Slackware 8.1 is Released

MrSnivvel writes: "Slackware 8.1 has been released. Highlights of this release include KDE 3.0.1, GNOME 1.4.1 (with new additions like Evolution), the long-awaited Mozilla 1.0 browser, support for many new filesystems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers. Remember to buy your copies at http://store.slackware.com. List of download mirrors here. Public releases of Mozilla AND Slackware in the same month, I'm so happy I've soiled myself."

Comments

Slackware is dead, my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux how Linux was intended. A single CD of beautiful and clean functionality. Minimal, stable and secure - and yet manageable. Slackware should be required for all Linux newbies. AFTER learning to edit rc.files and inetd.conf with vi, AFTER you've mastered ls, AFTER you've learned to download and compile, THEN you may play with KDE. Think how much better the world would be.

Re:Slackware is dead, my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes. The typical geek lost in his computer world. I hate to tell you but the rest of the world isn't like you. They are not looking to learn Linux. They want to use it. 28 Million AOL users will testify to the fact that people like things very simple and dumbed down.

And if you really wanted to learn linux then you would use Linux From Scratch like a real uber-geek.

I'm just glad that when the revolution comes, people like you will be at home reading about it on slashdot.

Re:Slackware is dead, my ass

[smittyoneeach]

Slackware should be required for all Linux newbies.

I disagree. Slackware was over my head whenever I tried it--7.x or something. The idea of a fistful of ASCII .conf files in standard locations that control everything was too simple and obvious for me to grasp. Forgive me, Father--I did Windows.
Now that I have spent some time with a RH distro, and grasp *nix-think to a sufficient depth, I'm strongly considering a return to Slack...

A question for the community: the reason to go for Slack over, say, Gentoo, is that Slack arrives as canned object files ready to install, whereas Gentoo assumes we have a pipe, time and skill to pull down all the source over TCP/IP and compile from scratch, no? In other words, Gentoo requires a higher level of skill than Slack to build and tweak?

...dons asbestos underwear...

Re:Slackware is dead, my ass

[SealBeater]

This is actually the *problem* with Slackware/Debian. I want to learn, so I
don't mind reading documentation, but most of the people I know don't care at
all, they just want "click-n-run"

This is going to be a long thread, I can tell. You shouldn't confuse
"click-n-run" with "wanting to learn". I always recommend slackware if anyone
asks me what is a good first distro, partially because it is less hand holding.
I had a friend who went to a tech school and had a class on linux, they gave
him mandrake. Do you know what the problem with that is? You don't learn
"linux" per say, you learn a distribution. You don't learn fdisk, you learn
disk-druid and drakeconf. You don't learn tar zxvf, you learn rpm -ui. You
never learn how to do things without a gui, because as long as you are using
these things, you are never faced with the need to. Slackware and LFS (as was
mentioned earlier) will teach you "linux". If you want to learn to build a
house, you don't go out and buy a house and walk around the inside examining
it, you read a book and build a house. Granted, not everyone wants to learn
the internals of an OS to a high degree, that's fine. But don't say a person
wants to learn, when all they really want to do is get up and running. FYI,
slackware is very easy to get up and running.

SealBeater

Re:Slackware is dead, my ass

[Bandman]

It just depends man. Many people ask me what version of linux would be right for them, and this is what I them: "Do you want to do, or do you want to know? Because if you just want a workable system, then use RedHat, because it will set everything up for you, and you'll have a good workable system. If you want to know how things work, /why/ they act the way they do, then you need to start on Slackware."

Because in my mind, both are completly ok choices. There are some people who just want to use a computer. This is why Windows has such a huge market share. Most of the people don't care one way or another. And if RedHat can give them that, then there's nothing wrong with them using it. People like us though, we Slackware users, are a different breed :) We can't stand not to know how our OS works. The fact that we have ran slackware for any length of time is a testiment to that. Anyone who can spend more than a month using slackware should probably stay with it, becuase not much else would make them happy, or at least that's the way I feel.

Re:Slackware is dead, my ass

[axxackall]

Slackware should a part of University course, where students are:

• not lazzy
• eager to learn
• having time to learn

Newbies in Wallmart should take Mandrake or RedHat.

Or better Yellow Dog Linux :))

Re:Slackware is dead, my ass

[q-soe]

"I started playing with Slackware 1.01 in early 1994 "

But think for a second - in 1994 you would need to be more technically knowledgeable that you needed to be in 2002 - 1994 was pre windows 95 and the PC world was still DOS based - you needed to know what you were doing - and running a BBS was hardly a point and shoot thing...

In other words dont you think that you may have had more knowledge of how a computer ticked than the average mum and dad these days ? Slackware is not forgiving if you have never used a command line - i put it to you that none of us had a problem but then i suggest you find your mum or your boss and give it to them and get them to run it - you may find what im getting at...

I have been branded as a troll on here for expressing my opionion more times in the last week than in 5 years previously - so at risk of it again please understand that when i say Slackware is not a beginners OS i mean not someone who has only ever used windows and has NO understanding of how and OS actually works - Joe Average. Sometimes we all forget that we are a lot more techincally skilled than we realise.

Re:Timing is everything

[Charm]

Really the best thing about Slackware is that it is like C. Not like assembly so that you have to do everything. But not like higher level languages where everthing is done with magic tricks. When was the last time you changed a setting and your distro changed it back. That sort of behaviour is unlikely on Slackware.

The user has full control. There is no crappy config tools to get in the way. This is why it is so good for learning Unix and Linux because you have access to the raw system.

In slackware if I want to change the bitdepth of X windows I have to edit it with a text file. At first this might seem silly but when a Redhat user is trying to do something complicated his fancy tools hold him back. Slack users do not have that problem, they understand how the system works.

Slackware is also very stable thats why it doesn't use GCC 3.1 out of the box.

Re:HAHAHAHA ! Slackware is dead !

[ajmarks]

Why the hell would you brag about being French? That's like saying, "I am a snooty man who does not bathe and who would prefer surrendering without a fight." The Warsaw ghetto withstood the Nazis longer than your entire nation.

Q: What's the French battle cry?
A: "We surrender!"

Seems so long ago

[Graspee_Leemoor]

A week today it will be exactly 6 years since I first installed Linux. The distribution that I used was Slackware 3.

After using it for a bit and becoming more acquainted with linux however, I could see that even the latest downloadable version of Slackware (I got 3.0.0 from the book "Linux Unleashed") had really old versions of things, so I "upgraded" to Redhat, which in those days, at least on #linux was the leetest of the leet.

At this point I could ask if slackware is more up-to-date these days, but then that would be a very "Ask Slashdot" thing to do, since I could just go and check for myself.

graspee

All Linux distributions need Kazaa-like installers

[emil]

Download a bootnet floppy or static Linux executible which checks a list of mirrors, tests bandwidth to find the fastest, and downloads the ISOs and/or does your install.

RedHat up2date seems to use such a mechanism; download times off this network are much faster than updates.redhat.com.

I screwed up my main Linux system this weekend, and hunting for a fast mirror on win98 is annoying.

Re:Timing is everything

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the last time you changed a setting and your distro changed it back.

Never saw that behavior with Red Hat. Is there a case of this happening with other distros, or are you making things up?

Nono, it's true. I've seen Red Hat do this often. If you admin redhat the normal way (eg. editing text files) it's a hell of an annoying experience. Find file with (say) hostname in. Edit hostname. Next time you reboot, the goddamn system has replaced it with one it had elsewhere. Talk to Red Hat fans about why it does it that way, they say it's for 'Ease of updating' or some such, cos the config files are comfortably distant... What's wrong with a plain text config??? I never had a problem with 'Ooh, I'm updating, let's see: tar cvfz backup.tgz /etc'... but nooooo, Red Hat like to script the scripts on their scripts and that's ALL there is to it.

Finally Red Hat (and lots of other distros) have just added an awful lot of cruft in order to simplify life for the maintainers (I assume). It tends to break some of the 'standard' ways of doing things. Why, I remember back in the days of Red Hat 5.1 there used to be endless warnings all over every config file I tried to edit; "DO not edit this by hand! You'll break (whatever the editor was called that you were supposed to use)", LinuxConf I think it was, which, coincidentally, was my introduction to the security risks inherent in a Red Hat distribution that hasn't been severely edited.

Red Hat is broken, as far as I'm concerned. Unless the new version magically fixes all of these things, which, to be honest, I doubt.