't want to be perceived as being behind other distributions.

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

No XGL, but if you need it it shouldn't be as difficult now that Slackware ships with X.org 7.2.

That being said, the new X.org comes with AIGLX which I prefer (but doesn't support all cards) and yes, compiz is officially a part of the Slackware distribution now although only with kde-window-decorator by default.

If you need gtk-window-decorator (for xfce), check out http://slackware.com/~rworkman/compiz. Does not include gconf support, so you'll want to be starting compiz and {kde,gtk}-window-decorator via CLI or a script to load with your DE of choice.

I've been running AIGLX+compiz+xfce on slackware-current in the weeks leading up to this release using rworkman's packages and it has been dead stable.

I think it's clear that some other distributions inflated their version numbers for marketing purposes, and I've had to field (way too many times) the question "why isn't yours 6.x" or worse "when will you upgrade to Linux 6.0" which really drives home the effectiveness of this simple trick. With the move to glibc and nearly everyone else using 6.x now, it made sense to go to at least 6.0, just to make it clear to people who don't know anything about Linux that Slackware's libraries, compilers, and other stuff are not 3 major versions behind...I promise I won't inflate the version number again (unless everyone else does again ;)

12 versions in 14 years

Nope. See: http://slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#0

The version was bumped from 4 to 7 at one point, skipping 5 and 6. So that's only 10 major versions.

Still, number of versions is one of the most meaningless things ever.

Or you could just circumvent the spyware all together.

"We are proud to announce that Slackware Linux version 11.0 has been finally released; it took some time but is well worth the wait. You can read the official announcement at this link. Slackware 11.0 contains the 2.4.33.3 Linux kernel, 2.6.17.13 in /extra and 2.6.18 in the /testing directory; the default boot option is the dependable 2.4.33.3 kernel, but this time we included more choices and support for 2.6.x kernels..." http://www.slackware.com/

Come on guys, is it really news every time Microsoft patches a new security flaw in Windows? When are we going to see the weekly Slashdot articles about the Linux security patches?

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2007-0338.html
http://support.novell.com/linux/psdb/bydate.html
http://www.debian.org/security/
http://www.slackware.com/security/list.php?l=slack ware-security&y=2007

Your best bet is to start with Slackware 11, it's a manual distribution which will force you to actually get involved with it and learn how things work under the hood.

For example, you have to write your own iptables firewall script. But by doing this, you'll be able to understand the output of "iptables --list" on any distro out there and see what it's doing behind the scenes (for instance, amusingly, what holes does it leave open if any?).

You can download the distro here, for free:
http://www.slackware.com/
(my favorite mirror is: http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/slackwa re-11.0-iso/)

There's a good book on it available here: http://www.slackbook.org/

Think of it this way (using a car analogy like the other guy, but more seriously):

If you learn to drive in a car with a five speed stick and a clutch, you'll be able to drive almost any wheeled vehicle on Earth with very little futzing around. It's almost like having a superpower.

But if you start out driving an automatic, you'll ONLY be able to drive automatic until somebody teaches you manual. And you won't have any reason to learn it, so you'll miss out on a potentially important skill.

It's better to start out with something challenging and switch to the easy stuff later.

Go Slackware, be a nerd like us! You'll thank me later.

The first time I tried to install Slackware (having previous installed Debian with several issues), it didn't take a single hour. In fact, the third and fourth install didn't take only an hour, either.

Something tells me you didn't read this or this.
If you just expect things to be set up right, you can't just install and be happy. In fact, the tendency to do that with Windows leads to the hosing of said Windows systems you write about.

The first time I tried to install Slackware (having previous installed Debian with several issues), it didn't take a single hour. In fact, the third and fourth install didn't take only an hour, either.

Something tells me you didn't read this or this.
If you just expect things to be set up right, you can't just install and be happy. In fact, the tendency to do that with Windows leads to the hosing of said Windows systems you write about.

So learn to use a proper CLI and solve your problem.

Alternatively, popular GUI's (Windows most of all) allow you to control virtually everything with the keyboard.

And for those who really passionately hate the mouse, or can't use it for some other reason, there's something called MouseKeys that you can turn on to move the pointer with the keyboard.

By modern I was thinking of RAM > 192 MB, (people who bought bargain pcs five and more years ago would face that problem) and a processor around 2 GHz or more. If the poster above took several minutes to boot Ubuntu, it seems pretty likely that he was running into the problem that he is running an old pc.

Don't believe me?

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/deskto pedition
"Ubuntu is available for PC, 64-Bit and Mac architectures. CDs require at least 256 MB of RAM. Install requires at least 2 GB of disk space."

http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php
"Slackware Linux doesn't require an extremely powerful system to run (though having one is quite nice :). It will run on systems as far back as the 486. Below is a list of minimum system requirements needed to install and run Slackware.

        * 486 processor
        * 16MB RAM (32MB suggested)
        * 100-500 megabytes of hard disk space for a minimal and around 3.5GB for full install
        * 3.5" floppy drive

Additional hardware may be needed if you want to run the X Window System at a usable speed or if you want network capabilities."

Pat is currently putting out security/maintenance patches for all releases 8.1 through 11.0. I still have one 9.0 server so I'm very thankful for the timely security updates it gets.

It's also nice to get the descriptive email notification of each patch from the slackware-security email list

I never believed that P2P would have a significant effect on the sales of records.

P2P + litigation has no effect on the sales, or may be even encouraging sales. P2P without litigation is clearly the end of the publishers. Do a simple mind experiment: if RIAA pledges not to sue P2P users and torrent trackers, the entire music publishing industry will collapse virtually overnight.

What you are saying has some truth in it though. Many of us will still opt to contribute directly to the musicians, but these will not be "sales of records". To draw a parallel, you do not really "buy software" when you pay $59 for a Slackware DVD. You are donating to the cause because Patrick kicks ass.

somebody in ##slackware on freenode
once recommended me to try using the slang API
instead of (n)curses based on the fact that he bought a ncurses book
and it sucked monkeyballs and programming ncurses is not really intuitive
some of the other fine folk who regularly sit idle in that channel
also said that if it could be done in a Shell script
you could try using shell and dialog which is a ncurses based program btw
this could obviously be a biased opinion from slackers since the pkgtools in slackware http://www.slackware.com/ are written this way
and they have served us fine for many years
and will continue to serve us happily for many more years to come.

anyway good luck

If you want an easy, out of the box solution go with Ubuntu or one of it's variants. http://www.ubuntu.com/ http://www.kubuntu.org/ http://www.xubuntu.org/

If you want to tinker with the OS a bit I'd suggest Slackware. http://www.slackware.com/ It isn't as easy to set up or maintain. However, you will have more of an opportunity to actually learn what is going on with they system.

Yeah! Go Slackware! Call me a fanboy, but this is great!

I just hope the balloon itself is not going to go slack! :-)

If it bothers you so much, why not try an alternative?

Fedora Core
Ubuntu
Debian
SUSE
Mandriva
Slackware
Gentoo

or any of these?

Or Mac, or BSD, or even Solaris? There's no shortage of options