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Slackware Being Spun Off
gaj writes, "The answer to "What about Slack?" given the WCCDROM/BSDi merger has been answered. Patrick & Co. (literally now!) are spinning off into a new company called (oddly enough) Slackware Linux, Inc. They've confirmed this on the Slackware site. " BTW, Patrick will be next week's Interviewee - so start thinking of questions.
That's somewhat disturbing. I immediately had visions of the Slackware core team skipping and twirling down the street, all decked out in pastel colors, taped glasses and little pointy elf shoes. Ugh, I need more coffee.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
No, it's not the pretty X that makes Slack great.
I've installed Red Hat and Slackware. I have machines at home running Red Hat 5.0 and Slackware 7. I admin both Slackware and Red Hat. I configure, compile, and install software on both. I can make valid comparisons between Slackware and Red Hat. I don't have any ground to stand on when talking about other distros, so I won't talk about other distros.
I use Slackware on my personal workstation and Red Hat on a machine that I don't use for much other than network routing. I don't fool much with the Red Hat machine, since I have it configured the way I like it. I didn't pick Red Hat to use as a gateway for any logical reason. I just had that machine available that had Red Hat on it at the time, so I configured it as a gateway.
I chose Slackware for my desktop workstation because I like the Slackware philosophy and it fits the way I work. Slackware has a more streamlined configuration that is better suited to manual changes with a text editor than is Red Hat's. I can configure Red Hat by hand, if I must, but Red Hat's SysV style of init is more suited to configuration by software. Overall, this makes Slackware more flexible because you can add scripts to rc.local or remove scripts from rc.d and worry less about breaking things than with Red Hat. Also, when you want some daemon banished from your machine for good, you don't have to remove a link from three or four directories. You can comment it out of one script and be done with it.
I am a tinkerer. I like to know how things work. I like to try different changes to see how they affect the system. I install from source, and you are kind of required to do so with Slackware since most RPMs are designed for some other system. That said, RPMs will work with Slackware, if you create the proper rc.d subdirectories first. Slackware still uses SysVInit, though inittab is set up more like BSD. Anyway, as I was saying, I install from source. I like to peruse the source of most applications before installing. And, yes, I install from source on Red Hat, too. I most recently installed OpenSSH on my Red Hat box. The big bonus of installing this way is there's no RPM database to get corrupted.
Slackware is great for someone who wants to learn about GNU/Linux and really understand what goes on under the hood. It's easier than Red Hat to install and to configure by hand. The rc scripts are all in one directory for the most part and it's easy to find where some daemon gets run so you can shut it down by commenting it out of the script.
If I were to create my own distro, I'd start from Slackware and build up from there. I think we need more GNU/Linux distros, not less. Right now, I feel that there are a lot of users' needs that are not being addressed by the larger distros. They may have three products (a Workstation, Server, and Web Server models) but those don't address everyone's needs. Slack, of course, comes in just one flavor, but that one flavor has most of what you need. Yet, Slackware is not perfect for all situations or all users, just as Red Hat is not perfect in all situations, either.
If Patrick and the gang can't carry the Slackware torch for some reason, then I'll be more than happy to pick it up and run with it. I practically have Slack 7 mirrored on my machine, anyway.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.