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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."
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.
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
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.
---
"I am a man, and men are
animals who tell stories."
"The meek shall inherit the earth, the rest of us shall go to the stars." Isaac Asimov