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Slackware Linux 8.0 Reviewed
lotion writes: "When the Slackware Linux project was cut loose from its parent company in April many devoted users wondered if the project would continue. Patrick Volkerding vowed it would. Despite the upheaval that accompanied what amounted to corporate abandonment, Volkerding and the team made good on that promise. On June 28, 2001, Slackware Linux Release 8.0 was made available.
The full review is here at Maximumlinux.org."
Well, I did start back in the kernel v0.12 days, when there was just a boot and a root disk...and when we got hard drive support, manually installing things...SLS was nice, but then I switched to Slackware (for religious reasons), I haven't changed yet. I've tried lots of different distros, and try and have a Red Hat version running just to keep up with that distro, since it is popular...but besides Slackware, the only other distro I use regularly is Tom's Ultimate Boot/Root disk...it's a lifesaver when you are a consultant...being able to walk in in and just boot it, and fix whatever people have screwed up.
Slackware and Toms, both keeping the heart of the Linux movement alive.
ttyl
Farrell
(what? I'm sentimental?)
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Always remember that 'fdisk /mbr' using Microsoft's fdisk writes a perfectly valid DOS bootloader to the mbr.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
There are some problems, but it's been a few years since I've needed to install Windows because of an mbr mixup. Partitions, now, that's a bit trickier...
/mbr, powerdown, remove SCSI card, power up, setup bios, tell it to clear itself, reboot, reboot, power down, reinsert SCSI card, reboot to OS). After a few cycles I went to Red Hat 7.1, which was without problem, as had been Mandrake 7.2 (though that had required that I remove the LBA32 switch on the LILO setup).
If you are using Mandrake, then the problem may not be with LILO. Mandrake 8 turned out to be incompatible with my Gateway E4300 as work... overwrote the SCSI drivers in bios. A boot disk appeared to work for a few boot cycles, but corruption recurred. (Fix: fdisk
I'm seriously thinking of looking into some old Linload documents, though. What with my number of partitions, and my multiple disks, nobody can get lilo to fit into the MBR anymore, and even with three boot disks, I don't feel comfortable about depending of floppies. (Besides, it's slow and clumsy.)
Grub might be an answer, I have a bad feeling about it, but I only tried it in the context of Mandrake (see above), so perhaps the problem wasn't with Grub at all.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Everyone here has made some excellent points. From the source of the defacement (a bad webpage script) to a nice little package called "autoslack". I wish the moderators had enough brains to mod up some replies to my post.
Updating your software to be the "latest and greatest(?)" is ALWAYS a bad idea! I'm not proposing that, what I'm pointing out is the NEED for automated security updates.
I do run update/upgrade on my debian unstable box at home every night, and every few days I have to check out what's broken and see if I can submit a bug report. I have a few other servers which use stable which if you knew much about debian, is mostly feature frozen. Debian has a rigorous packaging standard and a great QC division. I'm fairly confident that packages coming out of the pool are good enough for a power user. Packages in the stable distribution have gone through many iterations and integration testing. Security updates applied in haste may not have the same level of testing, but I'd much rather have exploits corrected than wait for complete integration testing.
I encourage you to look at debian. There are standards (like the placement of configfiles in /etc/$PKGNAME/*, and documentation /usr/share/doc/$PKGNAME/*, and man pages for almost all commands, which redhat sux at) that make debian much better than the sum of its parts.
Finally I'm not talking about a daily BIND update, but security updates on the stable version of your distribution (for redhat this would be 6.2, slackware 7.whatever).
Spend some time reading up on system security... what do all these guys the pundits interview say? Keeping current to the security flaws in your system is more than a full time job. You cannot at the same time as you add users, change passwords, bail users out (oops, I deleted that file! oh I screwed up and mailed out HR info to EVERYONE! oops, I wasted the website... etc etc...) keep up to speed on the security issues reguarding every element of every system you control.
If you plan on using a UNIX of professional quality, then you rely on the individuals integrating and packaging your software to
Can you make the state of each piece of software on your system your full time job? If not, remember that there is a hacker who can. Your box is theirs for the taking.
I'm not certain about your security argument. Sometime last week slackware.org was defaced. The phrase "Not only windows can be hacked." or some misspelling thereof (sorry, didn't grab it) appeared on their site.
Slackware needs some method of keeping current. On a stable debian box with updates pointed at security.debian.org a nightly (or hourly!) call to apt-get update; apt-get upgrade (with appropriate flags to resolve prompts you might be given during the package upgrade) will assure that you have the latest security patches applied. BSD has make World, redhat has up2date, mandrake has urpm... these are all inferior, but fine alternatives. Even microsoft has windowsupdate (which was also subjected to defacement the other day ha!) and various unattended install methods which come with the OS.
How can you do this in slackware?
Saw this in the docs and mentioned it to a guy from my W2k class (Yeah I know!!!! - not my choice, I like to eat) Just loved that shocked look on his face. His comment was "What? is that a $100,000 machine?" To which I grinned evilly and said "No, multimilion dollar big Iron from IBM." BWwaaa, Ha Ha!!!! His reaction was priceless! Ain't I a stinker?
So now it's:
$0 - Slackware O/S
$5,000,000 for a machine to run it on (S/390)
Priceless - the reaction of all those ego-centric Windows people
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
When the Slackware Linux project was cut loose from its parent company in April many devoted users wondered if the project would continue. Patrick Volkerding vowed it would. Despite the upheaval that accompanied what amounted to corporate abandonment, Volkerding and the team made good on that promise. On June 28, 2001, Slackware Linux Release 8.0 was made available. It is a very current distribution in terms of most of the component versions. Both kernels 2.4.5 and 2.2.19, glibc 2.2.3, KDE 2.1.2, Gnome 1.4, XFree86 4.1.0, and Samba 2.2 are among the major items. Two retail packaged versions will soon be available; one with and the other without the companion book, Slackware Essentials, for $39.99 and $49.99, respectively. The downloadable version on which this review is based comprises three CD's in ISO format.
The first is a bootable install CD. For those whose systems are incapable of booting to a CD-ROM device, floppy bootdisk images and utilities are included. The second CD contains extra packages including additional window managers, ham radio packages such as the excellent F6FBB packet radio BBS, a mirror of the Slackware online book, Linux HOW-TO's, FAQ's, and Zipslack which allows installation of a small installation of Slackware on a DOS partition or Zip disk. The third CD contains the sources.
For puposes of this review I installed Slackware 8.0 on a freshly wiped hard drive. The hardware configuration can be viewed here.
The setup utility is text based, which seems like an anachronism in these days of fancy graphical installers. Potential users should not be put off because the utility is very easy to use and walks you through each step. The install disk includes fdisk and the excellent menu driven cfdisk for drive partitioning. If the drive is not already partitioned, the setup utility exits to a command prompt where the partitioning software must be run. Once complete, typing setup at the prompt puts you back into the setup utility where you select the partitions, select the mount points, and format them.
Setup asks for the source from which the packages will be installed, which seems a little strange since the installation was booted from the CD.
Once the source is selected setup then asks for the type of installation and groups of packages. Selecting the default installation types (such as "full") will install kernel 2.2.19 as the default kernel. If you intend to use kernel 2.4.5 or have a SCSI based system there are special considerations which are only vaguely touched upon in the documentation. If that's what you want go here for a little help.
Once setup is finished installing packages it will ask if you want to configure LILO, a modem, basic networking (it correctly identified and installed the module for my Realtek 8139 based NIC), and finally prompt the user to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to restart the system.
Slackware 8.0 does not use a graphical login manager. Login is done through the console, though users may manually configure a graphical login manager should they desire. After login entering startx at the prompt will invoke the GUI. The default is KDE which was fine with me since I like KDE. This is easily changed (go here for how) for those who prefer something else.
It did not install the driver modules for my soundcard requiring me to manually edit one configuration file. (Go here to read what worked for me.)
I consider my user experience level with Linux to be somewhere shy of intermediate. But I remember installing Slackware Linux several years ago from floppy disks whose images took several hours to download over the blazing fast 14.4kbps connection I was using at the time. I did it on encouragement from a friend who suggested it would be easy. At the time it wasn't. It took me over two weeks before I got everything to work right. How things have changed.
-- john
I have been a slack user for about 3 years and I am VERY happy that Partick and comapny kept the project going. Slackare is a great choice for a server distro. I think that a bit to much was included in the 8.0 distro but it is an excellent project and I hope it continues for a LONG time!
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
Anyway, I installed slack 8 a couple nights ago, and my main concern is that I can't find any X server besides the frame buffer X server. Oh, excuse me, there's print-only as well. Anyway, the VESA framebuffer is nice to install with, although the slack 8 interface takes no advantage of it, BUT it's not really nice to keep running in VESA mode.
Most of us have accellerated graphics cards, to say the least; do you really want to keep running that GeForce in VESA mode? I was told in the #slackware channel that one has to compile one's own X server for a particular card...? Now, I know slackware is a DIY distro, but this seems like a huge step backwards. I used to be able to plug in the precompiled mga driver for my Matrox card, but no longer by the looks of things.
If anyone else can prove me wrong, I'd love it. I like lots of other things about slack, but I'd really rather not need to compile X just to get accelerated graphics performance.
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you can put xhost +localhost in your .xinitrc script, and the export DISPLAY=... in you /etc/profile and that should take care of those problems (without having to play with xauth)
--Ks9
an unchecked exec() call allowed a minor defacement, not a hack. the integrity of the server was not compromised, some script kiddie just changed a web page. it was quickly fixed.
... its called autoslack
and on your second point
--Ks9
Slackware 8 is most definitely the best version yet... it kicks major ass. Go download (or purchase!) it today and try it out.
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It's always fun to turn your computer on and see it say "LI" and stop responding. There's a lesson to be learned kids. Always use a boot disk.. unless of course all your floppies are 10 years old and don't work right anyhow.
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