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Slackware 8.1 rc1 Announced
Demerol writes with word that "about 12 hours ago, Patrick announced the that Slackware is now in Release Candidate stage in preparation for the long-awaited 8.1 release. Hundreds of updated to the current tree in the last few months have had all the slackers drooling, and now it is almost upon us. Now, I don't want to hear any more talk of Slackware being dead. Thanks. ;) Here is the ChangeLog
and the Userlocal announcement"
At first sight. At second sight Slackwares simplicity and stability is refreshing and unmatched, especially by Gentoo.
This from an ex-FreeBSD user that instinctively started with Gentoo, but who was very dissapointed; it is only superficially like FreeBSD (due to the ports system) but on closer look it is very diffent. Slackware truely remains the best choice if you're forced to run Linux (instead of FreeBSD), in my case because of lack of vmware-3 and decent Java in FreeBSD.
Have you looked at the package list? It is one of the most up-to-date Linux distributions in fact; just look at the package versions and compare to any other Linux distribution. All this coming from one man, and offering the most stable and understandable Linux distribution is truely amazing.
wow, everyone's putting out a new relase, even slackware(never realized how apropropriate the name was until now.) maybe I'll have to fire up a test box and try it again.
...and now she's ready to learn.
The question is; why?
slackware has a new one, redhat, mandrake, suse, debian(shortly)... even the packages like mozilla and kde are having long awaited releases....
maybe we're about to stumble on the turning point on the computer era... maybe 10 years from now we'll look at the 1995-2002 as the dark ages of the operating systems.
As a side note, I showed my girlfriend the article about sherwin williams, and she replied, "this linux thing isn't going away, is it?"
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
You can check your email and receive messages from the world wide web! Slackware will help you stay in touch with all your friends by making a buddy list. I know that I instant message my friends all the time. Plus the new Slackware comes with bright shiny buttons, surprising sounds that make you excited about the interweb and being in-touch with folks from around the world who are just like you!!!!!
"Slackware's tech support has been nothing but patient, understanding and helpful!" says grandmother Eunice Haversham.
"It's so easy even I can use it!" says Michigan resident Robert Malda.
The best thing of all about Slackware is the fact that it's FREE !!! Just pick up a copy at McDonalds in their Tux Happy Meal or download it from your favorite website or give us a call at 1-800-LUNIX4U right away and we'll tell you about our other great offers!
It's simple, quick, has a decent interface for installing (non-graphical, non-slow) and once you get it up and running, it is running. It was one of the few distrubutions left where you can get it up, upgrade the kernel to whatever the hell you want and it will [b]still[/b] run. It knows it's target group and delivers.
Packages are good, decently up to date (now) and are not overkill. I couldn't be more pleased
I'm a slackware whore. I sure wish someone would update slackware.com once in a while, pretty sad that some other site has news on this before there's a peep of it on slackware's own web site.
I've used 8.1-beta2 at work, I love it.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
What really amazes me about slackware is that it really does seem to be a one-man show.
This is reassuring to me. It's good to know that there really is one authoritative voice on at leat one distro.
It lacks bells and whistles and requires some expertise, which is why I couldn't stick with it, but philosophically, it appeals to me.
evanchik.net
I was going to download Slack so I could install the base and just do the ./config, make, make install dance for a buncha stuff I like to use, like evilwm. My intentions was to pull something together from installing just the bare libs and packages I need, and create a desktop box for myself that just plain works.
Slackware may not be for everyone, but that doesn't make their efforts any less relevant. They're a proven distro. Looking forward to this!
spam, spam, spam, spam, e-mail, news and spam.
Some people may be wondering why someone would use slackware when there are distros like Mandrake which have a graphical configuration utility for everything. There is a very good reason: to learn about Operating Systems and about Linux. To change a configuration in Slackware, you have to edit text files. But that's not really bad, because Slackware has amazing comments in the config files. You are encouraged to learn the filesystem and the config file structure. If you want to learn Linux as opposed to simply use Linux, run Slackware!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Latest's of every thing I need:
Apache-1.3.24
php-4.2.1,
with all the php packages I have to move over,
MySQL-3.23.49,
LOTS of standard stuff (Nautilus, Mozilla etc.)
I should be able to upgrade my box, install ZendStudio_Server, use the journalling file system to mirror my drives and have the bullet proof system I need to support my Community Wikis.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
We need to face the facts. The Linux distro business model just doesn't work and sooner or later, a lot of the distro people are again going to be amateurs doing it for love and not money.
All that might be a good thing as the emergence of a clear commercial leader can only help Linux in the business world - it still looks like too much of an anarchy at the moment.
My first distro was a shrinkwrap job, but now I know I'd never do that again - there is no money to be made out of me or anyone like me. My contribution is in code and similar efforts.
When the shakeout comes then the hacker community are really going to be tested - without that money it is back to people in their bedrooms churning it out. Are they/we up to it?
From the ChangeLog: :-)
:-)
:)
Sat May 25 12:38:52 PDT 2002
Well folks, we are now at Slackware 8.1-rc1.
Fri Apr 12 02:01:53 PDT 2002
We'll call this Slackware 8.1-beta2.
Who announces beta's/rc's like that?
He only really means it when he makes ISOs.
-Tom
Try here for a starters, its Slackware's web page. I'm actually not suprised you haven't heard of it. It isn't that popular anymore. It was one of the first Linux distributions. It was spawned from SLS in like early 1994. I'm ashamed I don't know more, since I've been using it since 1995. :) SLS and Yggdrasil were the first two distros I think. I tried Yggdrasil in 1994/1995 (don't remember which) but I couldn't get it to install correctly. It was probably a driver problem or something.
This is the release I've been waiting for. I've tried Redhat, I've tried Mandrake, but I fell in love with Slackware. The Sys V init on the redhat-ish distros annoy me... I really love Slack's BSD style init (and it supports Sys V style too if required!). It's much easier to edit.
Hooray for Patrick and gang! A job well done.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
He's authored more than a couple programs I use day-to-day (fetchmail, for one), and I hear he's got a bit of free time on his hands.
It's the most update distro's because its the newest released distro. What's the time line between 8.0 and this one ?
You want outdated ? how about that tgz packaging system ? how much outdated can you get ?
Though I am no longer a slackware user (FreeBSD, + Debian on my laptop), as I understood it, the main reason for not using bz2 compression was for people using legacy systems. bz2 is great on fast systems, but try decompressing big packages on a p100 or whatever, that takes an awful lot of time. Though this shouldnt be the case, keeping two trees (1 compressed with gz, the other with bz2) would be a nightmare.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
I used to be a Slackware user. I'm fairly advanced when it comes to Linux and UNIX in general so I don't care at all about graphical interfaces or configuration tools. However, I have fallen in love with advanced package management tools and distro companies that are really quick to update packages.
I just don't have the time to spend a few hours grabbing the latest source patches and doing a recompile. I use to like to compile everything from source so that I could optimise it for my machine but real life eventually got in the way of that and it stopped being fun.
So for the past 3-4 years I've been using Mandrake. But the first thing I do is 'rpm -e linuxconf drakx* kde* gnome*' etc. The reason I like it is not because of the ease of use but because Mandrake is really quick to release security updates and all it takes is a simple urpmi command to download them. Plus every release comes with tons of new toys that I like to play around with when I'm bored.
There's lots of other reasons I choose Mandrake too but I mean this as constructive critisism towards Slackware so I'll leave those out.
Comming from a BSD background I always felt right at home with Slack but when you just want something that you can use and keep up to date and secure with minimum effort then it just doesn't cut it.
I don't feel that you need to be user friendly and geared towards windows and mac users to fill this gap. Just a few command line tools that make a UNIX administrator's life easier when it comes to managing what's installed on the system (and the pkg_* tools are not up to speed on this IMO).
So I'm going to go off on a limb here and get ready to be flamed by all the Slackware lovers. I would probably switch back to Slackware if they were to switch to rpm or deb pkg. They can keep the "no easy configuration tools" or the bsd-style init scripts which I love so much. But I really need a way to customize my system and keep it up to date with minimal effort.
I know Slack has come with rpm installed optionally for a while but all of the system stuff like glibc, bash etc. should be installed as rpms so that it's really easy to updgrade them without taking hours to recompile.
--
Garett
Heh. Slackware is the distribution I learned on, and I learned a lot. By being console mode, by making you use fdisk instead of pretty little "auto-allocate" in disk druid and alike, you learn the ins and outs of the system. You get to edit stuff in /etc, not just push a few buttons. For a while I was wondering where the f*ck "XConfigurator" or all the other utilities were located. Hah! I had to do it all myself.
If you're serious about learning Linux the way you should learn (by experience, not paper) it, slack is the way to go. It just goes to show why paper MCSEs and RHCEs are worthless... you gotta have experience before you get hired for a real job.
Try Gentoo, I can't see how you'd go back.
And I just rsync'ed and upgraded everything up to "beta2" level a couple days ago. Now I have to go and update more stuff. Oh well, updates are always good....
For producing a distribution that's rock-solid and doesn't get in your way.
:-) which was the release that got me started with Linux. If you _really_ want to learn Linux, I think Slackware is still the way to go.
I still have the CD for 3.2, from 1997
I've tried Red Hat and Debian, but I still come back to good old Hackware.
Roland
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
The best Linux based server operating system is soon to see yet another fine release.
Ciryon
They were acquired by BSDI, because of their support for FreeBSD. Then BSDI was acquired by Wind River Software, entirely for BSD/OS. Pretty much everything associated with them is dead now, AFAIK. Well, FreeBSD has survived, because its development was never dependent on commercial support. And slackware has been hurt by the loss of all of its paid developers, but its always just pretty much been Pat's distribution and despite the lack of support 8.1 looks to be coming along very nicely.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Have you used both slackware and gentoo? I'd be curious to know your opinions, as I'm a slackware user myself.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Fully agree. I like being the person the few linux people at work come to. For the same reasons you stated.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
This actually should be modded up, and marked as funny.
And I say that as a slackware user.
Nice.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Lazy wimp. Go build your own distro.
In all seriousness, LFS is great when you've got a fast spare machine to play with and want to learn about how Linux works (I've got a "play box" just for this purpose), but I love Slackware for when I need absolute stability and resource efficiency. Good for desktops and servers, 486s to P4s. Thanks for the work, Patrick!
I've been using linux on and off for the past few years, didnt have a clue at first. Once Slackware 8.0 came out I was all set. I was confused a bit at first since I was used to redhat rpms, guis etc, but soon enough I loved slackware. I've been using 8.1 Beta 2 for a few days, and I'm loving it so far. If you want to learn linux, slackware is the only way to go.
---
Always standing, I am a tree awaiting the lightning. -Samael, Crown
Anyone got a mirror for an ISO?
used slackware for about 4 years and i was a gentoo lover within seconds :)
But this doesnt mean i wouldnt use Slack if i need a system up and running fast, cause gentoo is still a slow bastard with all the nice compile time needed...
A few years ago, I installed Slackware on a spare box and thought it was a nice distro. As you said, this is really nice if you want to learn how your OS works rather than just using it.
I don't use it anymore because all of my boxes (including my server) are running linux from scratch which while being much longer to setup (especially the first time), it is the ultimate learning experience. Everything on my workstation was compiled manually by me, including the shell, the compiler, X, etc...
One good thing about slack and linuxfromscratch is that you *know* exactly what is installed on your machine.
IP Therefore I am.
The new slack is coming. Great.
But what is more important - it still has users that loves slack.
Look at comments here! There are no angry posts. Almost everyone claims almost love to slackware, even users that had to go away from slackware. They were made to leave slack, but they still love it.
There are no post like BSD is dying, there are no troll or flamebaits commonly accompaning RedHat or Mandrake releases. Everyone seems to have warm feelings about Slack.
I think that slackware has one of best userbase around here.
Go slack!
:wq
what about linuxpackages?
Death to the lame distros. Real SA's do Slack.
Stupid RedHat and other GUI installs suck. If I wanted GUI I'd get a Mac.
I was there from the beginning. Slack is the best.
Give me Slack or give me Death!
This is a slackware FAQ.
Patrick won't use bzip2 because it's too resource-hungry for the very low-end that slackware still supports, and also he claims that the difference at gzip -9 vs bzip2 -9 isn't enough to make it worthwhile anyway.
Actually, Slackware is still pretty okay even for 386 boxes.
I learned most of the networking I know in the mid 90's by buying cheap 3C501 (yikes!) ethernet cards for $2.50 a pound at a surplus store and building three or four 386-SX boxes to run Slackware on.
That, and sweating through all the 'blue spine' O'Reilly books I could find.
Slackware is unquestionably the best distro for linux newbies. It was my first distro and it forced me to learn all the nitty gritty details of linux. Now its nothing but debian for me, but I must pay homage to their roots. Way to go Patrick... and praise Bob!
I looked in the changelog yesterday and it's really impressive to see so much important software beeing up to date.
Slackware isn't anymore using old outdated software. Take a careful look in the changelog and drool.
Also note the boot/root disks supporting the new journaling filesystems directly from a fresh installation.
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
Damnit! Now I'm extra proud of being a Finn. Our parliament made the right decision. I'm happy they weren't swayed by all kinds of luddites with absolutely no clue about the issues regarding nuclear power.
must be a slow news day... if the stories stopped coming we'd all get bored and tell ghost stories on kuro5hin :)
Most of the Yggdrasil releases had serious problems. Yggdrasil seemed to want to 'own' Linux, their first release was actually called LGX (Linux-GNU-X) so they could 'own' the name. They produced the first commercial CD-ROM release of Linux (I hope someday that 'white-cover with green ink' will be a collector's item because of it), but they've faded away.
I'm glad it was there, because I got my first taste of Linux with the old 'Plug and Play LGX' on my 486 with Sound Blaster Pro and it's proprietary 1x CDROM. The CD boot even played music at the login prompt.
Oh, please. As you know, Slackware has its own package management system, the same one it uses to install with. glibc, bash, and so forth *are* installed via binary packages. No need to recompile. Just follow slackware-current.
I upgraded KDE 2.2.1 to KDE 3.0.1 just by downloading the packages and using upgradepkg. I've also upgraded the kernel, a bunch of my X apps, and even X itself. All without compiling.
I should probably point this out--I'm an idiot. I probably shouldn't even be using a Linux system. But someone like me got Slackware Linux up and running and using all my devices. Wasn't hard at all. And now I have no reason to use Windows except to run certain games.
Then again, maybe I'm just ignorant since I haven't used any other distros since I first used Slackware 4.0. I guess I don't need to try the others when I've already got the best. :)
(shameless plug) Slackersguild will always use Slackware... ;)
Mandrake was the first linux distro I ever used but I keep finding myself always falling back on slack. I don't need graphical installs or wizards for everything I just need a fast and trim distro. and slack is that distro.p ?id=28573
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view.ph
It's all Politics
I agree. From now on hamster powered engines equipped with free-range unionized hamsters will be the norm. We should implement this immediately or dire consequences will result.
You have been warned.
peace.
I've been waiting for this a long time - Gives me a good reason to reinstall. I was expecting it to come during the last few weeks and I've been trolling the slackware ftp to see if anything had changed - and I was kinda hoping to be the first to post it here on slashdot. Heh, only to find that somebody else posted it first and it even had more than 100 comments already... makes me wonder how you ppl are spending your time.
Great this is good news!!! This is cause for a celebration!
Well.... I for one have no idea who this Ted Nugent fella is, but I am what you might call a gun-tottin', coon-hutin' redneck. Doesn't mean I don't know my way around a computer though.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
As All slackers know "Simplicity is the Divine" A LinuX distro who really saw linux kernel 0.99.15 in its first release!
Now troll on this if you can!
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
The main disadvantage of bzip2 is that it's MUCH slower than gzip.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
What the hell does that have to do with Slackware?
slashdot!=valid HTML
I'm a happy Slackware user. I've been a Slack user for years - and not just out of "being used to it". I used Slackware in my first job, I built mailservers on it in my second job, I used it to run a complete ISP in my third job, and a complete domain registry in my fourth job (incidentally, I'm still on a heck of a salary and really enjoy my work).
I've actually looked at other distributions to make maintainence easier, but:
- Debian I found was populated by anal freaks who were real religious fanatics - we had a department full of Debian people and I said "ok, let's do Debian then" and two years later I'm finding it hard to work out just where they put everything [1].
- RedHat just had too many problems and decided to SetUID root a load of crap (plus there's the obvious rootkits).
- SuSE fell apart at the seams.
So I went back to Slackware.It's quite funny when someone came along, found a security hole such as the recent OpenSSH hole, and tried to crack a Slack box - it was fairly obvious from the start, because the rootkits failed. Then I built Slack packages for tripwire and stuff.
Pat's got it right, IMHO. It's a good, simple distro with decent ground-up building. And there's a lot of misconception that you have to build stuff on Slack boxes - you don't - you can quite happily build packages.
I now run Slack on my laptop, on the company servers, on my desktop, and loads of other places. It works for me. I'm pleased to see Pat's finally got it together for 8.1 (I've been following the updates for some time).
But one bit of advice: update slackware.com - it's bloody old.
Snogs,
Joel.
[1] Admittedly I haven't got used to it in the same way I got used to Slack, but there's enough people in the company who can get used to Slack. Standardising means getting other people to learn it too.
Smegma.
Yes, I have used both.
I started with Slackware in 0.98 kernel times (when was that, about 1992?). After one year I switched to FreeBSD, been using it since a few months ago as my main OS. Now back to Linux, my first try was Gentoo because of the ports system which should be FreeBSD like.
Unfortunately, while the ports system is nifty and interesting, I think Gentoo as a whole still very immature. Also it is really more a sysv-like linux, Slackware being the only linux that feels like FreeBSD (mainly due to the BSD-style simple init scripts). Also slackware packages are so easy to roll yourself.
The main problem with Gentoo, IMO, is that not only add-on software are packages (as is the case with FreeBSD, the base system being one big consistent piece) but everything. The result is that every user is running a configuration of ports making up the (basic) system that is quite unique, i.e. that is hardly tested. It depends on the time that you rsync the Gentoo ports tree. The 'locking-down' mechanism, which fixes certain versions of ports even when other (newer) versions are available can prevent this 'version hell', but in the current configuration it is not used enough. Many users complain on essential ports not being compilable or crashing, due to the fact that they have slightly different versions of other packages that have interactions.
I think that gentoo has potential, but at this time is no match for slackware. Also the quality of a distribution does not (only) depend on how nifty its package system is. What is more important is how well tested the system as a whole is, and (for me) especially how simple and understandable it is.
vmware-3 does not run on freebsd alas (i bought the linux version, and it has substantial advantages over vmware-2).
you can run linux jdk, but no hotspot variants (so no jdk 1.4 at this time).
still, if only i would have vmware-3 running well under freebsd i'd switch back in a minute.
who uses distros anyway...
takes away the edge doesn't it?
Build an lfs and you'll learn linux.
www.linuxfromscratch.org
everything compiles smoothtly..
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
I have been with Slackware since 1995, when they released 2.3.
Now the introductions are over, let's think about Netscape.
IMHO Netscape is bound to have more users than Slackware it runs on multi-platform, it is released with almost every Linux distribution.
Enough... you must be a troll?
Yet someone (a moderator) found this funny?
I just built a Dual Athlon system... I installed XP just waiting for 8.1 - no other Operating System will do, until 8.1 is avaiable.
PS Has anyone noticed this on the BBC? Is it a scoop or is it old news?
alt.os.linux.slackware has known that rc1 on was out for a few days now and someone on the group even makes the effort to make current ISOs on a weekly bases. Other innovations mentioned in that group are the ability's to easily install slackware from ftp or DOS.
Ascii artist &
I've been using Slackware since 3.5 back in 1997, and I continue using it today. In fact, I'm posting this from my Slackware 8-ish box. So why Slackware? It's all about simplicity. Let's get more specific...
The lack of "forced" package dependencies is a good thing. When I know exactly what I want, I don't need to care about "forced" package dependencies. I run a Debian laptop at home, and when package dependencies break (ok so I'm trying out the unstable branch), it can be a real pain to fix that back. And I don't even want to get started on RPM (yes I run a Red Hat box too). But if I know exactly what I want, I can fix everything myself in Slackware. I'm not forced to accept what a package/distro maintainer wants me to install. It's all about control.
Learning Linux/UNIX. Some of you have already mentioned this. If you really want to learn about Linux/UNIX administration/development, Slackware is a great distro for that purpose. Now, people who would just want to use Linux as a desktop (for non-programming purposes) should use another distro. Slack's not for you. However, people who really want to learn will love the DIY-ness of Slackware. When you have to compile stuff yourself, or figure out why a certain library isn't working, you'll learn a whole heap of skills and tricks that will be really useful to you later. For example...
Moving back and forth from/to BSD is a breeze. When I first had to admin an OpenBSD box, I felt right at home. The similar *.tgz-style packages were easy to admin, and so was editing/configuring the system via editing text files. I later had to do some research using FreeBSD boxes, and again, I'm on familiar ground.
There are a whole lot of other reasons too, but I can't spell it out right now due to my current semi-hangover mode...
The downside: Of course, the obvious downside to using Slackware is time. You need to have heaps of time to learn and use it. But once you're done with that phase, you'll find your investment in Slackware will be worth it all. Again, I stress that Slackware is not for everyone. I certainly don't expect some of my less-obsessed-with-UNIX friends to like it. But hey, if you're the adventurous type who loves to learn and tinker around with stuff, go try it out. I think you'll like it.
slackware 96 was quite nice... came with a book called "Using Linux (third edition)"
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
Checking Linux Counter you will find that Slackware runs 12.09% of the registerd boxes. I couldn't find any current numbers indicateing how many netscape users there are. Maybe someone else knows.
Ascii artist &
You may be right,
:-D
but having said that Slackware places an email in every root's inbox asking them to register for the Linux Counter Project, how many other distributions do that?
Looking at the numbers of the project I would say that their numbers are a huge underestimate.
Don't say that this is a smart marketing ploy by Slackware, they've been doing this for over 7 years. It's just a shame that other distributions don't do the same...
There are AFAIK two analyses of Slashdottings to the Linux couter project so I won't provide a Link
yeah!
:-(
How did that manage to get modded up?
Why is it informative?
Having said that all this should come out in Meta-Moderation. Except that M*M rarely looks at the context of a message.
An official Sun JDK native to FreeBSD exists, and should be available with FreeBSD 5.0.
-- I'll cut you up so bad, you'll wish I'd never cut you up so bad!
Then again, luckily SUSEconfig isn't installed by default in most recent distros, either.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Well, yes - and CPU time is a resource.
> This is a troll. I grew up on Slack since '95. Go slack!
:-]
Even trolls think positively about slackware
:wq
I think it is quite interesting how slack has different boot kernels for different hardware configs for the install. Thats a pretty unique approach in my opinion. I also think that the installer rocks. Its very easy to use (even if it isn't 'Mandrake-esque') and I love curses programs. I do have a question though (haven't found the answer in the changelog). Does anyone know if there is an installer image with the base ISO that has a kernel supporting USB HID devices? The PS/2 ports on my best machine are fried and I only use USB for keyboard and mouse. I know I can download the image but I also don't have a floppy drive on that machine. Any help would be appreciated.
After I downloaded Slack 8.0 Last Year some time. I was always kinda curious how long before the next release. and After A year goes by and the forum closes down I start thinking maybe they are having a problem . Maybe slack is going away. Maybe the maintainer is just to busy to keep up slack. Well after reading the changelog that guy has been busy allright maintaining and making slack better more power to ya I should have sent my 20 buck to slack instead of mandrake. Don't forget to follow the adventures of slack-girl
It's all Politics
You obviously never had SUSEconfig re-generate your carefully handcrafter sendmail.cf. I just wondered if the guy who wrote it was being paid by Microsoft or a Debian nut when it first happened to me.
I've never used SUSE, but I used Slackware a long time ago, and have since then run a number of production Debian and Redhat servers. That said, I'm a bit puzzled by your comment, since it seems to imply that Debian eats local changes to configuration files. (I won't discuss Redhat.)
It's quite easy to set up Debian systems without any sort of automatic configuration. Changes to configuration files are always options provided for the user's convience, not something forced on him or her. AFAIK there are only two possible ways that a configuration will have anything changed by the Debian package manager:
1. When you upgrade a package, your are given the *option* of using the package-supplied configuration file instead of your own. However, the default is to keep your own.
2. The first time you install a package, you are given the *option* of having debconf automatically manage the configuration files for you. (At least in the latest Debian versions; debconf didin't exist IIRC a few years ago.) Debconf is just a program that keeps track of configuration information. The configuration files (eg. XF86Config) that I've used it for are extensively commented as to what parts debconf will change, and what parts it will not. This makes it possible to change things by hand and still use the automatic configuration stuff.
Of course, if you chose to install linuxconf or one of the other GUI configuration utilities, it might overwrite your manual changes. But I don't think that it's legitimate to blame Debian for that. Linuxconf is just a package among others that Debian provides in order to give users the widest set of options possible. I'm sure that if you installed linuxconf on Slackware you'd get the same resuslts.
Is there any specific example of Debian destroying a configuration file that I'm missing here?
-- "--," ?
I've started using Autopkg, but does anyone else have any more autoupgrade programs for Slackware? Also, what distros use BSD inits and which use System V inits?
SuSEConfig doesn't rule out using custom config files, it just makes you learn to edit them in the generator script instead of in the resulting file. Once you get the hang of it, it's really a decent system to use.
:) Then again, I'm biased because I started on Slack back when it was actually one of the more modern distros and there was no ISO available (man, that makes me feel old). I wouldn't have learned as much general linux stuff if I'd started with some other more "cutomized" distro - I would've just learned that distro.
Then again, I really think that Slackware is a good learning distro because it *forces* you to learn if you want it to work. If there's a lazy way to do something, I'll do it, so forcing me to learn is a good thing.
Exactly! And even after stating it you never understand it. Slackware does things in very standard ways, so instead of learning the peculiarities of a particular distribution, you just learn solid standard *nix.
The LSB is just wind. Slackware is the living standard that you can install on your machine, run, use, tinker with.
SysVinit is just annoying. RPM *shrug* you can install it on slack if you need it, knock yourself out.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Slackware does things in very standard ways....The LSB is just wind.
:)
No comment.
I can't tell ya about what it was in 94/95, but i can tell you what its like now. Slackware is another Linux distrobution (much like redhat, mandrake, suse, or debian), its another version of linux, which seems to keep a few ideals in all of its releases, mainly keep it simple, i wouldnt call slackware a rough distrobution by any meas, it just kinda sorta expects that you have some inkling what you are doing (and doesnt try to do everything for you), for me, slack says how high when i say jump. So it keeps things simple, slack also uses a BSD style init over a SysV style init (think redhat), and uses its own package system which to me is the most unix-ish way of doing things (a shell script and some binaries). All in all slack = full featured, but simplistic in its approach.
There is a site that makes binary packages of mostly everything you'll for slackware 8 and 7. You'll need some packages that are hard to compile or that you don't need much personalization or that you may want to easily remove with removepkg.
So in between official upgrade, take a loot at the linuxpackages.net site.
unfinished: (adj.)
You misunderstood. SUSEconfig actually was the reason to me to try Debian. I don't know if SuSE fixed anything, but the SUSEconfig shipped with 6.4 just shouted "Play by my rules or use another distro" a bit too loud for me.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
No, the 1.3 JDK is still being ported. There are still problems with threads, and progress is very slow. Sun has done nothing, except to give a source licence a few months ago (read the freebsd-java mailing list for details).
Hell, I run 7.x on a 486. The only reason it doesn't run 8 is because it's working so well I don't have to think about it. I put Slack on all my servers, from the 486 to a 1.8P4. Slack is good.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
When I was a newbie, I found RH a relatively easy way to start out with Linux, but I have never liked the broken packages I always got with RH or MDK.
Debian is nice and stable, good for servers, and the packaging is good, but it is usually a year out of date by the time it is released.
I am running Slack 8.0 now, and love it. Stable as all hell, critical apps are up to date and built from source, the rest just left as they came out of the box. Don't think I will be changing distro for a while.
Regarding your (presumed) rant about RPM being specified in the LSB, it's not really that bad, since nobody IS forcing you (even though some RPM-based-distro users would have you believe otherwise). IIRC, all the LSB specifies is that distros should have some way of installing RPM packages. Slack users can install RPM, and Debian users can use alien.
I think everyone here is missing the point. Everyone is comparing Slackware to Mandrake/Redhat etc, but the main reason why I use it is to install the absolute basic libraries required to get a Linux system going and then compile the latest KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Kernel and stuff like lirc so everything is remote controlled. The result is a Linux which is fast (takes 20 seconds to boot), looks good, easy to use and only fits in a partition of less than *1GB*. You don't get the bloat that you get with other distros.
Another advantage as noted earlier is editing config files. When you install hotplug USB or lirc or any other daemon which needs to go in an 'rc' statup file it is really easy in Slackware - simply add the command! Using most distributions today you have to try and fight some kind of configuration program or alternatively break the rc files which get overwritten next time you use the 'easy to use' configurator!
I had Mandrake on my machine until recently. While being pretty good, I had enough niggles with it to make me switch to Gentoo.
/etc/hosts. The other problem was that I often couldn't find stuff to edit it in the first place.
For one thing, it had a habit of resetting configuration files I had manually edited - e.g.
can we pump the exhaust fumes from our coal-burning plant into your house?
evanchik.net
Slackware works better for me than any other distro I've tried. I've had oddball problems with both RH and Mandrake, and I just don't like the "look and feel" of Suse. Sometimes Debian works great, but not always; I've gotten bit in the butt by apt-get. I only broke Slackware once, and it was only X and I could fix it from the command line. There's a learning curve, and I may have to tinker, but once I get something working, it WORKS!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
That bbc story (about water on mars) is a coupla days old.
it appeared on slashdot here
I haven't even said I dislike Slackware, just that I can't see a benefit to forcing users to run text files (as the post I am responding to asserts is the case).
Respond. Don't moderate me into oblivion. That isn't a troll. If you think it is, explain why.
Holy crap, I couldn't resist a big me too on that one. I almost stopped using linux entirely when I first started using it simply because of SysV and RPM.
'Phone-jacking: Give someone a ring, they'll have to answer to find out who it is!' - Threni
Well the first time I installed linux myself it was RedHat. The init system was so bizzarely convoluted I suspected it was invented simply to torture me ;) I actually liked rpm at the time, it's certainly a lot better than windows install shield crap. But it's needlessly complicated, and when it goes haywire (normally because of poor packaging I am told by rpm advocates - I don't doubt that's true, but then again it's needlessly difficult to package things properly under it too) it can be really ugly.
After installing slack and setting it up I could never go back to an rpm distro. The init system makes sense! The package system makes sense!
With redhat when something went wrong I could never be sure why until I spent the time tracking it down, and it always turned out to be something different and strange each time, sometimes my fault, but often not. When slack screws up, it's always one of two things - either there is a hardware problem or I screwed something up myself. After about a year I started having confidence in that, and that confidence has always turned out to be well founded. It makes troubleshooting so much easier.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.