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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."
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?
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 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