Slackware 9 Unleashed to World

kiltedtaco writes "Slackware Linux 9.0 is out! Based on gcc 3.2, and equipped with kernel 2.4.20 (ptrace-patched), XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1. You can read the full announcement, or just go grab a copy for yourself at either the Slackware Store or these lovely mirrors." I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux. It's cool to see that it's still around.

Comments

goodness

[fiftyfly]

gotta get me some of that, mmmm tasty

Re:goodness

[ogewo]

can't find a setup.exe....i'm out.

darn

[k0nsept]

darn i just downloaded the beta yesterday!

Re:darn

[phreaknb]

Well 9.0 has been out since the 18th. It just wasn't on the front page of slackware.com. Look at your changelog to see, or try "cat /etc/slackware-version"

Re:darn

[Mr. Sketch]

No you didn't because it was actually released on Wednesday (technically late Tuesday), so if you downloaded anything Wednesday from -current it would have been 9.0final. I knew about it, but didn't want to post it to Slashdot until I got it all downloaded :).

Re:darn

[garcia]

it's amazing that Slackware hasn't included some sort of automatic update like apt-get or RHN. I feel that it is not a wise descision to not allow users to keep w/the bleeding edge in this day and age of Linux.

I prefer that my system is running the latest and greatest.. Someday, when apt-get isn't broken, and you can easily use CVS X *and* automatically update programs it will be nice.

Please no comments from the Debian policy freaks. It's my system, I should be able to do what I want w/it whether Debian likes it or not.

Re:darn

[phreaknb]

There are programs that will do this for you. I thought the same, and did not have to look hard for one. Try "autopkg" or "slacker"

Re:darn

[Rooktoven]

rsync to a slack-current server. Upgradepkg *.

Re:darn

[Sh0t]

You mean besides the fact you can:

Download and use apt-get
Download and use Rpm
Download the sources of the most bleeding edge

Chances are the latest and greatest is going to be SOURCE anyway, not a package.

CVS is always available.

Please learn. Don't give people the wrong about slack.

Re:darn

[Vilim]

Haha same here, I had an ISO about 6 hours after the rsync was released thanks to ananke (hats of to him for a great job). I then distributed it to all my friends who run slackware and am now desparately trying to get ATI's stupid drivers to work in it. Otherwise it is great, the install is really no different but with Xfree86 4.3 and kde 3.1 where can you go wrong? I am typing this message from it now actually :p

Re:darn

[marbleman]

a tad outrageous

Re:darn

[BrokenHalo]

didn't want to post it to Slashdot until I got it all downloaded :).

I had a suspicion that a few people might be doing that... In my case, since I've been enjoying using Slack for so long now, I'm putting up some of my dollars for an "official" copy for once. I reckon Patrick richly deserves it.

Re:darn

[BrokenHalo]

Download and use apt-get
Download and use Rpm
Download the sources of the most bleeding edge

Only the latter usually applies (IMHO) to most slackware-heads. The binary distribution just gives us a world to stand on while we do it. As for rpm or apt-get: [affecting french accent] I spit in their general direction :-)

Why would we bother using rpm or apt-get when we can use the One True packaging system, tgz? :-)

Re:darn

[Anonymous Coward]

No you didn't because it was actually released on Wednesday (technically late Tuesday), so if you downloaded anything Wednesday from -current it would have been 9.0final. I knew about it, but didn't want to post it to Slashdot until I got it all downloaded :).

Yes, well some people are considerate, and download from mirrors (which aren't always up to date).

Re:darn

[uncleFester]

You mean besides the fact you can:

Download and use apt-get
Download and use Rpm
Download the sources of the most bleeding edge

s/download/rsync/g :)

-f (rsyncing the final bits now to build my own isos)

Re:darn

[SN74S181]

I bought one of the books, _Linux Programming_, co-authored by Patrick Volkerding. I figured that was paying him for his efforts. The book came with a CD that had 'Slackware 96' (Slackware 3.1.0) on it. That was the big leap from Kernel 1.2.13 to 2.0 for me. Back in those days, before I had any kind of reliable connection to the Internet at all, buying Linux CDs and books with Linux CDs in them was the easiest way to get the latest version of Slack.

Re:darn

[SN74S181]

I remember, during the brief period when I ran Red Hat Linux (at Version 4.2), that I always told people I ran Red Hat only for about a half hour. That was how long it took to recompile a nice solid static kernel on top of Red Hat and get rid of their broken kludge-ridden kernel module system. It was bad back with 4.2, but Red Hat had some nice binaries all preconfigured that I didn't know how to install on Slack. But as I learned more I went back to Slack.

Re:darn

[squant0]

how is that flaimbait?

I mean come on (Jimmy voice)

fp

[volkerdi]

Hey, do I get fp? :-)

Re:fp

[BRTB]

Well... maybe not in the real order, but we'll give you honorary FP anyway. =]

And while I'm posting... I think I speak for all of us loyal Slack users everywhere in thanking you for your hard work in making yet another fine release. Slackware forever!

Re: fp

[ThePurpleBuffalo]

I'd just like to point out that user "volkerdi" is Patrick Volkerding - the head Slackware guy.

Personally, I laughed out loud when I saw this post.

I think it's unfortunate that Mr. Volkerding, who has worked very hard for MANY years to help Linux, is rarely recognized.

Or maybe it just seems that way...

Beware TPB

Re:fp

[xombo]

I agree, it should be +5, Funny on all posts here since it should be his time in the sun.

Re:fp

[Sh0t]

UP the irons to you bro thanks for the good work even tho I use freebsd I appreciate your efforts to put out a nice bohemian distru

Re:fp

[RLiegh]

"FreeBSD is for people who love unix..."
Isn't slackware's motto something along the lines of "the most unix-like linux"?
Even though I switch between XP and NetBSD, I would not have gotten into NetBSD if I hadn't gotten into FreeBSD. And I wouldn't have gotten into FreeBSD without having learned on slackware.

So thank you, Pat. :^)

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

Pat,

Thanks to you, I got into Linux and loved it. I've since moved on to FreeBSD, but without Slack, I'd still be deciding between Corel and RedHat. Don't mind all of the people saying "where's the Debain-style package system" and crap like that. Slack is a good distro in it's own ways, and it's a shame that countless Windows-XP using AC's insult your hard work.

-Craig

Re:fp

[ankit]

You may not get the fp, but you surely get a big thank you from thousands of loyal slack users worldwide!

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you do. and here's a GIGANTIC thank you from me for making the absolute BEST linux distribution on the planet.

I would give you and your team a standing ovation but I'd just look silly here in my cubicle.

Thank you. you are one of the people that make linux as much fun as it is.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

You work in a cubicle? If I did, NO Linux distro in the world would make me smile!

Re:fp

[spickus]

Great job as usual. Thank you.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware, kicking ass for _how many_ years? Other distros
come and go, "XDISTRO r0x!" one day, "XDISTRO suxxx!" another,
Slackware will always own. The fp is yours, sir :p

Re:fp

[FuegoFuerte]

Oh yah... and a BIG BIG shout out from me, for adding Xinerama. :).

What, thought I didn't notice? ;)

Re: fp

[A nonymous Coward]

Patrick Volkerding is like slackware itself -- quiet, competent, gets the job done without need for flash. Rock solid, comforting, a fine old friend.

Re:fp

[deadsaijinx*]

wait. Maybe if I were to spend years developing a dependable and rock-solid linux distribution, then I could make FP postings and not get modded down! Then, with this now power, I will slowly take over all of /.!!!!! MUHAHA (specifically two "ha"s)

Or I could just come up with something meaningful to contribute to /. .... yeah, that would be a lot less work.

Re: fp

[SN74S181]

Thanks, Pat.

I remember how liberating it was the first time I installed Slackware. It was wonderful after suffering for so long with the always-broken-in-a-new-way mess that was Yggdrasil Linux. The old Infomagic Linux CD-ROM sets were a lifesaver to an isolated nerd in a sea of Microsoft.

Re: fp

[Baki]

He is very much recognized, maybe not in the press or on 'important' web sites, but by many many people who run their PC's on slackware and save loads of time because of it's simplicity and clearness.

I have been upgrading (without reinstallation) since 3 years. The simple and clear packaging system makes it possible to avoid being entangled in a web of dependancies (which demand a reinstall from scratch sooner or later in many distributions).

Only FreeBSD comes close.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

fp to you and truly thank you for a great distribution.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

omg you sad fucks

Re:fp

[Cleon]

Pat--You da man. Hands down.

Slackware was my first, and remains my only. :)

Re:fp

[Lumpy]

Yes you get first post, and The thanks of myself for putting out the absolute BEST distro of linux on this planet.

I started with Yggdrasil then switched to Slack back in the really early days nad havent looked back for any of my important systems.

Servers run slack exclusively. Redhat was up until recently for the desktop.... but with the lastest slack release... It looks like time to do a slackware desktop install.

Thank you for making Slackware something to be proud of.

My first linux

[Anonymous Coward]

WHOOHOO This is the first linux install I'm gonna try. I'm a meganewbie, so wish me luck :)

- KJ

Re:My first linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you'll have a great ol' time. If you (painfully?) learn how to run Slack, then you won't have to un-learn anything in the future.

Good luck. You might need it.

Re:My first linux

[meringuoid]

WHOOHOO This is the first linux install I'm gonna try. I'm a meganewbie, so wish me luck :)

Good luck. I really mean it. Admire your courage.

Personally I spent a good while messing about with Red Hat (7.0, 7.2, 7.3) and Mandrake (9.0) before settling down on Gentoo. Slack's good, though; fellow in the next room uses it, loves the thing. I have a Slackware boot CD around here somewhere, but I never did get around to trying it - I did use it as a rescue disk once or twice though.

It just struck me... you're not having us on, are you? Maybe it's your first Linux install, but you're a veteran of three hundred different BSD systems? :-)

Re:My first linux

[Anonymous Coward]

fellow in the next room uses it, loves the thing.

Fellow in the next room here,

Slackware is nice and simple. I first started with Redhat 7.3 but I didn't get on with the Redhat way of doing things. Much generic documentation found online didn't apply because Redhat had rearranged the backend so that it would work with their GUIs.

Slackware pretty much installs software where it was intended and encourages you to configure manually or use standard configuration tools such as XF86Config that you can read up on in any HOWTO. Also the packaging system is unobtrusive allowing you to install from source or say Loki or Mozilla installer without messing up packaging management (problems I found with Debian and Gentoo).

Chances are that from a standard install you won't get sound, X11 your CD-Writer or other `peripherals' running but then, just remember that the HOWTO's and other goodies are stored in the /usr/doc directory and of course there's www.google.com. You learn a lot about your computer in just getting things to work.

I cut my teeth on Slack, but then I had a whole summer to mess around before I really needed my computer. If you don't mind the command line (you may be surprised what can be done at a terminal,) and have a bit of time on your hands then try Slack. Oh, and also get a copy of `The Book' from slackware.com, it's a nice conscise but very helpful manual, especially for first install.

Regards

Nemes

Re:My first linux

[Anonymous Coward]

1996. Slackware 3.2. Never touched linux before, just knew dos. Installed no problems.

If you have clue and the ability to think, its not a problem.

Re:My first linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not having you on, I'm a (dare I say it) a fulltime win-user (XP at home, NT4 at work(sysadmin))

I'm gonna begin installing coming saturday, put on some good music, pop open a beer, and getting linux on my own ass (erhm, I mean hard drive ;P )

-- KJ

Rofl... coincidence?

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to be running it right now. I've tried all the different distributions but I keep coming back to slackware. It always works great for me! =)

man...

[intermodal]

its amazing the popularity slackware maintains despite its simplicity. Just goes to show how desireable simplicity can be for some.

Re:man...

[TeknoHog]

its amazing the popularity Mr. Bush maintains despite his simplicity. ;-)

Re:man...

[Gambit Thirty-Two]

Real linux users don't use packages.

We roll our own!

Re:man...

[cadillactux]

Whats this I hear? Linux users? Packages? The larger the boxen? Overcompensating?

Re:man...

[reidbold]

I hope you're not implying slack doesn't use packages, that's just lunacy.

Re:man...

[Anonymous Coward]

go post on kiro5in.

Re:man...

[Anonymous Coward]

dumbass.

Re:man...

[Gambit Thirty-Two]

Im just saying that I'd rather compile from scratch than download a new package.

which unfortunately wreaks havoc with Slackware, since half the stuff isnt installed in the default place!

Re:man...

[repoleved]

"despite its simplicity"? That was one of the big reasons that I moved to Slackware and haven't looked back.

Here are some reasons why I love Slackware:

1. The package manager is simple and easy to understand.
2. When something breaks, you have a good chance of knowing what you did to f*** it up, and how to fix it again.
3. It doesn't need RPM or APT.
4. It encourages you to use the source.
5. Nothing breaks unless you tell it to break (unlike RPM).
6. The most up-to-date software.
7. The best compiler.
8. The best user groups.
9. The best desktops and the best driver support.
10. Less "compulsive upgrading" than other distributions.

Slackware just ROCKS. I have used Mandrake, Redhat, Debian, Knoppix and Slackware, and Slackware is my favorite by far. Keep up the great work!

Re:man...

[SN74S181]

Naw. You install Slackware, then you use 'pkgtool -r' to remove packages one by one as you reinstall your tuned versions compiled from source. That's kinda-sorta using packages.

Re:man...

[jonnyfivealive]

all hail mr hardcore "real linux user" well, shoot... another -1 flaimbait for me...

First distro

[Anonymous Coward]

I started off with Slackware, but nowadays I use Debian.. I'll always have a soft spot for slack, though :).

Re:First distro

[LeoDV]

Same here. I'd bet there are a hojillion of us out there with that history.

What's so special about Slackware?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Why should I use it in preference to RH or Debian or any of the countless other distros? Does it have some special features? Is it easy to install? Does it have some packages you can't find elsewhere? Have they made some amazing customizations to the kernel?

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[punkmac]

it dosent hold your hand, so you learn the right way

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[eryk]

The answer to all your questions is no and that's exactly what makes Slackware so attractive.
It is clean and tidy distribution which keeps everything as simple as possible. It is beautiful.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[christafarian]

I run redhat when I do not want to mess with things like drivers or configuration. Slackware is simple, and there are not any darn rpms that get in your way.

RPMS can be your best friend or you worst enemy depending on what you are doing.

I have a fetish for compiling everything from source, so a minimal slackware is a step above LFS.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, its an oldy but goody that still follows standards. No one asked you to use it. Go back to your puter and use Red Hat or something...

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

So you're saying Slackware is the distro for newbies?

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[localghost]

It's simple. It is easy to install, though it's not as pretty as Redhat or Mandrake. It's got a very simple package management system, and it's got a much simpler directory structure. I started on Slackware and switched to Debian a few months ago. I'd say that what I miss most about Slackware is how easy it is to make it work the way you want (it's really easy to mix source and binary packages) and the layout of the startup scripts. I don't like this giant mess of symbolic links that most distros use. But it was worth the switch to get apt-get. (if they would only update the packages)

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what's so special about all the other distros? The argument in your post could be applied to all of the countless distros that you allude to.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[forged]

Slack is the distro for those who want to learn. I was a total newbie when they unleashed SLS on me in '94 (SLS was the precursor to Slackware). SLS and Slackware were the two only distros where I really learned the stuff.

So in a sense, yes Slackware is for the newbie, but no it won't hold your hand: you have to walk the path yourself.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[LordP]

It's very easy to install - the installer is to a lot of people the easiest to use (myself included).

I think most of the people who use or want to use Slackware is for the challenge - for the most part you generally have to edit config files yourself to administer it, or upgrade stuff. Compiling new packages yourself is done more often than using the package management system - it isn't anything like apt-get or rpm (though rpm is available and I've noticed quite a few package management tools around).

For me, it's what I've used since around 96/97 (and the red Infomagic distribution), and I'm comfortable with it :)

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Does it have some special features?
NO
>Is it easy to install?
It depends on who asks.
>Does it have some packages you can't find elsewhere?
NO
>Have they made some amazing customizations to the kernel?
NO

Isn't it beautiful?
For my desktop and notebook I switched to Gentoo, but firewall will be always Slackware.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Fnord]

Mandrake is for newbies. Slackware is for newbies that don't want to stay newbies.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Bitch-Face Jones]

Yeah, but thanks to its complete lack of package managment, its not so 'clean' and 'tidy' after you've used it for a couple months. It becomes a mess of libraries and broken dependencies that is a nightmare to administer.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[gilesjuk]

Stability perhaps, it's produced by one person.

Slack has had a reputation for being difficult, but compated to installing Gentoo it's quite simple to install.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[punkmac]

yes and no

i always recommend people to start off with slackware due to it being the most unix-like linux distro out right now. after you learn how a unix enviroment works and runs then pick your flavour, wether it be slack, redhat, debian, etc.

that being said, i still use it for my servers as its rock-solid stability and performance never gave me a reason to change. theirs also people i know on the other hand who are redhat devout and never want to change, but to each his own.

so yes, it is the distro for newbies imo, but not a distro for newbies ..if that makes sense? :)

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Rooktoven]

Au contraire.

I've found that it is much more forgiving in the way of dependencies than RPM based systems-- in other words, you can install slack-packages and ./configure && make install other software without getting trapped in dependency hell. The only time I have ever encountered any library issues is when riding on the bleeding edge of slack current, and even then all the essential networking tools have remained rock-solid.

At my company we're moving our mix of Suse and Red Hat servers to all slackware, and I for one couldn't be more overjoyed. (But then I'm lazy and like to just installpkg *, read my fortune and get on with life.)

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to your puter and use Red Hat or something...

He wasn't bitching, he was asking the same question that those of use that have never used slackwear were asking.

dumbfuck.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

so the hard way = the right way?

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[frodo from middle ea]

I have to diagree with almost all comments that tell you , you learn more about the system if it doesn't hold your hand.
Thats a bunch of crap. Whether you learn the system depends on whether you want to learn the system or not.
My first experience with Unix was a normal User a/c on a sun sparc box. I had no root access, no X, no vim (plain ol' vi), no bash. but by the time I installed RH 5.x somewhere in 98, It took me just a couple of weeks to figure out stuff.
Talking about a *nix system, whether you learn or not very much depends on whether you are GUI or CLI inclined. If you are CLI inclined then no matter what the distro is , it will take you hardly any time to figure which configuration goes in to which files. Remember the Unix configurations are stored in TEXT files rather than a binary registry.
So no matter what distro you use, The ability to learn how a system works, how to best configure and customise your system, lies in your apptitude to learn and master the CLI.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[znaps]

Yes it's easy to install, but Slackware never strived to have that illusion of simplicity that other distros tried and (IMO) have failed at. This scares some newbies, but teaches you Linux in the most straightforward way.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

It's not an argument. It's a question. I could ask the question of all distros. It's good to ask questions. If you don't you might stick a CD into your PC and find you're running Windows.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[WeeBull]

What's so special? Probably nothing; it's probably all down to personal taste. The Slackware "ethic" pretty much sums up why I use it, though -

Slackware - everything you need and nothing you don't.

(That reminds me of the old Burger King campaign; "You've got it - your way". Damn. Hungry now ...)

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

its complete lack of package managment,

It does have package management: installpkg, removepkg, and upgradepkg. It is far, far superior to RPM-based hell. RPM breaks the golden rule of programming (KISS) with a giant sledgehammer; just look at rpm --help, which I won't list here, as it's 154 lines of help options. That's just inexcusable.

The beauty of slackware's package management is that is doesn't check for dependencies. At first that might seem like a bad idea, but for power users (which is Slackware's target) that is best. What if I've upgraded a package manually, by installing from source (or really any way besides installpkg/upgradepkg)? For Redhat, you've got to fight rpm because it really doesn't like to install without all the dependencies listed in its rpm database. On Slackware there is no problem at all.

Additionally, RPM files suck. How do you get the files out of the package, if you just want to see the files and don't want to install? Use alien to convert it to Slackware tgz format.

And how do you see what files each package includes? For rpm, you've got to use rpm to "query" the binary database. Uck. Not very powerful. However for Slackware, all the files are listed in text files in /var/log/packages/, each file representing a package. You can use any of the many powerful file and text processing tools that come with all GNU systems, for example to see what packages put files into /sbin, just do "grep ^sbin /var/log/packages/*" - now that's powerful! And to find what files are in a Slackware .tgz package, just do "tar ztvf package.tgz".

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found that it is much more forgiving in the way of dependencies than RPM based systems-- in other words, you can install slack-packages and ./configure && make install other software without getting trapped in dependency hell.
What the hell are you talking about? Suppose that you're trying to upgrade a package such as Gnome that has like 9.34x10^32 library dependencies. Oh, but you're running slackware so you can show all your IRC friends how mad leet you are, so you compiled all of those 9.34x10^32 dependencies from source. Now you have to go through your entire directory structure and pick out every fucking file that needs to be replaced, unless you're lucky enough to have an uninstall script in your source directory, assuming that you kept it. So you're basically stuck doing hours of work on something that would take 5 minutes on any other distro with a decent package managment system. And at any rate, I don't know why the hell you're mentioning "RPM" as though its the only other package managment system on the face of the planet, because frankly RPM sucks ass, especially compared to Debian's APT or even (ugh) Ports-based systems.

You're not your fucking tarballs.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[dotgain]

Exactly - couldn't agree more.
I mean, what's with this, found in mandrake and redhat:

alias rm="rm -i"

What!?!?! Coz it's a good idea to get used to an interactive rm, isn't it? /sarc. Slack can be as good as any other distro going, but it can never be as bad as any other distro going, if you know what I mean.

GO PATRICK!

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[FuegoFuerte]

If you are CLI inclined then no matter what the distro is , it will take you hardly any time to figure which configuration goes in to which files.

This is NOT meant as a flame, but have you ever looked at Debian config files? Pure rubbish, half of it not needed. Confusing as hell. Then take a look at slackware scripts. Laid out nicely, easy to figure out, easy to make do what you want them to do. So there IS a big difference in learnability between distros.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[BrokenHalo]

I guess it depends on what the newbie wants. If he wants a linux box with all the desktop eye-candy because he wants to try out something other than windoze, Mandrake or RedHat are not bad.

Personally, I found tweaking mdk's or rh's scripts in /etc a bit of a chore, because I don't like the way they're written and organised. Pat's scripts are written pretty much as if I had done it myself, so I find them easy to follow.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[ArmedGeek]

for the most part you generally have to edit config files yourself to administer it

Yeah, my main desktop machine and my laptop both run Mandrake 9.0 (for simplicity and prettiness) but I still wind up editing config files. I don't have to (Mandrake has excellent GUI config utils) but, i guess if you know how to, it's just faster and easier to pop open a terminal window edit a config file and restart a service.

ps.I'm downloading Slackware 9 right now

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[BrokenHalo]

Slack has had a reputation for being difficult

I know being into Slackware at one time was popularly equated to satan-worship (muwahahahaha), but if we overlook the fact that the installer is a text-mode job, I think it's fair to say that it's just as easy to get up and running as (say) RH, and certainly easier than Debian.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[ArmedGeek]

What's special about RedHat? -easy, pretty, rediculous volume of distro-specific docs Mandrake? -easy, pretty, close enough to RH for the docs to be practically interchangable, IMO, the best distro for newbies that just want it to work Slack? -IMO, the best distro for simplicity and for people who WANT to know how it all works

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[GrimReality]

But it was worth the switch to get apt-get. (if they would only update the packages)

Debian does update packages. (Slackware and Debian used to have the distinction of usually having packages ready first; the proliferation of rpm based systems seems to have changed that though.)

The catch is that both distributions, especially Debian, puts them in 'unstable' or 'beta' for pretty long. Debian even went as far as to give the name 'Sid' to their 'unstable' section (remember Sid, the toy-breaking, evil kid from ToyStory).

Disclaimer: I use Debian (RedHat was the first one I used and I did have a sojourn with Mandrake). I haven't used Slackware, but my new computer will have Slackware pre-installed (when it arrives).

Thank you.

GrimReality
2003-03-21 02:32:29 UTC (2003-03-20 21:32:29 EST)

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[SN74S181]

I have a fetish for compiling everything from source, too. It's brought me over to NetBSD, from Slack, because a base install of NetBSD is so generic you don't even get a Window Manager except for TWM, unless you compile it from the Packages or use the binary packages. A base install is simple, yet complete, in a 100 meg download of TGZ files.

Also it's cool that there is one NetBSD, all the same, to run on all my architectures. The same exact source tree, kernel and userland, runs on my Sparc, Intel, and PPC boxes. The same /etc hierarchy. It's nice.

I wouldn't know enough about Unix to even have started on NetBSD if I hadn't learned so much running Slack, though. And the Slack boot/root diskettes have been important power tools (with useful things like dd for backing up partitions or entire raw hard drives) for years.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Arandir]

That's what's so great about Slackware! It doesn't have an of that crap in it!

Sometimes you want to go to the store and get milk. Not Vitamin D milk. Not lowfat milk. not no-fat milk. Not chocolate or strawberry milk. Just milk. That's like Slackware. Sometimes you just want to get Linux/Xfree86/KDE/Gnome/GCC without all the "improvements" the other distros put in.

p.s. But it is easy to install. The reason it is easy is that none of that "we have to make it easy" crap was added to the installer.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[hthiefshorty]

I recently installed my first distro on a laptop. Slackware was the only distro I could get to work (I tried Red Hat and SuSE). I am sure a Linux expert could have made any distro work, but Slackware got me, a newbie, to the point of enjoying Linux. Now that I am up and running I am learning more about Linux than I knew existed by configuring the machine and getting everything to work (and no, not everything works yet). Slackware is easy to use, but requires you to actually read a HOWTO or man page to get what you want.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

That alias is one of, it not the most anoying thing about any RedHat based distro. I got used to it, and use rm -f before I learnt about .bashrc Damn you RedHat, for teaching me bad habits!

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[aLEczapKA]

Definitly! Slackware was my first distro! When I started 2 years ago - I was a newbie and had no idea about Linux at all, but because of Slackware's simplicity I was able to learn it very fast. Just read a little - Slackware's Book and such...

Later I tried out some other: debian, mandrake, redhat, SuSe.. but it's just crap (sorry all fans, but that's my opinion), overloaded, bloated, slow, unstable and insecure (out of the box)... so I was getting back to Slackware with no regret.

Slack has powerful and simple to use (and understand) packaging system. And it never breaks up if _you_ don't screw something up. I just love it!

Slackware is simple, secure and stable. Do you need more?

BTW: Thank you Patrick for your hard work!

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[koffie]

No, that is confusing cause and effect. ;-)

It takes effort to learn something new, and when learning unix I think the effort is best spent with Volberdings gift to the world.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[moZer]

Here we go again... If you think that having no package manager, or having a very simple package manager, is better than rpm or dpkg you are simply wrong. Let me tell you why:

Dependencies are there for a reason. Just because you can install kdebase.tgz without having qt installed, doesn't mean it will run. Too obvious example? Well, name all libs that you need in order to run Galeon? Or what libs you need to update to what versions if you want to upgrade Galeon from 1.2 to 1.4?

The metadata (dependencies) that come with rpm/dpkg also makes it possible to write and use tools as apt/urpmi/up2date, to automatically download and install software with a single command.

Everything that you can do with a .tgz package, you can do with rpm/dpkg. Everything that you can do with a source tarball, you can do with a .src.rpm/dpkg_equiv., with the possible additional (small) overhead of editing a spec file. End of story.
No/primitive package management is simply a subset of rpm/dpkg. Here's how to downgrade rpm to the equivalent of Slack's pkg manager:
echo "alias rpm='rpm --nodeps --force $*'" >> /root/.bashrc
There, no dependency checking.

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[domc]

This will do the trick.

domc

Re:What's so special about Slackware?

[CrkHead]

Still a newbie after many years, but a better educated newbie than most. Slack has taken me up the learning curve to where I decide I must know all you need to know, then opened a few more doors to show me there is still a lot to learn.

I like that.

My mind in numbed eight hours a day in front of Windows boxes. It is nice to have something that will let me think when I get home.

Thanks Patrick

YES!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that makes me happier than FreeBSD releases is Slackware releases. Always clean and small, always reliable, always complete. My first and favorite distro.

Thank you Patrick.

Of *course* Slackware is still around!

[Silroquen]

I love Slackware! It's simple and it gives me complete control--just what I want in a Linux distro. If it ever *ceases* to be around, I'll have to take up the Slack myself. ;)

Re:Of *course* Slackware is still around!

[spanky1]

Debian is #1! I am going to try out this Slackware though. I haven't used it since version 2.0.

Re:Of *course* Slackware is still around!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think all dedicated Slack users feel this way. No other
distros off to us what Slackware does, it's that simple.
We can't get this anywhere else; Trolls/et cetera, if you
don't understand what the big deal about Slackware is...
You probably never will.

Pee trace patched?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to patch my pee trace, but the adhesive kept pulling on my pubes and it hurt like a son of a bitch.

I love Slack!

[miketang16]

I'm running an upgraded, 9.0 Slackware right now. It's awesome, everything works great, and how you would expect it too. btw.. Does anyone know if there's an automatic update utility for Slack, like Debian has?

Re:I love Slack!

[phreaknb]

autoslack - written by David Cantrell

Re:I love Slack!

[toothfish]

sort of.
swaret

Re:I love Slack!

[-eddy]

http://swaret.xbone.be/

Re:I love Slack!

[eryk]

Yes, there is one . It's called swaret.

Re:I love Slack!

[toothfish]

offtopic? huh. well, the link was offtopic, sort of. the freshmeat project is here.

Re:I love Slack!

[FPCat]

swaret works well, just be carefull of one things (at least I've bumped into this issue) If it updates the kernel, make sure you run lilo before you reboot, or you'll be looking for a boot disk.....

Re:I love Slack!

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone considered integrating Mike Hearn's autopackage into Slack?

Re:I love Slack!

[Dave2 Wickham]

I don't quite think it's ready to be integrated into anything yet ;)

First useful post?

[BRTB]

Since the official Slack FTP is a bit slow from everyone trying to grab it, here are a couple (unofficial) mirror lists:

alphageek.dyndns.org
AbnormalPenguin.com

I've already downloaded mine, so everybody have at it. ;)

Re:First useful post?

[rob1234]

Search for slackware-9.0 at http://www.filemirrors.com/ for some more

It's been out for 2 days.

[sziwan]

Actually, it's been out since Tuesday... but anyway, to us freaks, who kept up to date with -current branch, it was nothing new.

download

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully the ftp servers have enough sla[c]k for the slashdot crowd.

Re:download

[Anonymous Coward]

> Hopefully the ftp servers have enough sla[c]k for the slashdot crowd. It's not slakware, no matter how much you want to imply that by putting the c in brackets.

Re:download

[some guy I know]

At one time, the directory in which Slackware was located was called "slakware" (no "c").
I believe that this was to satisfy MS-DOS's "8.3" filename requirement.

Real-World Experience

[Joel Rowbottom]

Over at Fotopic and CentralNic we've already been using the Slackware pre stuff in production environments and it's pretty damn solid. It's also quite nice that automake and such deals with the Slack package format.

I've also got it running nicely on my laptop (HP Omnibook 9000), it's damn fine. Kudos to Pat and the gang.

Started off with Slackware Years ago

[Hut_Mul]

Heh, I was digging around my computer closet of junk the other day and ran across that first slack distro... all on floppy disks.

Now those were the days :)

Waiting for Zipslack/Bigslack

[phavens]

I've used Slackware for many things... But I have to say that Zipslack and Bigslack are two things I've enjoy and use the most.

Have a old computer that doesn't have a whole lot of space? ZipSlack.

Have no CD-Rom on a computer or just want a FAST easy ready made distro? Big slack. (just extract the zipped files over from a zip disk on the Hard Drive. Edit a text file... reboot :-) Fully functional Linux Distro.

The problem is that usually it takes a bit after the main release before the goodies really come out.

I use SuSE for most everything else but these ready made Distro are great.

Re:Waiting for Zipslack/Bigslack

[Skiboo]

I can tell you from first hand experience that you can install regular slackware from boot floppies and having the packages on the computers hard drive (download them from windows, say, or get them from another computer). Just boot, do whatever partitioning is necessary, mount whatever has the packages, install.

Does big slack have a different purpose? If not, it seems kindof pointeless.

BTW, does anybody know of another distro that lets you do this? (Install without a cd, and without a net connection, just reading the files from the hard drive it's installing to). LFS can, I believe, but that's a lot of work.

Re:Waiting for Zipslack/Bigslack

[phavens]

Most Distros have some sort of install to do. Big slack will install on a fat(32) partition and you can either start it from the command line or I just have a line in autoexec that starts it automatically. You can install it on a standard linux partition. But I have found it useful (for example) to extract them in a windows enviroment... edit the two text files (even setup the computer to dual boot VERY easily)... and either exit to dos and type linux or just reboot.

When trying to convert some people (on sometimes older computers) to linux. This has been surprisingly successful.

Yes I do know and use knoppix now that it's out there. But Big slack has been available for a while and I have to say that it can be easier to setup then even knoppix.

Re:Waiting for Zipslack/Bigslack

[Bishop]

Debian will install without CD or network. Copy over the Debs you want to the harddrive, and reboot with 2 floppies (I think it is two). Once in the Debian install menu there is a an option to intall the debs from the harddrive. However Debian is really meant to have a network connection to install packages with apt-get. Slackware works better then Debian if there isn't a network.

OpenBSD also installs without needing a CD or network. I think FreeBSD is still packaged such that you could put the whole thing on floppies.

Re:Waiting for Zipslack/Bigslack

[civilizedINTENSITY]

This is especially useful for converting users of WinXP who have only a "recovery" disk. The recovery disk boots win95 which then performs fdisk, format, install. This returns the HD to its original state, destroying all partioning you've done. Its not possible to have a dualboot system (with this crippled toy OS "recovery disk") unless you use the single physical partion MS "grants"/allows you.

Too much crud

[stratjakt]

I used to like slackware. Now the installation CD seems more like a mirror of sourceforge with everything and the kitchen sink wanting to be installed.

Except for Samba, PoPToP, squid, and FreeS/WAN... What's up with that?

It's also getting annoying that most new linux docs are geared towards Red Hat and it's SysV style init. I can 'translate' it, but it's just a pain sometimes.

I guess it's time to sign up with Microsoft Jr.

Re:Too much crud

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, this is quite complicated, and it may take you some time, but try to understand:

INSTALL THE OTHER PACKAGES YOURSELF.

Amazing, eh? There's no distro in the world that has every single app I want (I write distro reviews, so I've tested LOTS).

As for the RH-oriented-docs thing -- erm, that's hardly a problem with Slack, is it? Most free UNIX docs on the Net are for Linux, but does that make FreeBSD bad?

Get a clue and stop trolling.

Re:Too much crud

[slugo3]

Except for Samba, PoPToP,

1. Slack has Samba included in the N disk set weather you choose to install it or not is up to you.

2, Slack uses Popa3d by default but your welcome to chang it to whatever you like.

Re:Too much crud

[Anonymous Coward]

2, Slack uses Popa3d by default but your welcome to chang it to whatever you like

How can he change it? Only one person, Patrick V., handles the slackware distro.

Re:Too much crud

[Anonymous Coward]

PoPToP is a PPTP server. See those capital letters?

Re:Too much crud

[Adrian Voinea]

A little correction: PoPToP is a PPTP server, not a pop3 server :)

Damn you...

[pcbob]

...Buzz Lightyear, i just started downloading and was wondering why it slowed down to a crawl. Can't
you keep your mouth shut for at least few days? :)

Re:Damn you...

[Ataeagina]

Actually, he has. It came out tuesday :P

I have already ordered mine...

[sparkeyjames]

Just like I have the last 4 versions. Slackware is the only way to run Gnu/Linux.

Re:I have already ordered mine...

[damien_kane]

Just like I have the last 4 versions. Slackware is the only way to run Gnu/Linux.

Except, of course, that slack is not GNU/linux.
Technically only Debian is GNU/Linux.
I know RMS tries to put the GNU/ name on everything, but i didn't think he had extended it to other distros yet...
BTW, this isn't a flame... I'm a slacker myself (I think my potato-peeling, woody-sqeezing friend is on crack for liking Debian, but to each their own right?)

low disk space

[Doppler00]

Slackware is one of the few major linux distributions that I can install on an old 520MB hard drive.

I haven't tried version 9.0 yet. Have they improved the installation process? I found the text mode one took quite a bit of time to select the individual packages I wanted.

Re:low disk space

[Jeffrey Baker]

What? I just installed Debian unstable on a 64MB flash card. Any distribution can pull that stunt, the only matter is what packages to install. I actually find Slackware's packages to be a bit coarse. In the past you couldn't install emacs without a lot of associated crap, or you installed tetex in one huge chunk. I remember in 1995 one of my friends thought he was hot shit with his 1GB SCSI hard disk, so he went with the "Everything" option in the Slackware installer. After nearly an hour of installing the T package series he finally ran out of disk space.

Re:low disk space

[Anonymous Coward]

download the parts of the slackware-9.0 tree that you need, mainly the kernels, isolinux, and slackware dirs. Then make a custom CD to your liking. Just look at the maketag and tagfile files in the disk sets dirs in the slackware dir then edit to your liking. Then make an iso, burn to CD and viola, no more selecting which packages you want to have installed.

This way you'll have a CD where you don't have to select which packages you want by default.

The install process has not changed. Some changes to the netconfig script are nice, but the overall process has not changed. Also, no more mention of GNU/Linux like at the end of the 8.1 install process.

Re:low disk space

[Cro Magnon]

Imagine what would have happened with "everything" on Debian!

Speaking of cutting teeth...

[pongo000]

I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux.

I almost didn't become a Linux convert thanks to Slackware...I made the mistake of trying to install Slackware as my first Linux O/S back in '96. It was a nightmare straight from the bowels of O/S hell. I spent weeks trying to get my 486 running with X (this with no prior Unix knowledge). I finally gave up, and a few years later discovered SuSE and their YaST installer.

Ironically, I now run Slackware on most of my machines...go figure. It's a slick distro, and I've learned a lot since those dark days of '96.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[sziwan]

Slackware was my first linux distro, and I'm grateful to my friends for showing me The Right Way to use linux. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against other distros, but when it comes to learning, nothing beats Slackware.

Provided, of course, you do want to learn :P

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[stratjakt]

My first install was completely by hand, but I used slackwares boot disks to do it.

Then did the fdisk, mke2fs, installed bintools and blah blah blah blah till I had a system.

Of course I was a comp sci student and wanted to know step by step how an OS went together.

Slackware's the only linux distro I've ever installed, and I love-hate it. The big text based installer can be a pain in the ass with it's 10 zillion packages you dont want.

Maybe some defaults, like 'development install' or 'server install' or 'desktop install' would help?

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[Mnemic]

Not sure exactly when, but I cut my teeth on RH 4.0 back in HS. and hated it, and then found Slackware 3.2 I think off of Cheapbytes.com and installed it. It was great. I actualy didn't have any trouble getting X to work with it. I specificly rember how much of a pain in the ass Getting E to work was. Downloading all the packages, trying to get one to work with the other.

It was a true pain. but Just seeing Enlightenment load up was a true work of art. Nowadays with KDE and Gnome PRepackaged, many people don't get to have the fun so many of us did getting those Beta Window Mangers to run. :)

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[Cro Magnon]

I tried Slackware around that time too. However, I didn't really have enough HD space for a decent Linux (there was too much missing from my install), and I ended up going back to Doze. When I finally had enough room for Linux, I tried RedHat, but wasn't quite satisfied. After jumping from distro to distro, I found Slackware (7.0), and I've been Slacking ever since.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same exact experience except in 97 and with Red Hat. Luckily I got Slackware and everything worked well.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[Skater]

I started with Slack (version 3.something), too, because the Red Hat installer wouldn't detect my CD-ROM drive for some reason. I'm SO glad that happened...I tried Mandrake 8.2 once, but just had to come back to Slackware.

As the distrowatch.com page said: "If you want to know something about Linux, ask a Slackware user."

--RJ

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[haggar]

My first distro was Slackware, in February 1997, and apart from using pine and vi from time to time on Solaris 2.5.1, I had no Unix or Linux knowledge. However, I had a lot of NetWare experience, and guess what? I installed Slackware the same day I downloaded it to the hard disk. Yes, my first install was from the hard dis, and it went perfectly well, including all the network settings.

Then I tried RedHat 4.1, and it was OK, and then RH 5.2, which was worse (quality went down, overall) and OpenLinux Lite 1.1, and that was again a good experience... and have been trying out linux distros ever since. I stopped doing that in the last couple of years (working with Solaris as my main job), but my first Slackware install will remain amongst my fondest IT-memories.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[Cyno]

The first experience I had with slackware was on a 486 DX2/66 with a cheap 1MB trident video card that was unsupported by X. I felt so l33t when I finally got it configured and working with the SVGA server at 320x240 and playing doom at 8-bit.

Then 3DFX and all those ex SGI engineers just had to go and start a 3D revolution that left my l33t slackware game box in the dust.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[damien_kane]

I, on the other hand, have exactly the opposite story.
Back in 1996 A friend of mine who owned an ISP (Didn't everyone back then?) gave me a SUSE cd set, coz he was busy with his RH disk. I installed it, not knowing anything about unix/linux, and couldn't figure out how to get anything at all to work.
Within a week I had wiped my linux partition and didn't touch linux again until 1999 when i got into slack.
I haven't looked back.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[labratuk]

Slackware is a very nice distro.

I know what you mean, but funnily enough Slackware was what taught me Linux. If it weren't for Slackware, I would still be wandering round a plastic wrapped distro wondering why it didn't behave quite how it should. Not really having a clue what I was doing.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[Anonymous Coward]

I almost didn't become a Linux convert thanks to Slackware...I made the mistake of trying to install Slackware as my first Linux O/S back in '96. It was a nightmare straight from the bowels of O/S hell. I spent weeks trying to get my 486 running with X (this with no prior Unix knowledge). I finally gave up, and a few years later discovered SuSE and their YaST installer.

Well, my story goes almost exactly the same as yours... except I had no trouble whatsoever. I read the INSTALL file, partitioned my hard drive, installed all the packages, and away I went.

I'm really not trying to be an elitist nerd here, it's just I really don't see what's so hard about the whole thing. I have literally seen people say things like "it's way too hard, you need a degree to install it" when faced with a text-menu asking you to type your name in (or something similarly easy). It's not anything to do with the actual procedure, it's because it's presented in text-mode.

Utterly bizarre.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[leereyno]

I first installed slackware 3.3 on a compaq 386sx-16 with six megs of memory and a 60 meg hard drive. I got X running on my diamond speedstar pro video card in 8 bit mode.

I'm still amazed at how much I was actually able to do without knowing anything. I was able to roll my own kernel and the only thing I couldn't make work was my 8 bit Future Domain SCSI card.

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[Ringlord]

I really like your tagline, but I don't think Richard Stallman does!

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[IamTheRealMike]

Hah, nothing can beat me. My first Linux install was Slackware into 10mb of free space on a DOS drive. I didn't know ANY unix commands, so I just watched what was being installed as the packages flashed by on the installer. It took me several days to figure out that in Linux you don't start at the root of the filing system like in DOS. I couldn't understand where all those files had gone :)

I didn't hate it though. The next time I tried Linux was SuSE with a KDE alpha version. Better, but still rather primitive compared to '95. Then in 2002 I was elite enough and Linux was easy enough that we met in the middle :)

Re:Speaking of cutting teeth...

[guybarr]

Provided, of course, you do want to learn :P

Oh, for me, I wanted to learn, alright, that's why I was in the middle of my C.S./Math B.Sc. and scrambling for every bit of spare time to use for reading books with a lot of greek letters, programming, eating and sleeping. In that order of importance.

Slackware was a disaster then for me as well. It took 2..3 weeks from my semester. The lucky thing was it took'em from the beginning of the semester, or I would have given up on linux, and gone back to work on the university's sunoses. As it was, I switched to redhat and was able to actually work on the things that counted.

The Right Way to use linux ... is dependent on context and needs.

Debian!

[spanky1]

We set up Debian firewalls that use less than 200MB of disk space.

Re:Debian!

[forged]

For your firewalling needs, Smoothwall fits on a single floppy (or it used to anyway :)

And a few years ago, it was still possible to install Slackware on a 486 w/ 8 MB of RAM and 40 MB hard drive, including the development tools such as gcc. Arguably there wasn't left space to be of any real use, but that was more of an exercise to the reader!!

Re:Debian!

[Anonymous Coward]

If only Smoothwall wasn't done by a total jerk and complete asshole who has some kind of weird superiority complex.

Re:Debian!

[spanky1]

Interesting, but no dice. Squid won't be very efficient on a floppy-based firewall. Also, we sometimes install stuff like sendmail, apache, dhch servers, freeswan, modem redirectors, etc.

Re:Debian!

[spanky1]

dhch servers

should have said dhcp server, obviously. :) Also, it would be even less than 200MB if we didn't leave the extracted/compiled kernel source on there. We leave it in case we have to patch it for freeswan or whatever.

Re:Debian!

[stratjakt]

Squid works great if you stick a big honking chunk of RAM into the box, and have it create it's cache in there.

Beats hitting the HDD any day of the week. Of course, if you want a filtering wall with a gigantic database of blacklisted urls and phrases, you're on your own. (Though I suppose you could do so through NFS)

I love floppy based walls, I dont have to think twice about just bouncing the power on 'em.

Enough already

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat is the best-known Linux distribution, at least in the United States. It is the one most likely to be supported by large server hardware vendors like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell, so it is probably the best choice if you are going to first make use of Linux as a server of some sort in a corporate setting. You can download Red Hat Linux free from the Internet, but if you buy a "boxed set" from Red Hat or an authorized retailer, you will get the right to ask Red Hat employees for help directly as part of the deal. The amount of support and the length of the support period depends on which version of Red Hat you buy. As you'd expect, the more you spend, the longer the free support period you get. But even if you download Red Hat free, you will find many free "help" resources on Red Hat's Web site if you dig around a little. Several Linux.com workers use and love Red Hat, while others have had frustrating experiences with it.

SuSE is more oriented toward the needs and desires of home and small office Linux users than Red Hat, especially people who are experimenting with Linux for the first time. Several of our staff members use and love SuSE. It also offers support for large-scale servers and has special editions for Mac hardware and other hardware including (in case you happen to have one lying around) the top-of-the-line IBM 390 series. SuSE's Web site offers many support options ranging from free up into the sky, depending on whether you are an individual or running an industrial-scale server farm or even a Linux cluster running as a single "Beowulf" supercomputer. Because of the way SuSE distributes its product, you cannot download an ISO image of SuSE from the Internet. But the individual files that make up the distribution are available online.

Linux-Mandrake has a reputation for being the easiest distribution for new Linux users to install and learn. It has its quirks, but most of them are lovable, not harmful. We are sometimes accused of being biased in favor of Mandrake, because it is the distribution used by more Linux.com and NewsForge people than any other. Mandrake is downloadable for free, but the boxed sets come with support and a set of manuals that are more than worth the price.

Caldera OpenLinux is produced by a company with many years of Unix experience. It can be either downloaded free or purchased on CDs, with professional support provided to paying customers and "user helping user" free support available to all others. Caldera has other enterprise-level Linux and Unix products available, including a messaging server they say is nearly a direct replacement for Microsoft Exchange, which may be of special interest to corporate users thinking about switching to Linux (although there are other "Exchange replacement" products in the market, too).

Turbolinux is an enterprise-oriented distribution, generally not as suited for home or small-office installation by new users as most others. Linux.com staff has no direct experience with Turbolinux, but we have heard many good things about it from readers, especially about its application deployment utilities that make it easy for a systems administrator in a large computer facility to add programs to many computers at once. Again, there are other utilities from other software developers that do the same thing, but Turbolinux is rapidly accumulating a fine reputation.

Debian GNU/Linux is not a commercial distribution. It is maintained by a worldwide, all-volunteer organization, and it's 100% free. Several Linux.com people and a number of workers on other OSDN Web sites love Debian and would not use anything else. There is no "company-sponsored" support for Debian because there is no company, but Debian users say the Debian online documentation, combined with help they get from other users, is all they need.

Slackware Linux is "the original" Linux distribution. It does not pretend to be easy to install and use, and it isn't. But if you are determined to learn the inner workings of a Linux computer system, possi

YOU FAIL IT

[Anonymous Coward]

You can merge seawall with coyotelinux and fit it on a floppy!

Re:fp MOD PARENT UP FUNNY

[Rooktoven]

It's Pat Volkerding for god's sake...

Beta

[rjoseph]

Been using the beta for about two weeks now, and I'm incredibley impressed, this may be one of the best Slackware releases yet (and I've been using it since...like, 3.0 days, or 'round there. Damn, I'm getting old).

Check it out - Slackware is still alive and kicking ass!

ISO image available anywhere yet?

[Lawrence_Bird]

In fact the 9.0 was on mirrors last nite, but the only ISO image was for 8.1

Re:ISO image available anywhere yet?

[YahoKa]

No need for the ISO images ... I built my own bootable ISO by following the instructions at http://www.userlocal.com/articles/isohowto.html

Re:ISO image available anywhere yet?

[Travoltus]

Yeah, why have a single simple .iso to burn, when you can do it the long, tedious way?

It makes me feel a lot more 31337 if I know I built my bootable ISO by manually reconstructing and downloading the entire directory/file structure.

Simplicity should be listed as one of the seven deadly sins.

Re:ISO image available anywhere yet?

[ThatComputerGuy]

Slackware 9.0 ISOs began appearing earlier in the day. Many mirrors (at least, the unofficial ones listed elsewhere on this page) should have them by now.

Re:ISO image available anywhere yet?

[nekura]

But then it'd be eight deadly sins!

Re:ISO image available anywhere yet?

[Eil]

With slack, there's no overwhelming reason to have an ISO. IIRC, you just grab the disksets you want and the floppy images you need and you're ready to go. If you're minus a floppy drive, well, then you probably need an ISO. But otherwise, no. I think this is another one of slackware's greatest strengths--flexibility of installation.

Re:ISO image available anywhere yet?

[cymen]

Oh yeah, no need to download on the OC-3 at school instead of using the 56k modem at home. Sure, no problem...

Some people.

Re:ISO image available anywhere yet?

[Eil]

what?

A true throwback distro

[bogie]

I am always amazed that people are into distros like Slackware. No easy gui install that anyone can do without effort. No way to automatically update the system for security updates. And that's the way they like it.

Usually this is when a Slackware user starts crowing about bloat and spewing phrasing like "redhate". Slackwares's installer and system maintenace methods were normal in 1993, a bit dated by 1996, and positively outdated by 2000. Now that were in 2003 I'm still amazed that anyone wants to deal with all of that manual work in order to get everything completely working.

I guess its all about priorities. People who use something like Red Hat just want to sit down and be productive right away. While Slackware/Gentoo users just want to "master" their computers and dig on "noobs" for not taking the "hard way". I've always thought that was funny since linux is basically linux and a distro like Red Hat is just as powerful as Slackware no matter what the deafault theme looks like.

Oh well. Some things never change. Some people think the ease of use found in modern distros is a sign of weakness. I think its a sign of progress. If I had to return to my linux box from 1996 I'd slit my wrists.

Re:A true throwback distro

[stratjakt]

It depends what you're installing the distro for.

All the linux boxes in my home run slackware (save my coyotelinux based router), because they are all headless; a samba based PDC, a squid proxy, a VPN host, a couple more samba based storage machines. All are built out of spare parts.

None require X, only one has compilation tools. None need the plethora of stuff that come with other distros.

Slackware works just the way I want it. All I want is a kernel and a few basic utilities.

I've never considered it the 'hard way', or call it a badge of honor. It's the easiest way to get what I want on a box without wasting any precious space. And when you're trying to cram squid and dansguardian onto a 3.6 gig HDD, you want all the extra space you can get.

I'll cede that if I wanted a desktop OS with web browsers and working net connections, I'd stay away from slackware. But for what I do its the best tool for the job.

Re:A true throwback distro

[.com b4 .storm]

Some people think the ease of use found in modern distros is a sign of weakness. I think its a sign of progress.

This is such a troll, but I'll bite anyway. Slackware is not a "throwback" distro. It is all about simplicity. Believe it or not, some people don't WANT to use lots of GUI stuff, and they don't WANT everything set up for them from the start. Slackware is great for building a system that does what YOU want, and ONLY what you want. It also does so while being more UNIXy than other distributions, which is either a feature or a curse depending on your point of view.

And IMO, the installer is not hard to use. It's very straightforward and offers details that make it pretty simple to get things set up the way you want. Okay, it's not going to go through and auto detect your sound card for you, and it's not going to resize your partitions. But honestly that's not what Slackware is for. It's about being simple, clean, and full featured (or not, as you desire).

There is without doubt elitism in the Slackware community, but that is not what Slack is all about. And for the record I have never seen someone use the term "Redhate". If they did, they still wouldn't be half as trollish as you, my friend.

Re:A true throwback distro

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can motivate yourself learn the ins and outs of UNIX on a pre-built system, that's no problem. However, I dare to say a newbie who's struggled through installing Gentoo or Slackware or BSD will soon be using grep, awk and sed to do in seconds what takes a equal newbie on Red Hat hours of cutting & pasting in OpenOffice. :)

Re:A true throwback distro

[shepd]

>Now that were in 2003 I'm still amazed that anyone wants to deal with all of that manual work in order to get everything completely working.

Que?

The installer is simpler than simple. Fdisk, setup, choose formatting & swap, autodetect cdrom, select full from packages (unlike many other distros this will fit on all but the worst sized hard drives, yet will provide you with just about everything you need, including MP3 decoding [wow]), select to probe for your network and voila! All done!

That's hard for a serious user? The requirements to be a serious user serious have slipped over the years... At this rate finding the power button will make one a dedicated user in a few years.

Sound isn't hard: echo modprobe soundcard-name.o >> /etc/rc.d/rc.modules

And xf86config is likely the most intuitive setup program I've come across in a long time. Plus it doesn't limit to me to setting up X while I'm in front of the box.

What more do you want? A computer-chauffeur?

Re:A true throwback distro

[Anonymous Coward]

>The installer is simpler than simple. Fdisk, setup, choose formatting & swap, autodetect cdrom, select full from packages (unlike many other distros this will fit on all but the worst sized hard drives, yet will provide you with just about everything you need, including MP3 decoding [wow]), select to probe for your network and voila! All done!

Sorry, you think that's simple? I got my duaghter to rebuild her own pc the other day, gave her an xp pro disk and watched. took her 30 mins.

>>Sound isn't hard: echo modprobe soundcard-name.o >> /etc/rc.d/rc.modules

Yeah, right, like a "typical" home user is going to have a clue as to what the hell that means or even why they hould have to do it! Remember that "auto-recognition" stuff???? You can slag of Mircosoft all you like, but the installer is one slick piece of code.

Re:A true throwback distro

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sound isn't hard: echo modprobe soundcard-name.o >> /etc/rc.d/rc.modules

Nope. In Slackware 9 that's handled automatically by Hotplug.

Re:A true throwback distro

[Anonymous Coward]

No easy GUI install? BAH!!! I'm suprised people don't wine because they can't click on a letter in their favorite word processor instead of type it in. Is it about priorities? I don't think so. It's about having computer experience prior to point and click. So...we Slack users aren't crippled like some people.

Re:A true throwback distro

[shepd]

>Sorry, you think that's simple? I got my duaghter to rebuild her own pc the other day, gave her an xp pro disk and watched. took her 30 mins.

I'd be annoyed, but since you picked such a difficult to install OS (in comparison to slackware) it's dead easy to rebut:

It's excellent your daughter is building your computers for you. I'm glad she's decided to get computer experience with such a complicated to install operating system.

Installing windows XP, where do I start?

You have to use a totally undocumented partitioning program, which will then proceed to destroy your bootsector and do other nasty things. After sitting about for a while, you'll then be prompted to enter a computer name, a workgroup name, and you'll be asked if you're on a domain or not. If you are you continue through screens asking what your domain controller is, what the domain is called, and other fun stuff (tm). You then have to set the time and time zone of the machine (IIRC). You then wait a long while (again!) while the machine configures those choices. After this you are then prompted to enter your name, wether the machine should auto-login or not, and you must create some accounts. The next step is registration. For this you will need to either drag a phone over to your computer, or you'll have to hope-to-God your network info was perfect and that you have DHCP. Enter all your personal details (name, address, email, phone number, number of the beast) so that Microsoft can better advertise to you. If the machine can't dial out or use the network, you'll need to phone Microsoft up so they can better serve your "warranty". Dial their phone number. Sit on hold. Finally talk to someone who tells you that you have to send in a non-existant registration card. Bitch and moan and give up on this step (FAILURE to complete the install). Next we must activate windows. Since our network is giving us trouble, we have to phone. So we sit on hold for about 10 minutes. You tell the guy the huge 30 or so character string on your screen. He isn't sure if you said B or D, so you look about for your phonetic alphabet chart and tell him it's "Bravo". He understands and retuns a code to you, which you enter. It turns out the agent forgot to use the phonetic alphabet, so you have to ask him if he meant t or d. He says "Tango". You enter the code, reboot the machine, and it asks for drivers for your network card.

Now you search in the box of crap that came with the computer for your network card drivers and install them. Then it wants video drivers. And sound drivers. So you get online and download them.

You now finally have your computer set up.

Oh, and somewhere in all that mess is entering your 25 character cd-key. Perfectly.

At no point during the install are you asked about what you would like installed, so you absolutely must have a large hard drive.

Which one was easier? I'm sorry, I forgot after all that typing.

>Yeah, right, like a "typical" home user is going to have a clue as to what the hell that means or even why they hould have to do it! Remember that "auto-recognition" stuff???? You can slag of Mircosoft all you like, but the installer is one slick piece of code.

I didn't say "typical home user", did I? I said "serious user". Home users are usually not serious unless they're hobbyists. I think I can expect a serious user to know about modprobe. I also think I can expect them to be able to use a line-based setup program if it is fully documented (and xf86config certainly is!). It isn't rocket science, even though it is outside the realm of a day 1 user.

Re:A true throwback distro

[satan666]

Well, I am sorry that Slack has taken away from some of your precious quality time.

Please relax, drink some warm milk, and use that baby pacifier that you obviously need.

One day when you grow up, we will let you play with Slackware.

Re:A true throwback distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and somewhere in all that mess is entering your 25 character cd-key. Perfectly

Yea we all know how hard it is to copy text letter for letter. Only Linux Pro's can handle a task so complicated

Re:A true throwback distro

[ArmedGeek]

It depends what you're installing the distro for. ... because they are all headless;

agreed. I've got 2 boxes in my house like that. one public server, one private. Sometimes 'simple' is EXACTLY what's called for.

Re:A true throwback distro

[shepd]

>Yea we all know how hard it is to copy text letter for letter

0F C0UR5E! That's 8ecause N0TH1N9 in English 100K5 alike, does it?

Try harder.

Re:A true throwback distro

[c0ol]

oh man this is so true, i was on redhat 5(first linux) and i was all confident in my skills, so i went to slack and was like wtf is all this. Now that i had used slack i feel alot better at linux and am back on mdk 9 after using slack 7 for a year or so then redhat 7.2. i dare any "expert" whos only used redhat or mandrake to try slack and see what they learn from it.

Re:A true throwback distro

[budgenator]

xf86config is likely the most intuitive setup program
Not to mention the one you'll have to use when the nice WIMPy sickey GUI stuff fails to detect your card or monitor. Having "cut my teeth" on slackware back when it was either 32bit Linux or 16 bit Windows, having to edit the XF86Config with emacs or vi in terminal mode doesn't give me excess pucker-factor.

Re:A true throwback distro

[jonnyfivealive]

my kingdom for multiple mod points! troll troll troll troll troll. there, -5 pour vous and -1 offtopic for me from somebody that actually has the points

Re:A true throwback distro

[Tellalian]

This is such a troll, but I'll bite anyway.

You dismis the parent's point too quickly. He emphasizes the importance on "ease of use". You, on the other hand, seem to emphasize "efficiency of function". Both are immensely important. Sometimes one is preferred at the expense of the other. Unix and its derivatives have traditionally focussed on the later concern. The relative successes of Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, Lycoris, and others in recent years at addressing "ease of use" is the kind of evolution that makes Linux so promising and is undeniable progress. This is the point the parent was trying to emphasize.

Slackware is not a "throwback" distro. It is all about simplicity.

I'm sure Slack is a fine distribution and I wish it and its developers well, but it needs to be seen in a specific context in order to be fully appreciated.

Believe it or not, some people don't WANT to use lots of GUI stuff, and they don't WANT everything set up for them from the start. Slackware is great for building a system that does what YOU want, and ONLY what you want.

This is relative. Believe it or not, some people don't WANT to use lots of command-line stuff, and they don't WANT rip their hair out configuring every piece of hardware.

It also does so while being more UNIXy than other distributions, which is either a feature or a curse depending on your point of view.

I agree completely.

And IMO, the installer is not hard to use. It's very straightforward and offers details that make it pretty simple to get things set up the way you want. Okay, it's not going to go through and auto detect your sound card for you, and it's not going to resize your partitions. But honestly that's not what Slackware is for. It's about being simple, clean, and full featured (or not, as you desire).

Now let me get this straight. Because Slackware is "simple" and "let's you do what you want" it doesn't need to make hardware configuration easier? This argument always confuses me. "Doing what YOU want" usually refers to the software one installs and administers. So how does auto-configuring your monitor, network card, or other piece of hardware stop you from compiling source, configuring text files, or otherwise "doing what you want"?

There is without doubt elitism in the Slackware community, but that is not what Slack is all about.

Don't take this the wrong way (read: with a bit of humor) but Slackware doesn't seem to be about a lot of things.

And for the record I have never seen someone use the term "Redhate". If they did, they still wouldn't be half as trollish as you, my friend.

Again, this is relative to one's opinion. Just try not to confuse simplicity or "efficiency of function" with "ease of use".

Re:Not the first distro I've used but,

[Anonymous Coward]

Its funny how many llamas think they have first ps0t... but they really don't. LOSER!

attention moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't mod me down. Would you really want to waste your mod points on this comment? Come on... you only have 5 points! Spend them wisely. If you mod down this comment, then I [the terrorist] will have won!

Re:attention moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, well, mod points are as free as water... so I think I'll just kick you down a notch.

why i didnt download it 2 days ago

[alienhazard]

i saw on distrowatch.com that slack 9 was released 2 days ago, but when i went to slackware.com, it said that slack 9.0rc-1 was released. rc stands for release candidate, correct? is there anything actually different between the rc and the final?

Re:why i didnt download it 2 days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

yes there is a difference, there were lots of updates between the rc's and final, just look at the ChangeLog.txt file. Even final had some minor updates the day after that you won't find mentioned in the changelog.

Re:why i didnt download it 2 days ago

[Vilim]

The news page for Slackware is never accurate. The changelog revealed for me that slackware 9 had been released. To give you an idea of how inaccurate the news page is, there was a rc2 and rc3 that just didnt' exist. If you want to see exactly what changed since the release candidates here is the changelog http://slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i38 6

Re:why i didnt download it 2 days ago

[Rebel Patriot]

ftp.kpn.be has one.

Slightly OT: What happened to distrowatch?

[A5un]

What happened to distrowatch.com? I haven't been able to connect for the last couple days.

Re:Slightly OT: What happened to distrowatch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Genital warts.

All over their ass and genitalia.

They're all nubby with warts.

Re:Slightly OT: What happened to distrowatch?

[n0dez]

They're moving onto a new Web hosting provider.

Re:Slightly OT: What happened to distrowatch?

[ladislavb]

Down due to DNS troubles, should be back in a day or two. In the meantime you can find it at http://66.111.55.60.

my first and last distro

[stmpynode]

this is the linux distro that i started learning linux with. i read the install manual and figured everything out that way. hopefully slack will be around forever :)

Thinking about Linux install...

[airrage]

I'm thinking about throwning down on Linux install, what's the vibe with this distro--I mean is it designers, programmers, newbies? Like to make sure I'm not stereotyped...any help greatly appreciated.

God Bless America

Re:Thinking about Linux install...

[geomon]

Slackware was my first distro (~1994). I loved it but there were some difficult install issues with software packages so I bailed for an RPM-based distro.

I am thinking of heading back to Slack. I miss the hacking.

Bit of a contradiction

[Faust7]

Is it easy to install?

* The answer to all your questions is no and that's exactly what makes Slackware so attractive.

* It ... keeps everything as simple as possible.

Re:Bit of a contradiction

[eryk]

It is not a contadiction. Slackware has very simple installation which can be not easy for a novice. :-)

People can disagree with you without being a troll

[stratjakt]

Slackware has a ton of packages I'll never ever need, and is missing many crucial ones that would be a godsend if they would just install and work without a plethora of patches (Get PoPToP working with MS-CHAP v2 auths, and see what I mean).

Mod this post down, too. It's not going to change my mind.

Dang

[DaoudaW]

I'm sitting here waiting for Mandrake to announce 9.1 and instead Slack steals their thunder. Tell me again why we need all these distros...

Re:Dang

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me again why we need all these distros...

So idiots like your self can actually use linux by using Mandrake while the intelligent people can run slackware and debian.

Re:Dang

[n0dez]

I really like both slack and redhat. Depending on the situation I would recommend one of them :) Got slack? n(0)d/e\z

Re:Dang

[geekoid]

tell me again why we need all these radio stations?

Re:Dang

[Anonymous Coward]

And like radio stations, linux distributions may look and appear different, but whey you get take a closer look they are essentially the same.

Re:Dang

[SuperFrink]

Slackware jumped from 4 to 7 because of the version inflation in other distros. People were asking why slackware was only "linux 4" when other distros were running "linux 6".

http://slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#0

Slackware 9.0 official ISO

[n0dez]

Slackware 9.0 OFFICIAL ISO (Belgium, EU) ftp://ftp.kpn.be/pub/linux/slackware/slackware-9.0 -iso/ Happy slackin' to all. Slashdot sucks. I have sent several news and all were rejected. More people have reported the same thing. Slackware was released some days ago... and they published the news today... :( n0dez == www.n0dez.com

Re:Slackware 9.0 official ISO

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot. It's good that the news wasn't posted immediately, so the main slackware FTP site wasn't overloaded while it was trying to propagate the new version to the mirrors.

If your stories are written like your comments, I can see why they've been rejected.

What do you care? You run Red Hat anyway.

Re:fp MOD THIS UP DAMMNIT!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I laughed out loud when I read this!!!

Thanks Pat - you have my utmost respect!!

Re:Gee, you're so knowledgeable

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you like to pet my poopie?

Mmm

[0x1337]

Time to saturate the wires with teh isos.

Heh

[SILIZIUMM]

I began downloading the ISO about an hour ago. It was downloading at a wonderful rate of 365kb/s and I left to eat. Now I come back and see a little 90kb/s. I said to myself "Huh?" and fired up Mozilla on /. to find out this story...

Oh the memories ...

[WeeBull]

October 1994, issue 97 of "PC Plus". Almost 80MB of Slackware 2.0.0, kernel v 1.0.9. Manna from heaven, considering I only had a 9600 baud modem at the time. (Insert fancy maths here for calculating how long 80MB would take to download at 9600bps - about, what, 20 hours?)

Happy memories.

*raises glass* This one for you, Patrick, thanks.

Re:Oh the memories ...

[Bremen24601]

actually 19 hours 25 minutes 5 seconds plus a smidge.. assuming maximum sustained transfer rate (yeah right!)

Re:Oh the memories ...

[dylan_-]

October 1994, issue 97 of "PC Plus".

Wow! That's exactly the disk I used to install the very first time I used Linux...I wonder how many other people got started on that one?

Re:Oh the memories ...

[Anonymous Coward]

count me in.

Took me 2 or 3 goes to get it all working. Still works too.

Re:Oh the memories ...

[chiller2]

October '94 PC Plus CD.. the very same one that got me started with Slack :) I think I still have it somewhere.. blue with either white or silver writing. Maybe I should frame it ;)

Oh, you know that Jolt account you're using.. that started because Adrian Mardlin saw me playing Quake one evening after work at Nildram and asked what I thought of a 'games ISP' idea. I thought it'd be great to create something to rival Barrysworld, so he, I and a guy called Jon started work on it all. Look what it has become! :) It runs on Slackware too, or at least the core servers do :)

I wouldn't have been working for Nildram if I hadn't learned about Unix having used Slack, so I guess I have to thank Pat and the Slack team for that too!

"unleashed"

[Infonaut]

Why not "untethered, and allowed to float free into the stratosphere," or "set free, to gambol and frolic in the fields with all the other happy, furry distros?"

I remember back when software was soft and cuddly, with short little legs; we didn't need leashes for it. And we *liked* it that way!

W007

[0x1337]

Slack has been my first - and my current. I played around with SuSe - it was godawful. By the way Patrick - I have been able to install your 1995 Slackware (3.2?) Onto an IBM MCA PS/2 M55SX with a 60 GB ESDI disc, and 2.9 MB of memory (Thats right - 2.9mb !!!) Too bad I fried the machine later... :( Oh well ! Time to go dload the 9.0

Re:W007

[MoOsEb0y]

that's a damn big hard drive for a PS/2. Not to mention a weird interface for a 60 GB drive. Where'd you get it? :)

Re:W007

[0x1337]

Oh god.... I am such an idiot 60 MB people.... 60 mb... *looks away in shame*

Fast Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

MadPenguin.org had this a few days ago... with ISO links. There are a couple that are unofficial, but they are pretty fast mirrors. Not swamped like the other mirrors. I got mine from there :)

Same story, different outcome

[izto]

I did become a Linux convert thanks to Slackware. Also around '96 and with no prior Unix knowledge. I did spend almost two weeks trying to get X working on my 486 and God was it nice to see that little "X" in the center of my screen for the first time :-).

I started out on a thin Slackware version (Yes, it CAN get thinner) called DILinux (Drop-In Linux) that installed over UMSDOS. Anyone heard of it?

I didn't know what the kernel or gcc were. But I learned (Thanks to all README writers out there) that I needed them for configuring my sound card. Still remember those nights I spent up while downloading sources from tsx-11 and metalab :-)

As someone else posted, there's no better way to learn Linux than Slackware. At least to learn it *the right way* ;-)

P.S. I still run nothing but Slackware on all my desktops and servers =)

My first time.

[Xunker]

I remember my first time. With linux, that is.

Yep, Slackware was my first try at a distro. I bought the 4-disc set of Slackware 3.0 in January '96 because I wanted to buy something but I didn't have enough for a music CD and hey, this was FOUR CDS for ten bucks! Awesome!

So I got it home and read the exhaustive 48 page installation manual-cum-liner notes and figured out how to make the boot disc for my Sound Blaster OmniCD.

I never got PPP to auto dial and never had sound, but I somehow managed to wrap my 15 year old head around xf86config and all in all it was, to this day, the smoothest linux install I have ever done. It all just seemed to work. At least, that's how I remember it...

But maybe I just tell myself that to dull the pain of having no package managment. Maybe the past isn't as good as we rememeber.

But I still have that CD set.

Re:My first time.

[Rebel Patriot]

But maybe I just tell myself that to dull the pain of having no package managment. Maybe the past isn't as good as we rememeber. Why don't you look on that cd set for pkgtool. Slackware 3.0 has package management.

Re:My first time.

[budgenator]

It took me four tries, but finaly it installed and worked, what a rush that was. Second only to getting kernal 1.2.13 to compile, install then finaly to reboot.

Not easy to install?

[spakka]

Could any of the 'not easy to install' posters please elaborate? Is a curses-style interface really so difficult?

To me, 'not easy to install' means something like a GUI where you can't navigate to the list of packages because your mouse is unsupported.

Re:Not easy to install?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they can't elaborate. Because they can't point and click their response!

Re:Not easy to install?

[Wolfier]

The installer is fine. It would be better if it recognized convenience keys such as PGUP and PGDN.

What I REALLY want is, a way to upgrade from version n to version n+1 without reinstalling from scratch. It is saddening that no easy way to do it exists, while Debian users are just a "apt-get upgrade" away from a complete upgrade.

Re:Not easy to install?

[damien_kane]

As others have said, to upgrade ur version:

rsync slackware-current (from any of the mirrors) upgradepkg *

Re:Not easy to install?

[Accipiter]

What I REALLY want is, a way to upgrade from version n to version n+1 without reinstalling from scratch. It is saddening that no easy way to do it exists,

Slackware has had an easy-upgrade capability since 8.0. I upgraded from 7.1 to 8 with absolutely no problems. And it was easy.

Check this out - easy upgrade instructions. While it's not as simple as "apt-get upgrade", it's hardly a nightmare. Give it a shot.

Re:Not easy to install?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people has underdeveloped brains and has big problems with curses installers.

Re:Not easy to install?

[Anonymous Coward]

The installer is fine. It would be better if it recognized convenience keys such as PGUP and PGDN.

I believe it does as of 8.0 or 8.1.

Slackware is still great!

[farrellj]

It's simple to use, no RPM Hell, and if something is broke, you are only a ./configure ; make ; make install away from a fix!

ttyl
Farrell

Re:Slackware is still great!

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's simple to use, no RPM Hell, and if something is broke, you are only a ./configure ; make ; make install away from a fix!

'Course the dependency hell devil's in that ./configure step...

Re:Slackware is still great!

[Anonymous Coward]

"if something is broke, you are only a ./configure ; make ; make install away from a fix!"

You just described EVERY Linux distro.. Way to go.

I understand

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Like the ways physicsts strive to find the simplest laws of physics but laypeople still don't have a clue what they are talking about.

Enlightenment?

[tekniklr]

Looking at ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-9. 0/PACKAGES.TXT, it looks like this version of Slack doesn't include Enlightenment....

Anyone know why?

Re:Enlightenment?

[Stradenko]

Enlightenment comes from within...

Re:Enlightenment?

[BlakeStone]

Because ( my own guess ) E16.5 was included in most distros primarily as a window manager for Gnome 1.x. However, Gnome 2.x doesn't play well with E, and since E 17 will be a complete desktop environment, not just a window manager, interfacing with Gnome is no longer a design goal.

Personally, I don't mind. Gnome 2.x looks too soft & cuddly for me, so I just use E now.

Re:Enlightenment?

[analog_line]

That really sucks. Not like I haven't downloaded and built Enlightenment seperately many many times before (it runs much faster on my 233Mhz iMac than either KDE or Gnome) but one of the things I likes about Slackware was that when you were choosing your default window manager during install, Enlightnement was one of the choices.

Oh well. It will just add a few steps to the process of a new install for me.

Re:Enlightenment?

[schon]

E 17 will be a complete desktop environment, not just a window manager

Yeah, and with any luck, it might just be finished by the time Duke Nukem Forever is released, too :o)

Re:Enlightenment?

[turgid]

Because Enlightenment is a bloaty, buggy piece of shit and Slackware is a high-quality distribution.

Re:Oh PLEASE

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I find it more difficult to use GUI vs. text based if I have the option. I get overwhelmed by the GUI interfaces.

Then, today, and tomorrow...

[Nick Driver]

Seems like Slackware has always been around... it's alive and well today, and it will continue thriving forever. I'll bet that after the nuclear holocaust, the mutant cockroaches left wandering the planet will be running and maintaining Slackware still.

Slackware

[n0dez]

This a great moment to tell you that Slack rocks. However, what I don't like is that the media cares little about Slackware. I'm a regular LinuxToday contributor and I sent the official annoucement to several sites and none of them published this news (excepting OSnews.com). Another thing that I don't like is that there are a few books about Slack and all of them are outdated (3 year or more depending on which book)... what about Slack training? I also think that slackware.com needs more regular updates... [it was published the Slackware 9.0 rc1 only and not the rc2 and rc3] Just say congratulations for Slackware and giving you some feedback. I really like Slackware. n0dez

Mirror Listing google style

[xchino]

Only way I could find a decent server. Don't use anything from the first page until I'm done. :)

Here ya go

What's up with Mdk 9.1 and Knoppix 3.2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any timelines on these other distros?

Re:What's up with Mdk 9.1 and Knoppix 3.2?

[alienhazard]

mandrake is s'posed to release in about 2 weeks (sound familiar ut2003'ers?). i dont know about knoppix

A message to Patrick Volkerding

[n0dez]

I have posted a message for you above, please read it (if possible). :-) n0dez

Slackware - a sharp tools distro

[spaceyhackerlady]

My first "real" computer was a 486/66. I bought it used, and it came with Windows 3.1 on it. After firing it up and marvelling that people actually paid money for such a piece of crap, I went to the local bookstore and came home with a book that included a Slackware CD. Dunno what distro, but it would have been an old one (3.0?). I've run Slackware ever since.

I had no difficulty getting the thing going, PPP, sound (an excellent excuse for boning up on DSP!), the works. It ran fine in 8 MB RAM. OK, except for Netscape, which page-thrashed for about 2 minutes then ran fine. Upgrading to 32 MB (the capacity of the motherboard) cured that. Now I run a Pentium 3 with 768 MB RAM, plugged in to ADSL. The OS started as Slackware 8.0, but I've upgraded many packages, and run a 2.4.20 kernel. It flies...

To this day I recommend Slackware as a "sharp tools" distro - if you know what you're doing, it's immensely powerful and flexible. If you don't know what you're doing, you're screwed.

FWIW, my most recent Slackware install was Slackware 8.0 on a Toshiba laptop that RedHat 7.3 (the company standard) refused to install on. It would get to about 3 packages before the end, crash, reboot, say GRUB and sit there staring at me. The PCMCIA network card did all the right things, automagically. I had to fiddle a bit with the X configuration to set up yet another weird-ass laptop video card. Big deal.

Thanks, Patrick. Well done!

...laura

Re:Slackware - a sharp tools distro

[robbo]

slack was my first, too, on a P133. I think I moved to a package-based system after the first time I tried to upgrade my libc from source and I buggered the whole system. That was before I discovered /bin/sash :-)

one thing slack teaches you is to build packages yourself and actually take the time to find/report/patch compile-time bugs. I can't count the number of times I had to fix the netpbm headers...

Re:Slackware - a sharp tools distro

[hthiefshorty]

Hey Patrick, my modem works. First install, first rpm, first logon w/ Linux. On a Presario Compaq no less. No other disto would install. The fact I am writing this is proof enough that Slack is a great distro. Now on to the soundcard!

Sweet, thanx for the update :)

[digitalexpl0it]

Ive used slackware since version 3.0, I have always loved it. I started using unix with netbsd, then found out about linux and slackware was the first linux distro I have ever used, and ever since I still love the way things are handle..no so bulky like the rest...great job!

I dunno...

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat 8 is pretty slick though... If I switch to Slackware will I have to dig up the manual for my monitor to find horizontal sync rates to configure X?

Re:I dunno...

[Anonymous Coward]

yes

Slack is cool stuff....

[Penguin Follower]

... 'nuff said! :)

slack9 is good

[ph1nn]

Been running it for 2 days now since its been released and its the best release yet! I give major props to slackware, its the longest running and by FAR the best, easiest, and most none bloated distro out there. Especially if your a more hardcore user, not some RH llama ;-) Another great release Patrick!

mplayer?

[duplo]

I have seen various linux distributions come with various crappy media players - none of which compare to mplayer. Is there ever going to be support for mplayer (with libavcodec) on distribution cd's without having to download/configure it myself, since it appears not to be on the latest(and best) distro I have seen to date.

no one impressed by timing of post?

[horster]

does no one recognize the feat that slashdot accomplished this year by not jumping the gun and announcing the pre-release as many other sites did (linuxtoday). they waited nicely until the official announcement on the slackware site, thereby letting mirrors propagate, instead of pouncing on the changelogs.

does no one remember what happened last time around when michael posted early? good times.... (and then was rude about it to top it off...)

Re:no one impressed by timing of post?

[Anonymous Coward]

As if Michael has ever been polite about anything. He has a bit of a "history" with being abusive toward web-sites and their visitors.

Re:no one impressed by timing of post?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is somewhat humourous, given all the complaints about the bad editing on Slash (Poor spelling/grammar in the headlines, duplicate stories, unchecked URLS in the story, more stuff that I have probably missed), that the 1 time that they jumped the gun on a Slackware release, they suddenly become responisible in their posting of the newest Slack. Such is the power of Slack!!!

Enlightenment...

[StupidKatz]

... cannot be found inside a linux distro, even as one as cool as Slack. I'd mention a few of the ways to find Enlightenment here, but I bet it would only get me modded down.

Re:Enlightenment...

[Skweetis]

Hmm...

# mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /cdrom
# ls /cdrom/PACKAGES/enlightenment*
enlightenment-0.16.1-i386.tgz
#

I found it in my copy...

Re:Enlightenment...

[Anonymous Coward]

the first rule of Enlightenment is that nobody talks about Enlightenment...

Re:Enlightenment...

[dmaxwell]

It's in LOTs of distros.....

dmaxwell@Cinderella:~$ apt-cache search enlightenment
e16keyedit - a keybinding editor for the enlightenment window manager
e16menuedit - enlightenment menu editor
enlightenment - The Enlightenment Window Manager
enlightenment-data - Enlightenment Window Manager Run Time Data Files
enlightenment-theme-bluesteel - Hunchback's BlueSteel theme for E
enlightenment-theme-brushedmetal - Audio files for the BrushedMEtal-Tigert E Theme
enlightenment-theme-ganymede - cK's Ganymede theme for E
enlightenment-theme-shinymetal - Raster's ShinyMetal Theme for E
epplets - The Epplets for the Enlightenment Window Manager
eterm - Enlightened Terminal Emulator
lg-issue17 - Issue 17 of the Linux Gazette.
libedb1 - enlightenment's database access library
libedb1-dev - Enlightenment's db convenience wrapper library.
libevas0 - enlightenment advanced canvas library
libstringlist0 - StringList - library for handling misc Enlightenment functions

Oh!, not THAT Enlightenment.... You mean like wisdom and deep knowledge and stuff. You're new here aren't you?

Re:Enlightenment...

[StupidKatz]

In essence? Yes.

Yet I've managed to be somewhat intelligent and hit the karma kap, and thus ineligible to begin my reign of moderation terror muhuhahahahaha! Oh, wait... I said "terror". That knock on the door must be the BATF and the CIA. Dammit.

Ah ... Slackware

[Vanieter]

The memories ... I started with Dragon Linux (since I didn't want to bother with repartionning, go figure) 6 months ago or so. That was my first distro. Based on Slackware 7. My first configuration nightmares ! My first dependency hells ! I'll always remember Slackware. And should have gotten a newer distro (:

Erg... no GALEON or EVOLUTION!!!

[Travoltus]

Does anyone know a SAFE way to work Gnome 1.4 back into this (assuming a fresh slack 9.0 install) so as to get legacy GNOME apps like Galeon and Evolution working?

Re:Erg... no GALEON or EVOLUTION!!!

[Rebel Patriot]

Have patience. I'm working on a galeon package for 1.3.3. Currently galeon is still very beta for GNOME2. IIRC, evolution won't run with gtk2.0 at all.

Re:Erg... no GALEON or EVOLUTION!!!

[damien_kane]

Does anyone know a SAFE way to work Gnome 1.4 back into this (assuming a fresh slack 9.0 install) so as to get legacy GNOME apps like Galeon and Evolution working?

Look on Google for a package archive:

Here is one that I use. I have Evolution 1.2.1 running on Dropline Gnome-2.2/X4.3.0, Slackware 8.1 (Soon to b 9)

Never

[Anonymous Coward]

No distro will ever distribute a working mplayer until we fix our "intellectual tyranny" laws.

This is an excellent chance for someone in a free country like China or Russia to produce and sell CDs. You have to have an installation script that does a lot of driver checking and setup, and do that ALSA sound shit where you can synchronize the sound and video. If you base it off of debian so I can edit sources.list and add all the other stuff I want, I will pay $30 for that CD.

offtopic I know, but...

[Hex4def6]

Is it just me or do the slackware guys need some tips in product marketing? this is just not that appealing :)

Re:offtopic I know, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

ass, there is NO plural when it comes to slackware... it's one guy doing the job of an entire company.

there is no marketing , there's only fandom graphics.

Re:offtopic I know, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

How bout you make him a better design or shut the fuck up?

I trust slackware for servers

[bigberk]

I've set up a number of Internet and LAN servers, including one for my own business. What I like the most about slackware is its simplicity and transparency in installation and configuration. I can reliably get an installation up and running properly in very little time, and configuration and customization is easy - all off 1 CD, in one go.

Pat Volkerding has done a great job with this distribution; it really is carefully put together. I've been a fan since version 7 and I have already purchased Slackware 9 to show my support. If you like Slackware, please buy a copy from the Slackware Store to help keep the project alive.

Thanks slack

[be-fan]

I'm a relative n00b to all of this. My first distro was Slack 3.4. One of the 5 CD sets. Cool stuff. Now, I'm a full time Linux user. Thanks a lot Slack devs!

WHY DO YOU WASTE PRECIOUS BANDWIDTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

mindless rantings... yep, I'm at slashdot alright...

whoops

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a lot of people who cut their teeth on DOS when it first came out. I pity those same fools still using DOS much the way I pity those using Slackware in anything but a server environment.

Saints preserve us

[A nonymous Coward]

The last name doesn't sound very Irish, but Saint Patrick to be sure. And you just missed your very own day, tis a shame to be sure.

Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know there were any other big distros left. Iggdrasil went bye-bye, RedHat is full of proprietary stuff, Suse is full of proprietary stuff, Mandrake is french - it reeks of cheese and keeps surrendering, Debian is a Way of Life, not a distro, and Caldera never was a big distro despite what they claimed.

Re:People can disagree with you without being a tr

[FuegoFuerte]

...and is missing many crucial ones that would be a godsend if they would just install and work without a plethora of patches (Get PoPToP working with MS-CHAP v2 auths, and see what I mean).

I've done PoPTop with MS-CHAPv2 on Slackware (8.1 and 9.0beta). It's really not that difficult. And it's absolutely, certainly NOT made up of crucial patches and packages. And I highly doubt that any but a specialised firewall/gateway/VPN server distribution would include PPP and PoPTop with all the needed patches. That's a very specialised app which I wouldn't expect any distro to come configured for unless it's targetted toward that niche market.

Slackware Linux Essentials

[Alan Hicks]

You'll notice at the slackware store that there is a wonderful paperback book licensed under the GPL entitles, "Slackware Linux Essentials". It is perhaps one of the best linux books I have ever read and am thankful to be involved with.

Mysel and many of the "BOZOs" in alt.os.linux.slackware are currently working on a revised edition to bring this book up to date with the latest release of Slackware Linux. You can take a look at our (so far meager) progress here. I encourage anyone who wants to participate to give me an e-mail, you can find my address at that link, as well as a mailing list for this project. Any contributions would be greatly appreciated.

Slack on!

Maybe is because....

[williamyf]

many of us got our fisrt Slackware CD from the back of a "Linux Unleashed"(r/tm/c) series Book. ;-)

Oh, the memories

half a gig is huge!

[Anonymous Coward]

I squeezed a slackware-8.1-based nameserver on a 486 with a 130mb drive, df says 42% used.

Slackware 9 ISO url

[punkmac]

http://media.punkmac.com/slackware-9.0-iso/

since its still hard to find at the moment, figured i'd toss it up. check those md5's as normal.

enjoy

Message to P V

[mnmn]

I cut MY first teeth on Slacky. From Infomagic, we ordered a Linux pack back in 1995 that had RedHat, Slackware 3.2 and Debian. We were three friends and by chance slackware got to me.

Ive used so many distros and OSes including OpenBSD Plan9 and Darwin.

Right now for some internet servers, the two big ones I'm using are RedHat and Solaris8, but I'm just gathering experience for both since I'll certify myself for both of those. Markets like that. For server installations at companies I would go with RedHat, Debian or SuSE, but at home, by myself, with no constraints, its Slackware!
(or if its outdated like it sometimes is, knoppix!)

So hear me Volkerding! Slackware fans are out there using and recommending other distros but they remain slackware fans. The current useage of slackware is no barometer to how many techies WANT to use it. I might be helping prepare a tech school in Quetta, Pakistan, border with Afghanistan, and I'll be getting everyone started on Slackware before preparing them for certifications of RedHat, Solaris and AIX.

BTW, is there a HAZARAGI language version planned for slackware yet?

Re: First Post

[kwenda]

For my money, slack is the only way to go. It makes you learn... no handholding, no Fischer-Price interface, and for God's sake, NO RPM. I have learned more from figuring out "why doesn't this work" or "why won't this compile" then I ever could from flashy little WinXP Wizards and brainless operations like apt-get.

kwenda@backslash:~$ uptime
21:05:31 up 408 days, 10:40, 1 user, load average: 0.12, 0.12, 0.09

Oh Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

If Slackware is too hard for you, go back to your GameBoy. It's the easiest real distro to install. Red Hat is for converted MicroSofties, Suse is for Nazis, Debian is for zealots, and Mandrake is by and for people who give up without a fight.

Re:Oh Bullshit

[rmgrotkierii]

Mandrake is by and for people who give up without a fight.

you mean french people? ;-)

Re:GO FUCK YOURSELF, LIBERAL SCUM!

[Bremen24601]

We would, but apparently the right passed a law against this kindof thing...

The best reason to use Slackware

[alecthomas]

A colleague of mine put it best when he said of Slackware that "it doesn't try to do anything I don't want it to".

That is Slackware's beauty - if you know what you are doing, it doesn't get in the way.

Day Late

[Anonymous Coward]

It was actually released on the 19th. I'm sure there was a mass of people submitting stories but Cowboy Neal had to get the glory ...

Thank you Patrick

[lewp]

I'm kind of drunk at this point, and have had a few sleeping pills, so bear with me :). I'm slightly more eloquent when I'm sober, but feel the need to give thanks now.

Thanks for making Slackware. I may have initially gotten FBSD on one of my very old boxes (I'm only 21, so define "very old" as you see fit), but it was Slackware on a 486 where I became what I would consider semi-competent.

At this point I may have moved to other OS's and even distros with most of my production boxen for the sake of support contracts and package management, but I consider Slackware invaluable for the learner and recommend it to everyone who asks me "how do I learn UNIX?"

I'm happy to hear you've made another release, and have decided I will find some hardware to run it on. Slackware represents some of the happiest times I've ever had with a UNIX-like OS, and I'm determined not to forget about it anytime soon.

I'm just one guy, but I'm sure I echo thousands of others when I say, "Please keep up the good work. I owe a lot to you." Thanks man. If you're ever in Atlanta, let me know and I'll buy you and David Cantrell a beer :).

Slackware packages are WORSE than the alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

It is far, far superior to RPM-based hell. RPM breaks the golden rule of programming (KISS) with a giant sledgehammer; just look at rpm --help, which I won't list here, as it's 154 lines of help options. That's just inexcusable.

RPM is based on an actual database system, and many of it's command-line options deal with managing and querying that database in ways which Slackware packages don't allow.

Additionally, RPM files suck. How do you get the files out of the package, if you just want to see the files and don't want to install? Use alien [kitenet.net] to convert it to Slackware tgz format.

This is absurd. You can do that with standard RPM tools. I don't use an RPM-based system, so I can't tell you the exact commands, but RPM files are essentially cpio archives with extra information. You can use rpm2cpio(1) to convert an RPM into a cpio file, and then use cpio(1) to extract the files.

For rpm, you've got to use rpm to "query" the binary database. Uck. Not very powerful

No, it's actually very powerful. The database can be indexed for speed (unlike flat text files) and rpm(1) provides a sufficiently rich number of operations to make execution of arbitrary queries reasonable.

And to find what files are in a Slackware .tgz package, just do "tar ztvf package.tgz".

How is this more "powerful" than "rpm -qpl package.rpm"?

Further, slackware's lack of dependency checking makes automatic software installation (a la Debian's apt-get(1) ) impossible. How can you manage the automated installation of a random package (such as, say, gcc-3.2) if you don't know what's required to run it? You can't.

No thanks, Slackware. For actual use of Linux, not just impressing your fellow 1337 d00dz on IRC, I'll stick to Debian.

Slack rocks!

[Lispy]

Slack convinced me that even I can understand a Linuxsystem. I love 9.0 and will buy it to support Slackware...

Keep it going!

cu,
Lispy

GUI?

[Lispy]

I agree. But I disagree on the GUI part. Not everyone wants to use one, sure. But with the latest XFree86 and KDE Slack is more than ready for primtetime. Personally I must say that with dropline-gnome there is probably the best (and easiest to maintain) GUI available I have seen for a Linux Desktop so far...check it out!

cu,
Lispy

mirrors

[fearlezz]

Why doesn't Patrick ever make sure all official mirrors have the newest ISO before getting his server slashdotted? :( If he just uses to 3 mirrors, his server load decreases by 75%.

Happily there are also a lot of unofficial mirrors. Now I only need to get a md5sum from an official mirror.

I was just grumbling about not having this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just grumbling to myself the other day cause there was no distro to my knowlege (gentoo aside because the whole building from source shit blows ass sorry) that had xfree86 4.3 and kde 3.1 and gnome 2.2... whoa right on

i know the new mandrake has it but its a beta but i think i might wait for the mandrake dist because of the package management vs rpm because believe it or not rpm is more versatile heh :)

too late to be new - see Gentoo

[axxackall]

Based on gcc 3.2, and equipped with kernel 2.4.20 (ptrace-patched), XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1.

Many (if not most) of Gentoo users use those versions for weeks. Check the official statistics. I've upgraded those packages for more than a month. Some - even more time ago.

One of strong arguments of Slackware is compiling from tarballs in order to upgrade your packages (or reinstalling from new ISO). Perhaps, compiling from tarballs manually by all users until the new ISO arrives is not the way to create a good collaboration against those tarball bugs.

Gentoo Portage is that collaboration tool, infrastructure and athmosphere. It saves the knowledge of the collective, of those who has already spent time for manually debugging default tarballs (and created/updated ebuilds for them), and brings that knowledge to those who is spending their time on other tarballs (and creating/updating ebuilds for them). Besides, nobody waits new ISO unless new computer installation is required - all installations are evolving accordingly to the chosen profile.

I've been using Slackware (and RH) for years (since 1995) until last year I've converted to Gentoo, which is like a drag for me now: I am addicted to Gentoo and there is no way I am going back to neither Slackware or RH.

Slackware users, sooner or later you will be assimilated. The resistence is futile. See Gentoo (sorry, last paragraph is a silly joke, but I could not resist myself for it).

Re:too late to be new - see Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem misinformed.

Slackusers are not fanboys, and don't compile for the heck of it.

Gentoo compiles everything because it can, most of it produces no speed benifit, and serves no purpose.

Slackware lets you compile the stuff you want, while providing a clean, easy customisable system to compile on.

Gentoo has portage...

Slackware once again compiles from source, what needs to be compiled.

Re:too late to be new - see Gentoo

[fferreres]

I am trying gentoo now, and also am a Slackware user (can't use any other distros). I will like Gentoo I think, but Slack will always be usefull because nothing touches your system except you yourself, and you know _exactly_ what is going on.

Re:too late to be new - see Gentoo

[axxackall]

Slack will always be usefull because nothing touches your system except you yourself

That's true for Gentoo too. The question is, do you prefer to touch it with just you hands or you prefer to use very power tools?

and you know _exactly_ what is going on

In Gentoo we speak: "You know exactly what you are doing". Although it is the same if nothing going on unless you are doing it :)

Re:too late to be new - see Gentoo

[Repugnant_Shit]

I have two Linux-from-scratch systems, and I'm going to try Gentoo on a third, brand-new machine (my first machine that has never had Windows
installed :)

Re:too late to be new - see Gentoo

[fferreres]

My hands are a very power tool, thanks to slacky, that's my point here. I do agree Gentoo is the best package management I can think of. Ports derivatives rule. On the other hand, sometimes package management gets in the way. It's not like it solves everything, to use it well you have to learn quite a lot (to do it in a way compatible with what I want and without defeating the porpuse of package mngt.)

Understanding package management

[@madeus]

Integral package management is essential, in some form or other, for a reliable modern system - is a prerequisite for any production environment (with very rare exception).

'bolting on' package management does not offer you any form of guarantee against conflicts and bugs that occur due to unmatched, or poorly matched, dependencies. It is, in effect, utterly pointless.

Slackware does not have package management. Stating-the-obvious to the original poster (i.e. that you can download and install a package manager) does not change this, and as I said, would ultimately be almost entirely pointless.

Incidentally, I believe you should avoid giving the impression that apt-get is analogous to RPM, it is not. DPKG is the Debian package management system, apt-get is a tool which sit's atop the package management system. There is apt-get for RPM, it would even be possible to run apt-get atop free-bsd's ports system.

Re:Understanding package management

[Ravenscall]

funny, I just run installpkg, and it brings up a package manager in Slackware.

Re:Understanding package management

[llzackll]

If you compile and install from source, most configure scripts will tell you if you need a certain library or other dependancy, and if there will be a conflict. No need for a package management system. I've been running Slackware for years, and never ran into the problems you described. If I don't have a certain dependancy configure will tell me, and I will get it. If I still have problems, I will RTFM.

Re:Understanding package management

[@madeus]

That approach may suffice for a personal desktop (as long as your not picky about application integrity), but it entirely inadequate for a corporate workstation or server environment (where the vast majority of the Linux installed user base is).

For example: If you upgrade a library or remove a conflicting (seemingly 'broken') library to satisfy a dependancy then it's very possible to break another application which depends on (or 'uses if present') that library, and you won't even notice until days, weeks or even months down the line (after memory leaks, or intermittent untraceable faults, which can cost huge amounts of loosed revenue while you attempt to trace through the many layers of your infrastructure trying to identify the cause.).

As another example: In any production environment, systems may stay in place for years - if you have no package management there is absolutely no way to gracefully - and in a managed way - upgrade the entire system, short of vast amounts of downtime. After years of hacking and patching, with no package management database, sooner or later you are going to break something and your not going to notice - until it's wasted hours/days/weeks/months of time (and money). You'd also find that your system is full of local, and very probably remote, exploits because you've been unable to keep track of each of the hundreds of different applications and libraries installed on your system.

It is vital to be wary of employing any individual who has enough hubris to believe that they can single handily defeat these issues without the need for system management tools. A good system administrator should have a wide range of tools at his disposal and he should know how to use them, not scorn them in favour of misplaced faith in his abilities.

This is what I mean when I talk about understanding the importance of package management.

Re:Understanding package management

[@madeus]

'installpkg' is *not* a package management solution (though it could be said to be a 'package installer', in much the same way as rot13 can be said to be 'encryption').

It _is_ an easier way to uncompress and extract a tar file, then automatically run a shell script contained in that file.

It does not check for existing installed copies, dependants, pre-requistes or conflicts when adding/removing software. Which is the point of package management.

Re:low disk space - Formilux !

[wtarreau]

Here, we install very tiny systems at our customer's. These systems generally provide proxy, mail relay, firewall, network probes, ... in a few megabytes. How ? because our distro, Formilux is file-based, and not package-based, so we install only the files we need. For example, a complete firewall is about 12 MB. With sendmail, squid and several administration tools, we can even reach 14 MB! Speaking about security, what would you think about a distro with about only 6 setuid and a fully read-only filesystem ? During the last months, we have spent a lot of time stabilizing it, reducing it, and most important, makeing it far more easy to install and maintain, and we'll hopefully update a full release on the site within a few weeks.

Coming back to Slackware, it's really a great thing that Pat still works on it. I often recommend it to newbies that are enough of mandrake, because it's the most appropriate moment to let them discover that they can be free again :-)

Keep up the good job, Pat ! While many people like their distro, many others love slackware !

Re:It's been out for 2 days.

[Anonymous Coward]

wow. guess you must be cool then.

mailto:sales@store.slackware.com

[misfit13b]

Hey Patrick!

Why do all of my emails to you guys at the slackware store bounce back? I wanna make sure my subscription order went through!

m13b

Good for older systems too

[cascadefx]

I know a lot of people who first cut their teeth on Slack when trying Linux. It's cool to see that it's still around.

Still around?!?!

Of course it is still around and it is really good. I use it for older or "non-standard" systems that other distros won't install on without a lot of hand-holding and research into why the next newest and greatest graphical installer for distro X keeps hanging.

Two things that are great about Slack. First, it doesn't assume much about a system, but at the same time holds your hand enough that you don't have to know the scan rates (et al) or other specs your hardware intimately unlike *cough*debian*cough* (though I really like debian). Second, it fails gracefully. If something doesn't launch or was scanned improperly (or whatever) Slack will try to bring it up. If it can't, it throws and error exception, and continues about its way as best it can. I HATE when many systems just hang on installs. THAT is the WORST behavior. Graceful failure is an art and Slackware is very good with its paint brushes.

Case in point. Work gave us these crappy IBM laptops that actually are ACER low-enders. I love IBM and hoped for a better model, but we got these. Having a dual-boot situation of 2000 and Linux woud be really helpful for the types of problems these laptops were meant to help us troubleshoot, but getting SuSE (one of my favorites), RedHat, or Debian to load was a nightmare... mainly due to the USB configuration (it uses an internal hub architecture to split the USB ports... or something... whatever, Linux doesn't like it) among other things. Slackware (the distro that I cut my teeth on, Slackware 96 from Walnut Creek) was mentioned as a possible route. After grabbing the CDs, It installed (with a much easier to use installer than I remember) without one hitch. I love it.

So... give it a try. It is stable, it looks a lot like System V Unix and it is a great little OS.

Re:Slackware packages are WORSE than the alternati

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks, Slackware. For actual use of Linux, not just impressing your fellow 1337 d00dz on IRC, I'll stick to Debian. Bah. The 'l33+ d00dz now use Gentoo. Go fuck yourself.

Patrick is the reason I use Linux.

[BoomerSooner]

As a student wanting to learn to use a UNIX Shell so I could get a job at this company in colorado (corporate express) I was told by the other workers to get O'Reilly's Unix in a Nutshell book (pre-animals, i think it had a referee or something). I then bought the book and it was pointless since I had nothing to test it on. I had a friend in the MIS program who had switched from CS and he recommended getting a Linux distro ('95/'96ish). I was very excited to see the Tattered Cover (best bookstore ever in Denver) had not only distros (InfoMagic sets) but excellent books on Linux. I tried debian, redhat, suse and slackware. The only one I ever liked was the slackware distro (it just made more sense).

I bought walnut creek cd's every since (until i couldn't find them anymore). I run mostly redhat now (3 rh boxes, 2 slackware) but without Patrick's work Linux would have been significantly less approchable for a lowly MIS student.

Cheer's to Patrick. Keep up the good work.

Even rednecks use linux.

word

[jonnyfivealive]

well put. people get all bent out of shape before they even read that the other person had specific reasons for doing it a certain way. i think what you said sums up all this crap people are going on and on about...

if you need it small, get it small, say, slackware. if you need a desktop OS with a little less fuss and a little more fluff, go with something like redhat.

Mod this parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake is for newbies. Slackware is for newbies that don't want to stay newbies.

So true. I'm a newbie, still am. But, I'm learning a lot reading the f*cking manuals and playing around with confs. Slack is sweet. I see almost no use for a X11 environment to walk me through any 'wizards'.

Slack is my linux crack, how bout you?

its all about cars

[jonnyfivealive]

manual vs auto

if you want fun and control on the street, go with the stick.

if you want cruising with ease, go with the auto.

this is of course, leaving out the whole idea that ultimately, a well built auto is faster and more reliable, that part really doesnt work with my analogy, its mroe the opposite, but you get the idea, hehe.

Do Slackware updates run as smoothly as Debian's?

[Anonymous Coward]

What keeps me to using Debian is mostly it's package management and the fact that upgrades usually just work. How does Slackware compare to Debian in this point?

SLS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's it! Thank you for reminding me! I knew I'd been using Slack since way back, but I could only remember and find the first "Slackware" 2.0.0 CD I have, but it seemed there was something before... now where is that "SLS" cd...

Re:SLS

[forged]

• now where is that "SLS" cd

There was never a SLS CD that I can remember of. At the time, even a *CD-rom drive* was a luxury :)

The distro was designed to fit on multiple floppies. You can grab a copy from here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distribu tions/sls/

What about Debian

[cyberdude3k]

I dont know but i still think Debian Linux is the only linux that i think is in top, its kernel is very very very stable and u dont need a good machine, and eveything is for free it not commercial at all and it has the true sense of want GNU is all about. Red had is trying to turn into another M$ company and so are other Linux. I have both debian and red hat systems and i prefer debain even though its GUI is not that good, I bourght a computer for 50 bucks with 300 cryix processor 13GB hardisk and 128 MB RAM and i have debian on that, my university let me put my debian server under their network and its working like charm, its been two semester that i havent seen the computer i use telnet to do my stuff from my room computer. The onlything i am scare about is hope the processor dosen't get too heated up. I request the webmaster or the author to do a special report on debian linux

Last Post!

[alpg]

Many of the convicted thieves Parker has met began their
life of crime after taking college Computer Science courses.
-- Roger Rapoport, "Programs for Plunder", Omni, March 1981

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