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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.
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.
autoslack - written by David Cantrell
http://phreakinb.com
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
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
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.
In fact the 9.0 was on mirrors last nite, but the only ISO image was for 8.1
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!!
Au contraire.
./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.
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
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.)
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
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".
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
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.
PoPToP is a PPTP server. See those capital letters?
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!
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
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
# mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /cdrom /cdrom/PACKAGES/enlightenment*
I found it in my copy...# ls
enlightenment-0.16.1-i386.tgz
#
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.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
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.