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Slackware Updates
Joey Lawrance wrote to us with an updated announcement from the fine folks from Slackware with the news that the wait is over: slackware-current has been updated with the 2.2.14 kernel, XFree86 3.3.6, and a few minor fixes.' Kudos to Patrick Volkerding [?] and the Slackware team.
>How about adding FTP install as an install method?
:-)
:-)
/dev/xyz
/in /in
Isn't it easier just to ftp the stuff the normal way to another server, then export NFS over your local network? You know, being that the net is up/down all the time - at least with a FTP download you can start it over again, without problems, using FTP setup to setup your system, I don't know what the consequences of a broken netlink would be (probably have to begin setup all over again?).
(Note, I'm no expert on FTP installs, so if I'm wrong, correct me.
>No ones exports slackware via nfs so its a total pain in the ass to install.
Yeah, so really difficult...
Get stuff from ftp site.
Burn to cdrom/export to NFS.
Insert disk.
Power on.
Push enter at lilo prompt.
Put in other disk.
Push enter.
fdisk
work fdisk to your hearts content
setup
chose swap/destination/*
chose full
wait....
setup up the basics.
exit
Remove disks.
reboot.
* - Normally chose cdrom, but if you want NFS, do this before starting setup:
mkdir
ifconfig eth0 www.xxx.yyy.zzz
mount -t nfs www.xxx.yyy.zzz:/blah/slakware
then chose "user defined mountpoint" or something similar.
Easy as cake...
>Seems like slackware has the same exact interface when I first used it like 5 years ago.
Like a good wine, Slackware's vintage of interface ages well.
Hey, this isn't a flame, this is a "distro war". Even more fun!
Slackware rocks the earth!
Personally, I enjoy the rc.d scripts right where they are in Slackware, but that's why there are different distros - everyone has different tastes and needs. Chacon son gout...
/bin
/lib/libc.so.6 (0x4001c000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000) /lib/libc.so.6 (0x4001c000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000) /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x4001c000) /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40049000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
:) It also says so on their site http://www.slackware.com if you scroll down and read the news about Slack 7.0.
As for glibc, I just did:
# cd
# ldd *
and I got:
[snip]
touch:
libc.so.6 =>
umount:
libc.so.6 =>
uname:
libcrypt.so.1 =>
libc.so.6 =>
..etc.
So yes, Slackware uses glibc2
Woz
IMO, this Linux is not going to be the "Linux for the desktop," but as a hacker's distribution, it's pretty cool.
Amen brother. This is why I like to use Slackware - it's just fun. I've tried other distros and they just aren't as enjoyable for people who love to tinker. (I do not, however, get into distro wars. Everyone has it's place.)
I agree that Slackware is not "Linux for the desktop". It's not as slick, initially, as RedHat, Debian, etc., simply because of package manangement. I use pkgtool every now and then, but I certainly don't rely on it. However, I get the impression many people who use Slackware aren't interested in package management all that much. However, I could be terribly wrong (that's just the impression I get).
I love hacking away on Slackware. I don't see myself switching anytime soon. Thanks, Patrick V.!
Woz
I would really love to have a comparable distro for my Alphas
I know someone who has done a full SlackBuild for an Alpha. I suggest you do it yourself. As per classic Slackware tradition.
It takes under a day for a decent alpha to chew down most of Slackware completely when running at nice -19. Your only problem is that the install will be "Luke Flying to Dagobah". If you do not remember the quote about the manual watch The Empire Strikes Back again ;-)
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Is there any to change the ec.d scripts to sysvinit style? I love slackware, and I really want to continue using it, but this bsd style rc.d system is causing me and undue amount of headaches.
One of my main problems is that vmware refuses to run (and will not install without major kludges), and I kind of need NT (shudder).
Finkployd
I've been using Slack for a while. A friend who had been using Mandrake asked me about it, and soon enough I was over at his house on a saturday morning stepping him though the install.
The installation was a snap (as always), but he had some funky hardware, so the setup was a bit more difficult. I had to leave, so I left him all alone with the remainder of the fiddling.
The next morning he appeared bleary eyed. "I finally got it finished. It took me until two in the morning though." I thought he was going to dump Slack and go back to Mandrake when he continued, "I learned more about Linux last night than I did the previous two years with Redhat and Mandrake. I think I like this thing."
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
There's a good reason for this. If you download the kernel source from any of the official sources, the default for a "make zlilo" is to copy /vmlinuz to /vmlinuz.old and install your freshly compiled kernel to /vmlinuz, then run lilo. I always grab the latest kernel from ftp.kernel.org when I first install a box, and just have to do a "make menuconfig && make dep && make clean && make bzlilo && reboot" to install my kernel. That's certainly a lot easier than having to copy the kernel to the location you want and then running lilo by hand. Also, on a properly installed unix box, / shouldn't be more than about 200mb, and /usr, /tmp, /var, and /home should be seperate partitions. I generally install my boxen with 60mb for /, 75mb for /tmp, 100mb for /var, the rest for /usr, and then make /home a link to /usr/home. If I have a drive larger than 4gb, I will usually make /usr 2gb, and use the rest for /home.
And yes, I do this on my workstations too. Makes my system usable when I accidentally fill up one of the partitions (As long as it's not / that fills, as this does not make the system very happy).
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
Does anyone know where I can just get the ISO image for the updated slackware-current?
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
and none of these seem to have problems with users wanting a higher version number, from what I see. :)
And now go look at Market Share. That's what has motivated this. Just ask Patrick.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Please, get a clue. If RedHat had numbered it's releases the same way Slakware used to, they'd still be on version 3.x or 4.x. You know damn well that the version number jump was necessary. Why stir the pot?
Also, does anyone know where I can just get the ISO image for the updated slackware-current?
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Exactly! While I lament that it was necessary, I do agree that it basically sucks. Nor do I think Red Hat will learn the lesson from this. Not that it really matters. We need a new way to date/keep track of sofware besides version numbers. I rather liked the direction we went with "Slackware 96". I kept hoping that we'd go that route. We could have had "Slackware 99" followed by "Slackware 2k". If we needed to release more than one version a year, we could use "Slackware 2000-R1" kinda like Lotus used to do with Lotus 123...
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
I *HATE* to say it, but Microsoft has it right. Software should be versioned off it's release date (not that MS actually DOES this...) It just makes more sense to download Slackware 2000.03.08. Want to differentiate between major/minor and development releases? Use codenames like Debian.
The fact is, version numbers on linux distros are so meaningless now, you have to look at all of the packages to see if they are at a level that meets your needs.
I have used Linux since kernel 1.3.15 days, and at that time, Slackware was the most polished and complete distribution. For quite some time, it languished, and only recently has seen the maintenance/updating found on more recent distro's, notably RedHat.
/etc/rc.d init scripts. I detest the byzantine SysV init scripts found in RedHat.
I've used and continue to use RedHat extensively. It is certainly the best Linux distro for Alpha architecture. It is exceptionally easy for beginners to install, yet remains very powerful via the `rpm` mechanism of package and especially dependancy updating.
Yet Slackware still has powerful attractions. It can certainly be installed on less hard-disk and RAM than RedHat. It leads to better UNIX understanding [albeit less easily] by using an editor for sysadmin rather than `linuxconf` tools. Furthermore, I find the file layout easier to understand, especially the BSD-style
The bsd-style init is also considered one of the main disadvantages of slackware - sysvinit is usually considered much more versatile and easy to use (once you get the hang of it). Also, does anyone know if slack v7 ever fixed the glibc/libc5 compatibility issues? AFAIK the last version had minimal glibc support and most system binaries were still libc5.. not necessarily streamlined for a modern Linux distro.
--
I have four Unix boxen at home---a tattered 486 running FreeBSD, a P/150 running Slackware, a P/166 running Redhat, and a Redhat laptop. I seldom touch the 486 because it's frustratingly slow, for development, but functions nicely as a firewall/router. The laptop and the 166 are running Redhat because I use them as clients and I like the big, hefty, comprehensive, everything-supports-it nature of Redhat in that environment.
But when I feel like playing with Unix, when I want to fiddle with server applications, or go in and tweak the configuration of everything, or I'm just gonna bash out some C code to run in a character environment, I do it on the Slackware system. Why? Because Redhat is so comparatively complex and has so many interconnected things that it's so much easier to do indirect damage to the system. This is fine if all you want to do is run the darn thing. But with Slackware, everything is simple, clean and orthogonal. When I want to do mundane preconfigured productivity-type stuff, I use Redhat, but when I want to play, or I want to do the sort of playing other people might mistake for work, I use Slackware. It's just a lot of fun.
Besides, it's still very character-based. I used to run it with a scavenged MDA adapter and a 1983 vintage IBM monochrome monitor, before a splurged on a VGA card and a switchbox. That's what Zork is supposed to look like!
P.S. SuSE is awfully nice, too, like Redhat but with more i18n, tons of included apps and a good user manual. I ran 6.0 for a while, but overwrote it with Redhat for reasons that had more to do with my video card than the distribution itself.
--
This is not my sandwich.
Slackware doesn't use a silly configuration tool with umpteen configuration files to keep the settings...
It has a limited number of start-up scripts which are pretty straight-forward, so that you can customize them easily at your situation.
Since they are that simple and straightforward, I've learned quite a lot about how everything is arranged at boot-up, which is a lot more difficult with Red Hat, SuSe or Debian, where there seem to be hundreds of directories with files and symlinks... Especially newbies who want to go a bit further than playing with their GUI config tool find this very overwhelming.
Basically, slackware is a do-it-yourself distro, since their package management system isn't really that good. But if you know your way around, I think it has a lot to offer in system stability and insight in the inner workings.
It's a pity it's only x86... I would really love to have a comparable distro for my Alphas :-)
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
As for vmlinuz being installed into /, by default, it is, but in the Makefile in the kernel source you can change the Install Path. It has it set to /boot and is just waiting for you to uncomment it! Reading the Slackware Install Forum this question has come up all to frequently, way more frequently than any other question.
Its a small problem on an otherwise excellent distribution that I plan on using for years to come...
--
May contain traces of nut.
If you want a system that you can configure yourself and has its config files on logical places you should use SlackWare.
SlackWare also tends to be more like a BSD system then a sysV.
I use Slackware by the way so I might be a bit biased.....
Grtz, Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Well, I find this discussion helpful. I'm a relative newbie who started on Redhat 5.0 a couple years back and I'm very interested in trying out different distro's to learn, if nothing else. It is helpful here to see what people like about Slack so I can decide if it's something I want to bother with.
For example, I recently set up a new box and decided to give Debian a try. Having been spoiled by the RedHat installs, I kind of had a few quirks getting everything going, especially the network. I'm not an old-school unix expert so I was unaware of the sysV vs BSD-style init script differences, so it took a little digging and tinkering to learn how Slink is set up, but now I have a happily working box sitting in the corner running Deb, and I have a real sense of accomplishment for having gone though and learned something new instead of just installing another RedHat 6.1 box.
I'll have another opportunity soon to try out another distro, my Mom's pentium has finally run out of gas (yep, she tried to upgrade to Win98 and it barfed) so I'm building her a new machine and I'll end up scavenging her old box. Right now I've got a FreeBSD CD that came with something I ordered from LinuxMall and I might try installing that to see what it's all about. From the comments here, I'm now curious about Slack, so I might just download that and give it a try.
I agree that distribution flamewars are counter-productive, but what I read here (comments sorted by age) up until I got to your post was most positive, informative comments expressing differences and preferences. I don't see anything wrong with that. Seems to me that this is the real strength of Linux anyway, that if you don't like the way RedHat works, you can use something else... if you think that text-based install isn't for you, you can use RedHat until you outgrow it, etc.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
the new release will become version 10? I mean, after all, this is a significant change, and slack needs the upper hand on the other distributions ;) (if you don't understand, go here.)
--
This is great news for me, because I was just thinking the other day about those new cheap (but supposedly good) $25 Linksys 10/100 cards which require the latest (Tulip?) driver from 2.2.14! Now I can get one! And I've been upgrading for DSL, so I don't even have an uptime to lose!
/boot like all the other modern distros. IMHO, /boot is the only way to go when you have an enormous hard drive. So I have to move the kernel and edit lilo.conf and go back into setup and "recycle" lilo to get my machine bootable.
While I don't think I'd ever consider using Slackware as a "desktop" OS, it's a great distro for command-line hacks like me who would rather stick the box in a corner and telnet in.
But the main thing that keeps me coming back to Slackware is that I can be sure the source tarballs I download will fscking compile. I've always had a bad time trying to compile source under less-than-full installs of RedHat (ever since the time I bought a release version of 5.2 and the kernel wouldn't recompile), then I go to Slackware and things compile with no problem. I'm sorry, but I don't want to bloat my hard drive with a full install of RedHat just to be sure I can compile something without being in RPM hell trying to find the right libraries!
As far as I'm concerned, Slackware is much easier for me to install, because there are fewer packages to keep track of, which means less chance of missing a "regular" library during install. But I think the "flat" nature of the Slackware install, compared with RPM's extensive hierarchial dependencies, is the real reason I find Slackware so much easier to install.
And as a bonus, it's a floppy-friendly install, too! When I first installed it, I didn't have a CD-ROM on an Intel box, and was downloading Slackware tarball disks and installing them from a directory on the hard drive (because I was getting too many disk errors from those el cheapo HD floppies I had lying around). The install disks make a good root-boot, too. The first time I tried Red Hat, I tried downloading just the 50 or so RPMs I tought I needed to a hard drive, and it bitched about every single RPM I didn't download being missing, whether I was installing it or not. Since Red Hat uses hundreds of RPMs, I had to press the enter key a lot.
Although sometimes I wish it used SysV init, I'm not installing many services, and I can do well enough just editing rc.local. SysV init just seems to be an excuse for distros like Red Hat to start up every service they can think of. And IMHO, most people DON'T need fscking sendmail running!
The thing that annoys me most about Slackware, though, is that it doesn't put the kernel into
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }