Slackware 9.1RC 2 Out, Mandrake 9.2 Soon

Colin writes "The founder of Slackware, Patrick Volkerding, released version 9.1 RC-2 of the upcoming Slackware. Good ol' Slack comes with new versions of packages while the addition of the Swaret tool adds dependency checking on Slackware for the first time! Here is an enthusiastic preview of Slackware 9.1 with plenty of screenshots." And pacc points out that Mandrake 9.2 will soon be ready, but only for Mandrake Club members at first. "But it will soon come to a mirror near you(TM). Though by choosing to distribute it with BitTorrent, do they effectively limit the downloads for a limited release?"

Comments

and now in the news

[penis fish]

linux sucks my cock!

more at 8

and now, back to the newb speak:

lolz
hru?

do u wan 2 cybar?

ok bai

linux sux

YHBT

thx

wipo 4 life

Yeah

[Pay The Fuck Up!]

And I bet you cheapskates will just download it, too, instead of doing the right and honorable thing and buying a copy.

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

and why should i pay the fuckup? he's doing just fine without my support.

No Fun.

[tarquin_fim_bim]

"adds dependency checking on Slackware for the first time!"

Well that's going to take all the fun out of it, I'll have to change distros, it just wouldn't be the same if after 2 hours of compiling it doesn't bork. Hell, I'd even pay extra for that, dependency checking is for pussies, with too little time on their hands.

Re:No Fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why it's called SWareT, probably slang for "sware it". It's called that so you don't have to cuss out your Slackware box whenever dependancy hell kicks in.

Re:No Fun.

[fishybell]

"9.1RC 2...adds dependency checking on Slackware for the first time!"

Now the name "Slack" is brought to full term.

Re:No Fun.

[BusterB]

Swaret's dependency checking is actually pretty neat. For some dependencies, it is able to get a list of package relations from an external site maintained by the swaret project. For other dependencies, does something like an ldd on the binaries in a package to determine which libraries are missing. Sometimes, it can then deduce which packages need to be installed from this information. If not, at least you have some clue as to what is missing.

As for building software on Slack, usually 'configure' catches any missing dependencies before compiling begins. One nice thing about Slackware is there are no '-dev' packages. Just install the compiler, and all of the necessary include files are already there from the other packages.

Re:No Fun.

[narfbot]

Nothing has really changed as Swaret is not required, or installed by default, or even in the standard package set. It's in extra. So have all the fun you want with 9.1.

Re:No Fun.

[failedlogic]

I'd have to agree with you. Having computers check the dependencies takes the humanity out of the computer experience.

Your answer, my friend, is right under your nose. Either:

a) Don't install Swaret.
b) Donwload an earlier version of Slackware.

Re:No Fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would tend to agree, If I want my OS to stop me from doing something stupid like installing software that won't work, I'll just download XP from gnutella (again).

Nice review, although I'd have to say that I'm using 9.0 and OSS drivers and I can play multiple mp3's simultaneously on my soundblaster live! value card no problem, so I think she has a cheap sound card. Oh yeah, and GUI utilities are for pussies... not much point in using a powerful, flexible os if you are just going to take that power and flexibility away with a GUI.

But hey, what do I know, I'm just some anonymous coward right?

Re:No Fun.

[ThatComputerGuy]

Exactly. Slackware is still Slackware, and it will remain that way, as evidenced by Pat's entries in the Changelog for another similar package:

extra/slackpkg-0.99/slackpkg-0.99-noarch-4.tgz: Added slackpkg, a simple tool for keeping a Slackware system up-to-date. Thanks to Piter Punk for quickly fixing a few last-minute bugs, and reminding me that I'd promised to add this. It's only fair, especially as I'm not a big believer in automated dependency handling. :-)

Re:No Fun.

[donnz]

Christ mate, you're going to have to change your sig with your current track record. Last 4 comments, all +5 rated.

Want to sign up to my OS project?

Re:No Fun.

[Coneasfast]

I hope you were only joking around. Because i've used slackware for years and never had any dependancy problems, I always know what I need.

Bottom line is if you don't know what you need, then Slackware probably isn't for you anyways.

Jeez..you couldn't wait

[Anonymous Coward]

damn, editors, if 9.2 is is so soon, why bother postin the RC2 as a "news" story?

How many users would actually have gone and downloaded this anyways?

Slashdot: more and more useless everyday.

This is important

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, look, it's more badly coded crapware thrown together by pot-smoking U.S.-hating Germans in their parent's basement. YIPEE!!!

And I love things spelled with an "e"

[nsample]

From the review:

Slackware is my new favorite operating system along with FreeBSD, Windows Server 2003 and Mac OS X.

Um, what is there that this guy *doesn't* like? I guess he didn't mention Commodore Basic...

P.S. excuse my IN ABILITY to Rape ur mom OK ??

[penis fish]

It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality,' which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to pedophilia.

What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:

• Linus Torvalds is an anagram of slit anus or VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
• Richard M. Stallman, spokespervert for the Gaysex's Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of mans cram thrill ad.
• Alan Cox is barely an anagram of anal cox which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.

I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.

Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'

As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.

And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!

Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:

'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'

Is this why you were touching your penis in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?

We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and copyright of post

Re:P.S. excuse my IN ABILITY to Rape ur mom OK ??

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe that you took the time to type that out. You must have either a horriblly lonely life or some serious issues with closeted homosexuality.

Re:P.S. excuse my IN ABILITY to Rape ur mom OK ??

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have either a horriblly lonely life or some serious issues with closeted homosexuality.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Re:P.S. excuse my IN ABILITY to Rape ur mom OK ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic, I'll give you offtopic.

This guy finally gets this hot girl to go out with him but he has to find a date for her friend.
He agrees because the date is 2 days away. To his surprise none of his friends could make it so he asks his retarded brother.
The brother says' "I wouldn't know what to do."
The other brother says, "Just do what I do."

So the brother agrees. The night of the date they drive out to Lover's Point. The brother jumps in the back seat with his girlfriend while the retard jumps in the front seat.
He watches as his brother puts his hand down the front of the girl's shirt, the retard does the same. He watches his brother puts his hand between the girl's legs, the retard does the same.
But to his surprise its wet so he quickly pulls away his hand is now bloody. So the retard pulls the girl to the front of the car and pulls out a first aid kit.
He pulls down her pants and says "I'd be bleeding too if someone cut off my penis."

BSD is your better choice

[1113Coder]

They've been doing "dependency checks" for years now why is this new? I think this whole article misses the important fact that BSD is the ultimate OS and does everything better than SlackWare and the like.

Re:BSD is your better choice

[guacamole]

Fortunately, there are plenty Linux distributions that are not slackware-like. It's good to see slackware to finally overcome this stone age limitation though.

Re:BSD is your better choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, the dependency checking tool is called 'ldd'. Slack has had it for a long time.

Want automatic dependency checking? Run the program, and if it is missing something, it will tell you what it is.

Maybe automatic dependency solving is what slackware is missing. But slack has a file that comes with it called MANIFEST.bz2. I just 'bzcat MANIFEST.bz2 | less' and type / and the shared library name. Find the associated package name and installpkg. Works every time. Well, maybe not for third party tgz's, but it's the same for third party rpms too-- you make your own trouble by doing this. Now the way to avoid problems with programs not included in slack is to compile it yourself.

All swaret does is combine all those steps into one tool. Same old stuff, different approach.

Now what does BSD have over this?

Re:BSD is your better choice

[LinuxSneaker]

You know, I've used Slackware for many years, and I never noticed that program. I'll look into using it instead of my "hack" with the libraries-current file.
Thanks.

Re:BSD is your better choice

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it at handling Slackware packages?

Genuninely Curious

[smittyoneeach]

Apache 2.x: when, why not now?

Re:Genuninely Curious

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Apache 2.x isn't ready for production consumption, so says just about every third-party add-on that "supports" it. NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE.

Re:Genuninely Curious

[BusterB]

You can get it and a lot more Slackware extra packages
here:.

If you really want it in the base distribution, just ask Patrick. He is usually prompt and if you make a good case for a package, he will add it. It also helps if you can give some built tips for particularly onery packages.

Re:Genuninely Curious

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who don't know:

Apache is a so called "GNU" (Gay Niggers United) software developed for Gay Sex And Video franchise stores in Illinois.

Re:Genuninely Curious

[ThatComputerGuy]

I've asked various people in the past why I would want to upgrade to Apache 2.x, and most people admit that the main reasons wouldn't convince many users to upgrade yet, especially combined with the the authors of PHP and other modules stating that Apache 2.0 doesn't yet work very well with these other packages.

Until it becomes very compatible with these other modules and proves itself to be reliable with increased usage down the road, I doubt 2.x will be included in Slackware very soon. Also, with the type of user that Slackware attracts, it's not unreasonable for those that want Apache 2.x be expected to be able to build it for themselves.

Then again, there's always LinuxPackages.net, but that's another story (notice how I didn't link to the site...).

Who cares?

[You Are A Dumbass]

I don't.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Omicron32]

Eugina is a "she" and also runs that site.

sound wasn't really Slack's fault, and others

[motorsabbath]

Alsa is a separate entity from Slack - if Alsa had issues with the sound card it wasn't Slack's fault. Also, the driver on the cheaper onboard sound rigs emulates full-duplex in software, right? At least sometimes? Setting up full duplex in software can probably be done but with quite a bit of work. The issues never exist on a card with onboard full-duplex support but one must still learn and use Alsa. The Slack/Alsa combo worked fine for basic sound support.

As to the Slack install, it is what is is - easy and quick. Just like FreeBSD's - there's no reason to change it, it's fine.

Re:sound wasn't really Slack's fault, and others

[BusterB]

I agree. At least the sound hardware was autodetected, which is a lot better than the old days. The new hotplug package works wonders on my laptop (except for the soft-modem), and my rc.modules file is completely empty. Even my orinoco card automatically grabs an IP address with no extra configuration.

Arts, which is part of KDE, does a passable job of duplexing cards that lack mixing in hardware or in the driver. One can just run 'artsdsp xmms' with xmms running with the OSS driver, and the sound will automagically be mixed by arts to the sound card. Arts does seem to use about 10% processor though for this functionality. Esound is supposed to do this too, but I haven't looked closely. Both are included with Slackware.

Re:sound wasn't really Slack's fault, and others

[outernet]

Incase anybody is interested, there is a ALSA plugin (included with ALSA) called 'dmix', which does software mixing - installing it is a simple case of editing configuration files.

Re:sound wasn't really Slack's fault, and others

[ostrich2]

If I'm not mistakem, xmms even has an output filter that works directly with arts. You don't need to do anything special to get it to work with KDE.

Re:sound wasn't really Slack's fault, and others

[Bandman]

I think most of this type of activity is typically done with a sound daemon, isn't it? The sound daemon maintains absolute control of the sound device, and then it maintains responsibility for mixing the sounds in software, and sending it to the device. I could be wrong, though.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[silverHat]

Makes me wonder if he loved Windows 98 too when it came out, because we all loved win98...right?

Upgrade treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

how can Linux be taken seriously as a desktop operating system when you have to download new software releases? You should be able to install an OS & use it for at least 5 years without updating anything.

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you're running an upatched stock version of Win98 with Office 97 right?

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[kfg]

A nice attempt at a troll, but. . .

The point you miss is that with the various flavors of Unix you can install a system and just use it for 5 years without updating, or even 10 years.

Many, in fact, do just this.

Most Unix improvements these days are really only chasing the changes mandated by the "improvements" driven by the propriatary companies.

To this day when I want a good, solid Unix solution to just get some real work done I install Red Hat 5.2.

It's killer.

KFG

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[lightcycle]

Try running Windows XP then without downloading any updates. I'd be surprised if it stays up half a day.

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, Linux != Unix

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

Half a day? Probably about 60 seconds after connecting to the internet.

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you can run older software. But what about security?

I don't want my fast, stable, little server running a vulnerable version of glibc.. yet if I upgrade glibc I need to upgrade the compilers, then the kernel, etc etc.

If it's an isolated machine, or has no listening services and a smart user at the console, sure older stuff works great, but otherwise you pretty much have to use somthing newer.

Newer software has more bloat. Why is it I could run my webserver on a 486dx/66 with 16m ram before, when now I need at *least* a pentium 233 with 32meg? Simple static HTML mind you. Bloat bloat bloat.

It would be interesting to fix the security issues in older distributions, such as slackware 4, but who has the time.

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[mamba-mamba]

Wow. Red Hat 5.2 was the first version of linux I ever ran.

I was SO stoked when I finally booted the machine and was able to compile hello world.

I didn't even know about X at the time. Eventually I got x configured properly for my video card, and figured out how to make linux talk to my metricom wireless modem. The next major milestone was checking my hotmail email for the first time under linux. Pretty cool.

Then I installed samba and diald, and set the linux box up as a nat box/firewall, print and file server for my housemates, and we shared the slow-ass metricom connection. Heh. To download anything big (like a new kernel) I had to start it up before I went to bed, and the next day it would still be going.

Over time I upgraded my libc, my gcc, my Xserver, the kernel. Until it eventually wasn't really a redhat 5.2 box anymore, because I did all my upgrades from sources, not packages.

Around that time I tried linux from scratch, and that was fun. (by this time I had DSL, or I never would have done linux from scratch). I learned how to build pretty much everything on a typical linux system that way. I installed X and gtk and the enlightenment window manager (which has a ton of dependencies).

Now I am using slackware 8, although my firewall system is still running linux from scratch. No web server, no ftp, no telnet, no services of any kind, except a cache-only dns server for the LAN side.

It sure has been fun. Thanks for taking me down memory road.

I'll probably try out gentoo next.

MM
--

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

AHAWHAWHAW HAW HAW you guys are as funny as fucking cot death. you also forgot to mention the borg or something equally as predictable and lame.

bitches.

Re:Upgrade treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Dell PC with Win-XP home. I was dutifully installing Microsoft Updates until one of the updates hosed me up. I then completely reinstalled Win-XP and have never downloaded an update since (I have antivirus, and HW/SW firewalls which I keep current). Since my reinstall, my machine has never crashed.

*Slackware is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

What people don't want to realize is that *Slackware is dying. Why, just look at the tripe I have to support my stupid conclusion:

- blah blah blah
- I made this up
- this is garbage too

See? So *Slackware joins the ranks of *BSD and they're both dying together, because I'm a stupid fucking *Linux fanboy with nothing better to do than masturbate to the RedHat webpage. All hail *Linus, creator of my inferior playtoy.

Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[Idou]

"Though by choosing to distribute it with BitTorrent, do they effectively limit the downloads for a limited release?"

As opposed to NOT using BitTorrent and having all the bandwidth eaten up so that each person gets 4k/s ?

Oh, I get it . . . you meant "Though by limiting the release, do they effectively make the BitTorrent method of distribution less effective?"

Well, there are over 16,000 Mandrake members. Let's say only 10% decide to download at the same time (an obviously conservative figure), that is still 1,600 simultaneous downloads. Is that suboptimal for BitTorrent?

Personally, I don't think Mandrake cares. The other way couldn't handle the traffic so they are using BitTorrent. If members get 150k/s instead 200k/s because of the limitted release, big deal. That is a small price to pay to get freeloaders involved in the actual realities behind creating a product they obviously value.

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded Knoppix Linux with Bittorrent and it took roughly two days to get the entire ISO image (over DSL). Not too impressive! I would have been better off using GetRight and mirrored downloads (which has always given me amazing download speeds, assuming there are several mirrors to download from).

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[tugrul]

I don't get how they intend to limit the downloads to just Mandrake Club members. Its a lot easier to pass on a few hundred KB .torrent file than ISOs.

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[1000StonedMonkeys]

Knoppix 3.3 took me about 5 hours last night with cable (well it said 5 hours when I went to sleep and the speed was slowly climing). Make sure you forward ports 6881 through 6889 or other clients behind firewalls won't be able to send you data.

The other issue with bittorrent links is how much bandwidth is actually dedicated to seeding the file. If someone like mandrake is seeding it, there will be bandwidth to spare.

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[araemo]

it says "Bittorrent technology" they could have co-opted the protocol, but changed bits and pieces of headers and tracker communication so only a 'mandrake-club' downloader will work with it..

or they could just be using the honor system to ask their members not to hand out the .torrents

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[TheCrazyFinn]

Bah.

I got Knoppix 3.3 in 31 Minutes, using BitTorrent.

Of course, my laptop was sitting on 100MB full duplex connectivity. Gotta love working for UUNET.

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

how about they don't publish the link to the bittirent publically until they emailed it tot he club members. then after a while make it availible on thier site. seems to me that it couls hold it off for atleast a couple of months

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[zenyu]

I don't get how they intend to limit the downloads to just Mandrake Club members. Its a lot easier to pass on a few hundred KB .torrent file than ISOs.

I think this is only going to be for a couple days. It's like the 'secret' Mandrake mirrors that they give members an urpmi string to. There is nothing preventing a non-member from discovering one of them and using it, except Mandrake asks their club members not to publish the addresses. I'm sure the bittorrent thing will be like that too, they will publish a .torrent file and ask us not to reveal it to the world. Then a few days later when we've all got copies they release it to the general public and not only do we serve as big huge mirror for the newbies but are also not suffereing 10KB/s downloads since we already have the iso's.

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[erioshi]

Some will find that the limitation will relate to having an older version of Mandrake Linux, unintentionally, I'm sure. The available Bit Torrent RPMs for ML will not install on older versions (ML 9.1 or older) without slogging through dependency upgrades.

Re:Don't get BitTorrent comment . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Behind a firewall? Your download performance will drop from 150KB/s down to 20KB/s or less. Also, your upload speed may be affecting your download speed. What is the upload speed of your DSL?

In just over a week I've downloaded 27 eps of MST3K through BitTorrent. These aren't files that are exactly heavily traded. Maybe one day Rhino will release these one DVD too.

It's important to note here that your problems with BitTorrent are not the norm, otherwise no one would be using it.

Version 10.2 to follow next week

[melted]

Man when will they switch to numbering schemes even remotely resembling anything real? Come on, the version is based on kernel 2.4.x - name it version 2.4.x, that's it. Not 9.2 or 22.34!

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[rehabdoll]

Partrick names it after the current lilo version.

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[ikkonoishi]

Better than switching from 3.1 to 95 to 2000.

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[Bingo Foo]

Why base the distro version number on the kernel version number? Why not base it on the emacs version number or the PHP version number? Oh, I know! because it doesn't tell you about the whole distribution!

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[Josh Booth]

Huh?

$ lilo -v
LILO version 22.4.1, [snip....]

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[Skater]

When he jumped from Slackware 4 to Slackware 7, I think he said something along the lines of "I'm tired of being asked when I was going oupgrade to Linux 6.0". (People were confusing the Red Hat version number with the kernel version.)

No, I don't think it's the LILO version, as someone else pointed out.

I'm not sure what prompts him to change the major version number.

--RJ

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[mvdw]

I'm not sure what prompts him to change the major version number.

I think it's when something major changes (glibc, gcc etc) (duh!). Like for 8.1->9.0, it was a change from gcc 2.95.3 to 3.x. There's no real hard and fast rule, AFAIK.

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[Anonymous Coward]

i can see how this could irratate and confuse you but in reality it isn't the linux kernel they are promoting. it is the add-ons and the way they customized the kernel that make a distrobutions diferent from each other. shouldn't that apropriatly be named after a developement scheme? 1 number jump for major diferences and .2 partial number jumps for basic improvments? i'm not sure exactly how it works but i can see were the mandrake 8.2, 9.0, 9.2 and such comes from. if you really need to know the kernels version then maybe google, thier website or even # uname could help you. :)

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[rastos1]

That would be because Slackware went from 2.4 to 3.0 in 1995. Are you suggesting to go backwards now?

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[Stevyn]

you forgot millenium.

1,2,3,3.1,3.11,nt 3.1...nt4,95, 98, 98se, me, 2000, xp, 2003. after they're done with the xp scheming of naming things, they're just going to pick random fruit.

Microsoft Windows Orange, Microsoft Server Apple. Now that will confuse people. Thankfully they don't have to decide because when they buy a new computer they aren't given a choice.

Microsoft could just come out with Windows Monkey Balls Edition and not have a problem selling it.

Re:Version 10.2 to follow next week

[Stevyn]

And don't forget netscape 4 to 6. wtf? Funny how it coincided with IE 6.

Setup, where art thou?

[imag0]

Just installed the latest Slack on an extra drive the other day and was suprised that the venerable and much appreciated 'setup' was missing.

I've used Slack off and on since the 0.96-pre-1 days and it was the first time since then that I noticed it was gone from the system.

Here's hoping for a new, revamped (still curses!) 'setup' app in the near future.

Thanks for years of great software, Patrick and company!

Re:Setup, where art thou?

[Baron of Greymatter]

Setup is only on the CD, AFAIK. It doesn't get installed on the hard drive (at least not since 7.1, the first Slackware I installed). The individual configuration programs such as netconfig do get installed, though.

Re:Setup, where art thou?

[breman]

If you type "pkgtool" you will find all the old menu based setup scripts, along with a few new ones.

Re:Setup, where art thou?

[breman]

I made a few screenshots just in case anyone missed it :)

http://members.shaw.ca/pkgtool/pkgtool.png
http://members.shaw.ca/pkgtool/setup.png

Insider's View on Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an overhaul of Slackware being done to use a portage-like system and also use .deb files. This is done with use of checkinstall. As I also understand. the Slackware project is being turned over to the maintainers of Debian because there's just not enough interest, otherwise, to keep the distribution afload. There's a lot of history with Slackware, so nobody wants to see it die. Unfortunately, the pending merger with another distro is probably the only way to keep it afloat. It's kind of sad that this may be the last or second-to-late release of this distro. I don't see Debain maintaining it well. They're insanely out of date. But we can hope, right?

Re:Insider's View on Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

They're insanely out of date.

Slackware or Debian? I heard Debian now comes with Mozilla 1.0 installed so they are not out of date anymore.

Re:Insider's View on Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Which Debian are you talking about? Sid is as up to date as any others......Woody is rock solid, that's the advantage. And upgrading can be done with one simple command.....

Re:Insider's View on Slackware

[DarkOx]

You really need to stop trolling

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[japetto_bootsnakes]

That "guy" is a girl. Eugenia, not Eugene. Just wanted to clarify. Credit to where credit is due!!!

AMD64?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which will be the first mainstream and complete distribution that'll have a non-beta AMD64 version? I'm asking because I can't find any of them right now and I don't what the state of the AMD64 versions are for Mandrake, RH, Debian, Suse, etc...

Sebastien Loisel

Re:AMD64?

[joestar]

Did you have a look at Mandrake's website?

September 24th, 2003 - Mandrake 9.2 Beta1 for AMD64 - The first beta of Mandrake 9.2 for AMD64 (Athlon64 and Opteron) is now available. Release informations and places to download are available here.

Re:AMD64?

[NLG]

Mandrake has beta 1 of the 9.2 version for AMD64 available. Check their site for links.

Re:AMD64?

[A Commentor]

Does the term "NON-Beta" mean anything to you? The original poster asked for a non-Beta release and both initial responses point to beta versions...

Re:AMD64?

[pacc]

OS-news has a disappointing article about AMD64. In for example Gentoo most packages won't be marked as supporting 64 bits until proven otherwise, and until tested things will remain beta.

I think that your hope here is beta distributions that lets you test everything and iron out bugs rather than hoping for a tested distro containing nothing. Then at least there's hope that things are tried and tested, this is what betas are for.

Nforce3 and IDE drivers is a different matter since you cannot gain anything on a 64-bit platform if everything else is in 'just working' condition. If these are fixed then everything else can come out of beta in due time.

DAMN YOU MANDRAKE!!!!

[Lord Kano]

For always releasing such sweet, sweet distros!

Like many of the other geeks here, my tastes are very peculiar. It takes me months to get my system customized just the way I want it. As soon as I do, Mandrake comes out with a new version of their distro with all kinds of creamy goodness that I just can't pass up.

LK

Re:DAMN YOU MANDRAKE!!!!

[kfg]

Sucks to be addicted to small, shiney objects, don't it? :)

KFG

Re:DAMN YOU MANDRAKE!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucks to be addicted to small, shiney objects, don't it? :)

What was that? I was distracted...

Re:DAMN YOU MANDRAKE!!!!

[Drakonian]

Did anyone else read that as "Like many of the other geeks here, my testes are very peculiar."

Re:DAMN YOU MANDRAKE!!!!

[Wycliffe]

There is a simple solution to that. This is how I
went from 9.0 to 9.1 with only 2 commands.

urpmi.addmedia mandrake9.1 http://...............

urpmi --auto-select

And a couple hours later, i was upgraded.

Re:DAMN YOU MANDRAKE!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else read that as "Like many of the other geeks here, my testes are very peculiar."

No, just you. Like I always say, a man talks about what he thinks about... Freud could have done a paper about you.

Re:DAMN YOU MANDRAKE!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a question - does the person who moderated this have any idea what "redundant" means?

If you are going to give a stupid moderation, might as well go with the everpopular "Overrated", then you are safe in M2!

Swaret Kicks!

[big_groo]

I have this installed now...it *really* is simple.

swaret --update
swaret --upgrade

Lots of options, you can even specify default 'yes' for all upgrades. Resolves dependencies too.

Re:Swaret Kicks!

[Jellybob]

Wow. That doesn't sound at all like apt-get.

Why don't they just manage Slackware packages with apt?

Re:Swaret Kicks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should they use apt?

It's not like it's impossible to reimplement apt's features and functions, and probably pretty likely that the swaret creator simply started it out as a hobby, like most open source projects that go big.

Re:Swaret Kicks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they just manage Slackware packages with apt?

Cause if they did their system would be automatically out_of_date.

Re:Swaret Kicks!

[Cro Magnon]

I agree! My main complaint about Slackware was that major upgrades were a PITA. With swaret, I upgraded from 9.0 to 9.1-rc2 so easily I almost thought I was using Debian.

Slackware vs. FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD wins hands down. No evidence needed in the argument. Your thoughts?

Linux Mandrake 9.1 HOWTO and Documentation Guide

[mandrakewilson]

Just posting this link again to try to get through to new users. Time for M$ whores to take the plunge!

A MANDRAKE HOWTO
The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to LINUX Mandrake 9.1
http://mandrakeuser.cjb.net

New web site up on how to set up mandrake 9.1 to ease the configuration pains of the new linux user. Written and catered for the moderate computer user. It covers how to get and install mandrake and add in most of the needed applications. Covers most of the major software included in the distribution, other freely available applications, newbie command line tutorial, how to handle some common and annoying bugs peculiar to each application.

PART I
1. Introduction
2. Indispensable Tools for the Linux User
3. Useful links

PART II - Mandrake Installation
1. Getting Mandrake 9.1
2. Installing Mandrake 9.1
3. Going through the install sequence
4. Using Mandrake
5. Nice things to add easily
6. Configuration with Mandrake Control Center
7. Configuration with Gnome Control Center
8. Important Configuration of Menus and MIME Types
9. More Advanced Configuration

PART III - Linux Shell and Apps
1. Navigating around terminal
2. Shells -- bash, csh, rsh, sh
3. Environments and Paths
4. File Permissions
5. Editing files
6. Linking
7. Finding Files
8. Using grep
9. Basic bash scripts knowledge
10. Running Remote X applications
11. Mounting Remote File Systems
12. Language setup for man pages
13. Handling Print Jobs

PART IV - Software Packages
1. What are packages?
2. Specifying Sources For Online Downloading - Mandrake Mirrors, Texstar, PLF
3. Packages to be installed from Mandrake CDs - Mesa, mplayer, Timidity, pan, gaim, mozplugger
4. Packages to install from Texstar - Macromedia Flash, nano, Real Player
5. Mplayer and Codecs
6. Other essential packages- Open Office, Sun Java, Adobe Acrobat 5, BitTorrent
7. Setting up SMB share for Windows
8. Using vncserver for remote desktop applications
9. File Sharing - p2p networks - Limewire, edonkey, lmule
10. Running M$ Office under Linux.
11. Games - SNES, MAME, WineX

PART V - Advanced FAQ
1. How do I get DRI 3D acceleration to work?
2. Mandrake Fonts Deuglification and Anti-aliasing
3. Email Clients and Web Browsers (Handling mailto: and http:)
4. Full Mozilla Plugins Configuration (Quicktime, Java, Flash, Mplayer)
5. Konquerer Plugins Configuration
6. X Windows xmatrix screensaver
7. How to adjust the sound volume permanently

This HOWTO is my first contribution to the linux user community, and since I have found documentation sorely lacking for the total newbie, I have decided to write one myself. It is based on my experience in the past month trying to install everything from scratch. This HOWTO will be short, brief and to the point. Further information can be found in documentations on other websites, this one is just for the impatient, and users who want to reduce their startup time. Why Mandrake? Firstly, it is easy-to-install, and the first distribution that I've tried that has come very close to the ease-of-use of windows. If you can install and customize windows, you will not have much trouble with the Linux installation. Who is this HOWTO written for? This document is meant for the average user who is at least accustomed to tweaking and customizing their own OS. It will definitely not be a tutorial on how to point and click or use GUI interfaces.
This HOWTO is my first contribution community, and since I found newbie documentation wanting, I wrote one myself. It is for

The message at Mandrake Linux...

[joestar]

It's a very interesting approach: Mandrake Club & contributors (developers, translators...) are thanked, while business (retail sales) is boosted!

Here is the full message posted on their website:
____

Mandrake 9.2 ISOs available for Club and contributors in advance!

Next ISOs of Mandrake 9.2 Download Edition will be available for Club Members and all people who have contributed to the new version (including developers and translators), prior to retail packs and public download release.

This new policy was strongly suggested by Club Members for a long time. It is now possible to offer this opportunity with the new BitTorrent technology.

Mandrake 9.2 ISO images will be released in advance to Mandrake Club users, hopefully before October 15th, when all last tests will have been achieved.

Thanks to all people who made possible this new promising release of Mandrake Linux.

MandrakeSoft Team.
____

RE: The message at Mandrake Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a life... Mandrake is not that good. I know from experience.

You would be better off with using SuSE, Slackware or Debian.

Re:The message at Mandrake Linux...

[Seclusion]

I give it 6 hours before other mirrors will be wildly distributing these iso's to nonmembers legally.

Re:The message at Mandrake Linux...

[mormop]

Mandrake Club & contributors (developers, translators...) are thanked, while business (retail sales) is boosted!

Funnily enough, Mandrake Expert contributors are left out. I remember when I signed up you were supposed to get some stuff + VIP club membership if you came in the top 5 experts in any month. This took between 2 and 4 hours a night for me to come in at 4th place but so far nothing.

Given Mandrake's financial state I couldn't be arsed to hassle them for the goods but the club membership would have been nice if they are going to start restricting non-members activities. KDE 3.2 is only available to members which makes it tricky to support if you don't have it.

Before you say pay up and join the club, I'm ex-self employed i.e. no work / no welfare. How else do you think I can spend so much time posting on /.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

That "credit" being simply her existance as a female?

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

Defnitely gotta get credit for being a girl. I guess.

Slackware kicking ass

[Phroggy]

A few months ago I tried setting up Linux From Scratch. I discovered that to make it not completely suck, I had to patch various things. It occurred to me that Slackware has already done exactly these things (plus more I wouldn't think of) for me.

The other day I upgraded BIND to the new version which I downloaded from ISC, so I could work around Verisign's DNS hijacking. I ran into a snag: it wanted to save a PID file in /var/run, but I want to run named as a non-root user, meaning /var/run wouldn't be writable. The only configure option is --localstatedir which defaults to /var, meaning it would create a subdir called "run" under wherever I chose to put it, which is pretty stupid IMHO. Slackware uses /var/run/named/named.pid so you can change the ownership of /var/run/named to match the user you run named as.

So I popped in the source CD to see how they do it, since I couldn't find a config option for that. Guess what? There's a diff file, and a shell script that patches the source (along with other build options). The changes are toward the end of ./bin/named/include/named/globals.h.

Yes, that's right, when I got the source off the CD, I got the original unmodified source tarball, a diff file, and a shell script with build options - not some mysteriously customized source tarball that the distro thinks is somehow better than the original, but the original tarball plus Slackware's modifications - meaning, I can easily make the same modifications to a new version of the source.

Is Slackware perfect? Well, no, maybe not - but that's OK, because if something's not to my liking, Slackware doesn't get in my way if I want to do it myself. I can just build a new version of BIND from source, uninstall the old one, install the new one, and not worry about other packages maybe depending on BIND somehow, or anything else weird.

So, let me join the other Slackware fans here with a hearty "THANKS, PATRICK!"

Re:Slackware kicking ass

[smeat]

Wow you mean exactly like every SRPM in existance?

smeat!

Re:Slackware kicking ass

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be doing something really strange, since you don't have to patch BIND 9 to do a chrooted environment that drops root. Yes, I'm talking about Slackware here - it's all I run.

The procedure is simple: untar, configure, make, do make install with DESTDIR, then pack up that directory with makepkg. Use installpkg or upgradepkg to install that package.

Now you create a chroot tree. It's supposed to be simple, so you don't need to put much in it. There's /dev/null, /dev/random, /etc/localtime (the contents, NOT the symlink), your /etc files (zones, etc), and then /var/run.

Inside the chroot tree, /var/run and anything else which needs to be writable is owned by the bind user and group, which are both "named" on my systems.

Once you have all this set up, you start it like this: /usr/local/sbin/named -u named -t /chroot/path

It'll start up, chroot, then drop to the new user. This is all stock source with no funny stuff.

As for how you control it -- that's simple. Run rndc-confgen. Create rndc.conf and put it both in your real /etc and the chrooted /etc. Then make sure the "controls" part from it gets into your main named.conf. Open port 953/tcp to localhost and you're in business.

Re:Slackware kicking ass

[Anonymous Coward]

options
{
pid-file "/path/to/pid/file.pid";
};

Much easier.

Re:Slackware kicking ass

[Phroggy]

You must be doing something really strange, since you don't have to patch BIND 9 to do a chrooted environment that drops root.

If by "really strange" you mean not running in a chrooted environment, then yeah.

Re:Slackware kicking ass

[Phroggy]

Thanks, didn't know about that option. (Should have.)

What is SlackWare?

[1113Coder]

Slackware is a commonly misunderstood linux distribution. Many feel it's communist. It's not at all. Is Linux and the open source community more "left leaning" yes but SlackWare people definetely are not. Below is a brief fact based historical overview of the leftist movement and how it relates to open source software : Torvold Linus Torvold, a soft headed finish lad first decided to write linux after reading about soviet farmers not being able to afford Windows operating system software. Some call him a traitor including Anne Coulter, personally I call him an enemy non-combatant. The Revolution After corrupting many many perfectly patriotic programmers into believing that software should be free and we should all share, Linus started really pouring on the heat. HE formed the aptly named Red Hat Software company to "spread the message". The truth is redhat has been investigated many times by the CIA and Microsoft for subversive activity. Nothing was ever proved but that was before 9/11. Now no real evidence is needed we only need to suspect subversion in order to act. The Rise of the SubCulture The subculture surronding this communist open source community reached a boiling point when crackpots from San Fransisco started making millions selling pea brain ideas to Wall Street. This was known as the dotcom boom (or bust?). Swanky communist headquarters started sprouting in every major city and propeller hat wearing storm troopers started taking over. Luckily market forces prevailed as they always do and now most of these treachorous baffoons are now unemployed. The future of the greatest nation has been restored.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

Is she hot? More importantly, does she take it up the backdoor?

Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, in Slackware2.png read the email subjects. They're pretty funny.

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

direc t link

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, this is amazing!

What Operating System are you using? Is it the beautiful Microsoft Windows XPee?

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's Linux Slackware with Gnome.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

She's as ugly as a horse, but since she's Greek, she probably does take it up the back door.

Gorbachev

[Anonymous Coward]

Mister Gorbachev tear down this wall!

Where's the news?

[Anonymous Coward]

A release candidate and a soon-to-be-release. WTF?

Slack rules

[Rock Ridge]

I use 9.0. It is good. If you look at the Slack Book's HTML, you'll see that it was created with MS Word; is that telling?

I hope they soon get the 2.6 kernel going.

9.0 kernel builds and works with Gcc 3.X, which is more than some distros can claim.

I want Slack to have a "make world," like the BSDs, then I'd be set; although I must say that Slack generally uses stock sources, as opposed to patched-to-hell, like some others.

Thanks, Patrick

Re:Slack rules

[Alan Hicks]

If you look at the Slack Book's HTML, you'll see that it was created with MS Word

That depends on which book you're looking at. I assure you mine is written with vi (and I think some guys on our team use emacs). Take a look for yourself at what will one-day be the Second Edition of Slackware Linux Essentials.

None

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop wasting time testing out new versions.
Do some coding.

Slackware still being updated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware is still being updated? Have they moved to glibc yet? :p What's next, an update to TAMU or even Yggdrassil (or however the FUCK that lame distro was named)? Stop beating on a dead horse, peoples!

SlackwareUsers--;

[chrysrobyn]

In college, I was the ideal Slackware user. I wanted to learn programming, loved to compile my own stuff and felt that Redhat was only useful in removing the user from my goal of learning *nix. I extolled its virtues at every opportunity. I didn't have to hunt down an RPM just to install a new kernel, and I certainly knew how to compile my own kernel. I didn't know of any other serious distributions in 1996.

When I entered the real world and had a job and non-computer hobbies, I still had the need (perceived need as opposed to life or death need) for a *nix machine for my home mail, DNS and web serving. I no longer had the time, however, for fixing dependencies, applying source code patches and hunting down the minor details that I had arduously learned how to hunt down in the previous years. Debian came to my rescue. Dselect may be rough around the intuitive UI edges, and it's not quick on my 486, but it's consistent and only requires occasional answers to keep my machine well patched. It's been years since I've had to compile my own kernel, let alone wanted to.

I fondly remember Slackware as I remember my first girlfriend. It was a good idea at the time, but that time has since past and I have moved on. I am much happier now, but the lessons and memories will stay with me for a long time.

Re:SlackwareUsers--;

[Chuck Bucket]

It's been years since I've had to compile my own kernel, let alone wanted to.

Hmmm...what's your IP?

CB

Re:SlackwareUsers--;

[kfg]

Oddly enough time does not follow you particularly.

Some people have yet to learn those lessons and for them Slack remains just as relevant today as it was for you "back in the day."

There's always a new generation looking for their first "girlfriend," and even the occassional older man who has no objections to a fresh face that has yet to learn to adulterate itself with makeup and "chrome" and an air of false, unearned sophistication and commercial cynicism.

Although Slack may be "high maintainence" as "she" matures into a woman, she is high maintainence in the sense that someone working on her doctorate in archeology is high maintainence -- and not in the sense of someone who's bitching about your not working hard enough to buy her a more status laden house full of shoes is.

Have I beaten your metaphor into the ground yet?

KFG

Re:SlackwareUsers--;

[rampant mac]

"In college, I was the ideal Slackware user. ... I fondly remember Slackware as I remember my first girlfriend. "

That's so ironic, because when I was in college during the same timeframe and I felt the same way about Slackware!

I loved to recompile binaries and ...

Who the fuck am I kidding? I drank my ass off and chased after every skirt I could. Which is the reason you're a UN*X admin and I'm stuck "slaving" every day working a civil service job for the government. I wish I would've studied harder while I was in college.. Oh wait, damn... Nevermind. Back to my FreeCell game.

Re:SlackwareUsers--;

[pavon]

I have to say amen to that. My experiances are nearly identical. I love slackware for all it taught me and the simlpicity in design that made it easy to learn how linux worked.

Where our paths depart is that when I grew tired of doing everything myself I was decieved into the way of redhat. I dare say that the RPM dependancies I found were far worse than the dependencies that I had to deal with in slackware. In slackware, all the dependencies were real - if you can't compile a package it is because you really do need that other package. Compared to RPM, where a large number of the dependencies are artificial - you need the latest, greatest version of this library, not because the new features are used, but because it was what the packager compiled against, or you need to download these three other libraries because the packager decided to package them seperately, even though they are used only for a couple programs. It is frustrating that so many of the dependancy issues in rpm are really social problems, not technical ones. I also disliked how the system configuration was complicated with layers of tools each with their own config files.

I tried debian after a year of redhat. Unfortuneately, this was not a good experiance. It took me weeks to install. The CD's I bought would not install at all, nor the ones I downloaded. Eventually got ahold of really old CD's from a friend, installed them, then spent a couple days apt-getting up to the newest version. From then on everytime I tried to update a package apt-get would update my entire system. I'm sure it was something simple but I didn't have time to figure it out. Then a couple weeks latter my deskstar harddrive died on me :)

Needless to say I was not in the mood to go through that ordeal again, and bounced from RedHat to SuSE back to slackware to Madrake, untill I finnaly rediscovered debian years later. I have never looked back.

Re:SlackwareUsers--;

[ameoba]

For me, Slackware and my first love are very much intertwined memories. I lost the girl to time & distance, but thanks to Pat, I've still got a good OS.

Re:SlackwareUsers--;

[Drakonian]

Ahaha. This is on my all time list of great posts.

Re:SlackwareUsers--;

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with you ... 0%!

Re:SlackwareUsers--;

[fucksl4shd0t]

Have I beaten your metaphor into the ground yet?

Near as I can tell, there's only one thing missing from the metaphor so far, so I'll gladly provide it.

All women sooner or later get hitched and wind up spending the rest of their lives with someone, and Slack is certainly no exception. Just like your first girlfriend is now screwing her brains out with some other dude, Slack will be, always. And like your first girlfriend, as a Slack installation gets older and more and more patched and updated and so forth, she will get bigger around the rear, stretch marks appearing in the most unlikely places. When you finally sit down and look over your life with your loving wife in your arms, you'll finally realize that the girl you loved so many years ago turned out to be just as bloated as all the rest of the girls you disdained along the way.

Welcome to Slack in retirement, where it turns out that it ain't nothin' special. Just another fucking woman.

... dependency checking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Swaret's dependency checking isn't a core functionality of swaret, it's actually a dependency list maintained by the swaret team.

Re:... dependency checking ...

[LinuxSneaker]

Ok, since you brought it up:

The dependency checking does not work by including additional information in the tgz package's metadata. Instead, swaret checks each executable program installed with ldd (which is part of the * package). If the executable depends on a library not on the system, swaret downloads a small text file that lists each package in Slackware that contains a library, and also gives what the library name is. The example below is a small snipper from the libraries-current, which is from http://mhlug.linuxorbit.com/swaret/libraries-curre nt (or http://gma.sourceforge.net/swaret/libraries-curren t). In the same directory are files from the 9.0 and 8.1 releases. These files are checked nightly against Slackware's ftp site.

qt-3.1.2-i486-4.tgz: usr/lib/qt-3.1.2/lib/libqui.so.1.0.0
qt-3.1.2-i486-4.tgz: usr/lib/qt-3.1.2/lib/libqt-mt.so.3.1.2
procps-3.1.8-i386-1.tgz: lib/libproc.so.3.1.8
procps-2.0.13-i486-1.tgz: lib/libproc.so.2.0.13
popt-1.7-i386-1.tgz: usr/lib/libpopt.so.0.0.0

This methode does not guarantee that there will be no errors. An example where it will not detect a dependency is when a package depends on another because of a command, not a linked library.

Re:Linux Mandrake 9.1 HOWTO and Documentation Guid

[phoxix]

All I can say is "Bless you!"

And I'm not even religious

Sunny Dubey

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

that's the greek males you're thinking of.

Love this guy's writing...

[big_groo]

...I believe that the via82xx Alsa driver does not support advanced mixer capabilities and this is something that needs fixing in my opinion as these onboard VIA sound cards are very wildly used.

Call me dull, but I usually just plug some speakers into them. Anyone else?

Re:Love this guy's writing...

[big_groo]

*smack* Girl. Now it makes more sense.

Not REALLY dependancy checking

[contrasutra]

Hey, I love Slackware, but this is not a "fix" to dependancy checking.

This uses Swaret to actually declare and manage the dependancies.

TGZ and PKGTOOL still have no idea what a dependancy is. This is a problem of course, because you rely on Swaret being right.

Not to mention, that it only works on the official Slack servers, which basically have what's on the ISO, and maybe 5-10 /extra packages.

I think Slack should go with PACMAN/ABS from archlinux.org. GREAT package manager and "PORTS" system.

Re:Not REALLY dependancy checking

[CAIMLAS]

A "fix" to the problem might be to not use slackware in the first place? What's wrong with gentoo?

If manually fixing deps isn't your thing, and dealing with broken packages isn't either, then slack probably isn't the right distro for you.

Because it's LINUX they're distributing

[melted]

And Linux is a kernel.

Re:Because it's LINUX they're distributing

[lactose99]

So the rest of the packages included don't amount to anything? This is precicely why a version number shouldn't be based on the included kernel-- the distro is much more than just a kernel.

Eugenia!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is up with the big huge retarded icons?!!! Are you fucking blind as a bat?! I can see those things from over here in Ohio! Why don't you learn to use a computer like any real geek and actually make everything incredibly small. I prefer the highest screen resolution possible and the smallest fonts. You can fit tons of stuff on the screen that way. With your Romper Room style desktop, you can fit like five windows on there at once. I like to do more like 20 at a time. Learn to use xterm with the unreadable font. If you do it for long enough it becomes readable.

Re:Eugenia!!!!!

[contrasutra]

She was showing off the brand new SVG icons in GNOME 2.4.

Mmmmm....scalable.

One nice thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The lack of an option to turn off the installation of '-dev' stuff is a nice thing?

If it bothers you so much, just hack a small option to apt or whatever to automagically grab the -dev packages while its installing stuff.

Re:One nice thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late, sucka. Debian sux0rs!

I'm buying Mandrake 9.2

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

I'm buying Mandrake 9.2 I use Redhat, Debian, and OpenBSD mainly but I tried Mandrake 9.1 on my laptop and replaced Redhat w/ it. urpmi surprised me (almost as good as apt) and the overall speed is noticeably better than Redhat. Combine this w/ the excellent packages from texstar and plf and I'm very happy.

Re:I'm buying Mandrake 9.2

[leviramsey]

Just curious, but why would you use Texstar's packages? AFAIK, there's not a single package that Texstar provides that's not available in Mandrake contribs (which are essentially maintained as part of the distribution) or in PLF (which is largely maintained by the same contributors to the distribution from outside Mandrakesoft). If you just use main, contribs, and PLF, you're virtually guaranteed to be able to get bugs and conflicts fixed; as Texstar does not in any way participate in the development of MandrakeLinux, he is always going to be a few steps behind and there are various cases of conflict between his packages.

Re:I'm buying Mandrake 9.2

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

I'm pretty sure there's a few specialized packages of Texstar's like Java for Mozilla that aren't in contribs. I am not for sure however.
In short, I just started using Mandrake. I was not aware of the issue you raised. Nothing of Texstar's has caused any problems on my box. I am primarily a Redhat/OpenBSD guy so I am still figuring out Mandrake.

Re:I'm buying Mandrake 9.2

[Rob Simpson]

I've bought up to 9.0 Powerpack, but I didn't buy 9.1 because I couldn't find it in any store - they only offer it on their site, shipped from the US - so I'd probably have to pay customs on top of their rather high price. They were almost at the beta for 9.2 by the time they actually stopped listing 9.1 as "pre-order" anyway.

Re:I'm buying Mandrake 9.2

[ageitgey]

Texstar's packages are often patched with cool/new features that aren't in the standard distribution.

For example, install his KDE packages and you will have options for drop shadows on your desktop text, drop shadows on windows, etc.

However these features are not always production quality so keep that in mind.

Was that during a new release?

[Idou]

Or were you just downloading at your own convenience?

It makes a BIG difference (I average 200K/s !)

slackware2.png

[lostchicken]

I like how every single message in the email client is spam. Mostly pr0n spam, for that matter.

Re:slackware2.png

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, that email account is mostly used to gather spam. What better than having a Linux as your spam client? :]

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

And?
Ok it's a girl.

Wow look at everybody go crazy over pointing that out

She excites you guys that much eh?

Mandrake

[westyvw]

I hope they have sorted out their problems. My Mandrake installation 9.1 is all Fuxored up. I installed ok, and used it for a little while, and I liked it much. I added software and had some fun. Mandrake really lets you try some net stuff out. But then it messed up Mozilla, and now mozilla wont save any preferences. Its like starting it new over and over. Additionally, I found Mandrake very slow compared to my latop using Suse 8.2 and my workstatins using Redhat 7.3 and 8 and 9. I have been thinking about scrapping the whole thing for Gentoo.
If anyone can fix my problems with Mozilla and Mandrake I would love to hear about it.

Re:Mandrake

[Baron of Greymatter]

I have Mandrake 9.1 and Slackware 9.0 dual-booted on one machine (cheap no-name 1.1 GHz with 224 Mb RAM). I was able to get Mandrake to work, but it was problematic enough to not recommend it. I hope 9.2 is better.

Slackware installed and ran without a problem, while Mandrake had several problems, notably configuring X (no screen definitions) and not seeing my wheel-mouse. I had to copy my XF86config file from my Slack partition to get Mandrake to work. Not good.

In addition, Slackware is about 20% faster than Mandrake on the same machine, although memory usage was about the same. This was when running either KDE, GNOME, or WindowMaker. In fact, this machine running Mandrake is about as fast as my old 433 MHz Emachine w/192 Mb RAM running Red Hat 9.

Like I said, I hope Mandrake 9.2 is an improvement over 9.1. Otherwise it just isn't worth trying.

Re:Mandrake

[pair-a-noyd]

no offense, but if you've got Mandrake 9.1 all "Fuxored up" I don't think you have much luck with Gentoo. Mandrake is pretty much an entry level distro. Gentoo is NOT entry level.
BTW, I use both. I like Mandrake because it works very, very well with my boxes, I have 9.1 installed on 4 machines here at home, my sons' machine at college, my dad's machine, three friends, and two customers. Everyone likes it.
I have Gentoo on a TOTAL DOG of a 200mhz Pentium1, just because I wanted to indulge in a little masochism. You have to be a twisted nut to do a stage 1 Gentoo build said machine..
(one week just compiling the kernel....)

Good luck..

Re:Mandrake

[buchanmilne]

I have Mandrake 9.1 and Slackware 9.0 dual-booted on one machine (cheap no-name 1.1 GHz with 224 Mb RAM).

For display problems, it would help if you mentioned what display card it was using ...

Mandrake had several problems, notably configuring X (no screen definitions) and not seeing my wheel-mouse. I had to copy my XF86config file from my Slack partition to get Mandrake to work.

Alternatively you could have done:
# mv /etc/X11/XF86Config* /tmp
# XFdrake --expert --noauto
(do your configuration but don't test)
# service dm restart

There were some cards which caused a crash during the X test on 9.1, resulting in a corrupt config file. Removing it, running the configuration again, not testing (to avoid another possible crash), and restarting the display manager fixes this.

AFAIK, this bug is fixed, but since I don't have the hardware to reproduce the bug, I couldn't check ...


In addition, Slackware is about 20% faster than Mandrake on the same machine, although memory usage was about the same.


You must have some other problems.


In fact, this machine running Mandrake is about as fast as my old 433 MHz Emachine w/192 Mb RAM running Red Hat 9.


You definitely have problems. I would guess your hostname resolution is stuffed, but 'time getent hosts `hostname`' will show that. If it's more than a second, it's your problem.

Anyway, while there were small niggles on some hardware, overall 9.1 was really good.

Re:Mandrake

[westyvw]

I appreciate where you are comming from. Except I already have done a stage one build of Gentoo for a machine at work (in fact it was on a P2 233 with the slowest hard drives in existance!). I could do it again, its just a matter of my time. When at home I just dont wanna spend the time (both mine and the computers).

Frankly Gentoo is easier to figure out and use once its up and running (in general), but that still doesnt explain why Mandrake is so fussy and SLOW. My laptop 1 gig 4500 rpm hd 100 Mhz FSB is FASTER with suse 8.2 BY FAR than my 2 gig, 266 fsb, 7200 rpm hd with Mandrake. Also Mandrakes quirks and forgetfullness are pretty much unexcusable. (Did I mention that the family computer looks at email and the web and thats about it????)

I wonder if Mandrake

[rsilvergun]

fixed the installer in 9.2. I had no end of trouble with mandrake 9.x's installers. Selected packages would often not be installed, hardware would be missdetected, the installer would crash. It's a real bummer after 8.2's great installer. Once it's installed, Mandrake's the best behaved linux I'ved used so far (provided you can find good urpmi mirrors).

On a side note, I don't see much worth having in 9.2 over 9.1 otherwise. I've got nearly all the updated packages courtsy of Texstar and the PLF. Does anyone know why Mandrake didn't just wait for Kernel 2.6.0?

Re:I wonder if Mandrake

[arose]

Does anyone know why Mandrake didn't just wait for Kernel 2.6.0?

I would guess, so they can concentrate on a solid 10.0 release with a new kernel.

Re:I wonder if Mandrake

[Mayfoev]

The only thing I am waiting from Mandrake is that they include my awaiting XFree86 patch (yet approved by XFree86 and committed in their CVS) before their freeze...

Now I am considering that maybe they are reluctant to do so in order to avoid offering me an "advance" account. More seriously, it seems that during the finalization period, there is a little less concern about the content of some types of Bugzilla reports.

I can understand that from their point of view there are things more important than a defective graphic driver on some rare configurations. But at the same time, it can't prevent me from thinking that the distribution could be with this kind of enhancements a little, little better.

Re:I wonder if Mandrake

[pair-a-noyd]

Do you REALLY want to run a "point Oh"??
Not me man.. I did a few point Oh's in Linux and I remember the same problems in the DOS days.

"10.0" does not strike my fancy, I will not be using it when it does come out. I ALWAYS wait for the next up, like .1 or .2

Don't get too excited yet. I'm also not to excited to jump on the 2.6.0 kernel
Let everyone else debug it first.

I personally don't have the TIME to play guinea pig for everyone else.

Re:I wonder if Mandrake

[kilgortrout]

Does anyone know why Mandrake didn't just wait for Kernel 2.6.0?

One word answer=MONEY. The only way they can make any money is by releasing a new product which they do twice a year. Delaying a new release would severely impact their bottom line, particularly when no one knows for sure when 2.6 will be ready.

The MS whores may not ...

[Anonymous Coward]

appreciate Linux sluts. After all we give it away for free. :)

Not my Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linux I use is a complete OS, kernel, drivers, tools, GUI, the works. When I turn on my computer, it loads Linux. If someone asks me what it is, I'll tell them "It's Linux." Why? Because most people don't care about the specifics. It's something different, and they want a name to put on it. It seems "Linux" is the name people recognize from the media etc., and they go: "Oh, yeah. I've heard about that."

If you don't like that... heh, you're probably a GNU/Linux user. :)

Linux is a kernel?
GNU is someones ego.
Which one do you support?

Re:Not my Linux...

[More Karma Than God]

>If you don't like that... heh, you're probably a GNU/Linux user.

I think you mean SCO/GNU/Linux.

I can only assume...

[wmaker]

I can only assume that they have payed SCO for every copy downloaded.

Make this:

[Anonymous Coward]

"I want Slack to have a "make world," like the BSDs, then I'd be set..."

Umm, the BSDs have that now.

So what are you waiting for?

Installing packages - problems in Mandrake

[Baron of Greymatter]

I forgot to mention this in my last post about Mandrake-vs-Slackware. It didn't install about 50 of the packages I had selected, including about half of GNOME, Midnight Commander, and a few console apps.

hmm

[ShadowRage]

only thing making slcakware 9.1 orgasmic is swaret and pretty screenshots of gnome, not saying slackware is bad, slackware is awesome, but I dont see why people are creaming their pants over the new build, you can install swaret on your existing slack system, and swaret is optional in slack 9.1 :P

devs*.tgz and devfs

[b_w_duncan]

Presumably, it's not safe to upgrade the devs package and assume all the changes went to disk when devfs is mounted. Any changes written to the devfs /dev will be lost at next reboot. This is a kind of dependency that isn't checked for. Should it be? Of course, since i'm running devfs, my on-disc /dev doesn't matter, does it? What if i want to boot an older kernel or decide devfs isn't for me? (Slackware does support devfs, i think. It at least includes devfsd) PS I modified my on-disc /dev today by: # mkdir /devdisc # mount --bind / /devdisc # rm /devdisc/dev/.devfsd # -- what i wanted to do # umount /devdisc

In other news ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gheyware X 10.2.5 has been released.

Featuring:

o new shiny colors
o direct linkies to hormone selling pharmacies
o Gaym, the Instant Massager
o natural support for AssPlug input devices
o a sperm bank client ... for those thirsty moments
o support for triple G5 mobos

menus, not text based

[breman]

Hello fellow Slackware users and newcomers, just a few comments to help clarify a few things.

Slackware 9.1 comes in two CDs and it's Installation is text-based.

I would personally describe this as a menu based installation. ie: use arrow keys to select packages/options.

The only snag might be that the user will need to use the command line and not extremely user-friendly fdisk application to create partitions for Slackware.

cfdisk is also available which is menu based.

Re:menus, not text based

[Pharmboy]

cfdisk is also available which is menu based.

I was going to say...i had picked up a copy of slack 9 from cheapiso.com and just go around the installing it the other day. unfortunately, a bad ata controller prevented the full install, (replaced today) but the install process was pretty damn easy. a bit different for those of us used to redhat, but it was pretty easy and almost intuitive. It took about half the time to get to the install that it takes redhat.

The interface is pretty. think good ansi bbs interface :D cant wait until tomorrow, gonna dual boot it with 98 on a 60gb drive, on an old amd 1700xp /512ram box i have. should be interesting.

M$ Whores???

[borgboy]

Hmmm. This whole OSS business is supposed to engender, among other things, choice.

Now, for various reasons, some geek, some pragmatic, some even business-like, I - a die-hard Windows user/programmer of over 10 years - am interested in Linux. Not to the exclusion of Windows, hoever.

It's not necessary to call us whores. Not all of us. At worst, there are the vast majority who think there is no choice, and they certainly need to be educated. But, having educated myself on the alternatives, I still choose to use Windows, and damned if I will apologize for it. If you want to convert the intelligent Windows geeks, (we're out there, lost in a sea of clue-bies) you might want to consider that we're worth a little respect.

By the way, I'm loading Mandrake on a virtual as I type this.

Re:M$ Whores???

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD parent up, exactly how a feel about most of the linux geeks.

Re:M$ Whores???

[Peaker]

Really?

Do you not find the Win32 API and all existing wrappers utter crap like most good programmers do?
If you do - how can you program on Windows, are you masochistic?

Do you not believe in the freedom to change and redistribute software?

Do you use weak editors and tools like Visual Studio, C#, etc or the vastly superior alternatives such as (a well-configured) emacs, Python, Pyrex, etc?

Do you, as a programmer, not appriciate the ability to debug, seek or at least report bugs in the software you use?

Do you not mind the utter lack of control you as a user have on the software you use?

Re:M$ Whores???

[ScrewMaster]

I may be a Windows whore, I may be a Windows programmer ... but at least I'm a programmer with a JOB.

Re:M$ Whores???

[borgboy]

Yes.

No. Maybe I'm not a good programmer, but I've got someone fooled then. I've seen some pretty decent wrappers of Win32, though MFC aint one of them.
By typing. No.

I do.

I currently use, among other things, Visual Studio .Net 2003, WSAD 5, Delphi 7, TextPad and XmlSpy. If they are weak in comparison to the tools you mention, I do not notice it.
I notice in other posts of yours that you seem not to prefer staticly typed dynamically bound languages, so I doubt we'll see eye to eye much on anything.

I do appreciate the ability to do those things and I enjoy them where possible, which is more than you probably give credit for.

Not having an utter lack of control of the software I use, I do not mind.

Now, to an extent, some or all of these points might be raised in an argument against Windows. But there is an undeniable sense of where I am most productive. I'm not asking you to follow my choice, I'm asking you to respect my right to make it.

Re:M$ Whores???

[mandrakewilson]

Hey, it was only meant in jest. No offence intended, don't take it seriously.

Well, you're in the majority of users and have just Linux users to complain about. You know, you should look it at from the Linux's user's point of view as well.

Everyone around you is a Windows geek. They all know where to get their Windows Warez, and the passwords, they all use illegal software, and yet shout about the RIAA.

You have to troubleshoot any problems alone. The others have each other to pass warez around when something doesn't work.

They are always trying to get you to use MSN and refuse to use other clients. They bring Windows CE/XP/whatever portable gadgets to make you drool, when they know full well you don't have any Linux PDAs to show off in return. They always send you Microsoft Office documents, even though they know you're running Linux. And I can actually open them!

If you even reboot your Linux machine, they will all notice and go "AH HA!".

They are always prodding you to make a linux cluster as a proof of concept.

Then there's those that ask you "What is the Unix command for yadayadayada?". When the Linux experience is more than just about the unix shell.

No one to share the "UMPH" when you see an article about how another city is converting to Linux. There's no joy-sharing there. It feels awful to be the only one that sees it that way.

People think you're crazy if you don't run Windows, that u're a fringe lunatic.

Re:M$ Whores???

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't take the comments too seriously. Skins are thin around here after so much MS pissing in the Linux soup. I'm sure there are nice, intelligent Windows users around here too. They're just never modded up. ;)

Re:M$ Whores???

[fucksl4shd0t]

People think you're crazy if you don't run Windows, that u're a fringe lunatic.

And then they do everything possible to make it happen. That shit sucks.

You know, I don't care much that the people around me have made their choices. I don't go over to their houses telling them their computers are shit, assembled by a bunch of college-kid-dope-smoking-non-programming-smelly-ra ts. But they come knocking on my door just to tell me that about my computer. I really don't understand it. Guess the Golden Rule only applies to those of us on the fringe, eh?

Re:M$ Whores???

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called "making a living" and my wife and son come before any of that idealistic drivel you list.

Yes, I called it drivel. In the world of paying your own bills and providing for your family, ideals are nice, but paychecks are better, and with the _VAST_ majority of the tech-business world using MS for much of their work, us MS whores are paying the bills.

Spout all you like about how we are sellouts, how we don't value freedom, how we don't care about security - it's all drivel and bs. I care about all of that and I want to teach all of that to my son - but first I have to make sure he gets fed, has diapers, clothes, healtcare, toys, etc.

Maybe I am a whore in that I provide a service for money, but I can sleep at night and I take pride in the work I do. I may not like the kludges and duct-tape solutions I have to provide to make an employer/client happy, but I do what needs to be done to care for my own.

If you can't understand that, well, go back to your dorm room/mom's basement, crank up your pirated mp3, watch a stolen dvd, play a cracked RPG on your ivory tower of ideals. (See how bad it makes you look to make dumbass assumptions about someone's beliefs and motivations?)

Me? I got bills to pay.
You? Sounds like you should work on your presentation. Instead of making a case for Free software, you seemed a bit rabid to me.

Re:M$ Whores???

[Peaker]

If you can't understand that, well, go back to your dorm room/mom's basement, crank up your pirated mp3, watch a stolen dvd, play a cracked RPG on your ivory tower of ideals. (See how bad it makes you look to make dumbass assumptions about someone's beliefs and motivations?)

You? Sounds like you should work on your presentation. Instead of making a case for Free software, you seemed a bit rabid to me.

In fact, I never had and probably never will have a tough time getting a job as a programmer, writing for closed or open platforms.

I have not yet seen a list of wanted programmer positions that did not include *nix programming and jobs with better respect for freedom - or at least jobs that do not support the large entities that are buying the government to destroy those freedoms.

If you are not talented enough to get jobs in such a field, why don't you move to some other field where you don't have to be a pawn of the corrupt powers?

Re:M$ Whores???

[Peaker]

I currently use, among other things, Visual Studio .Net 2003, WSAD 5, Delphi 7, TextPad and XmlSpy. If they are weak in comparison to the tools you mention, I do not notice it.

I know previous versions of most of those tools, and yes they are far weaker and less efficient than the Free Software solutions that have been in development for decades - by far more talented programmers (including RMS).

The main example of this is Emacs. Being based on a dynamic language and still beating the static-language Microsoft development platforms to dust in flexibility, power, extensibility and most notably due to its nature - in performance.

You should really try to learn to use and configure Emacs. Replace your GUI development tools with the more portable and more powerful Qt. You will not only help spread freedom of change and restribution, but also discover how much more efficient these tools are.

I notice in other posts of yours that you seem not to prefer staticly typed dynamically bound languages, so I doubt we'll see eye to eye much on anything.

I used to prefer static typing. Most programmers who have grown accustomed to static typing prefer it for most tasks. That is, until they really spend a lot of time with a dynamic language.
Then they understand the sheer amount of effort they have wasted writing repetitive code trying to convince the compiler that their program is typesafe - when they could have spent that time writing automatic unit-tests or working on better designs.

Once you really try using dynamically typed languages for a while, you will, as all invariably do, convert to use dynamic typing almost exclusively.

Re:M$ Whores???

[sewagemaster]

Hmmm. This whole OSS business is supposed to engender, among other things, choice.

choice is an illusion, designed by those who have power, for those who do not.

.....ripping of matrix revolutions... it's like wiping my arse with silk. i love it :D

Re:M$ Whores???

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be one M$ whore, but you are one damn fucking karma whore.

Software Repositories Soon Supported by Swaret

[LinuxSneaker]

We will soon be adding the ability to have a line in the swaret.conf file such as this:
REPOS=GreatSite:http://www.website.com/slackstuff/
and then all the packages that are there can be managed just like the main Slackware packages. However, the site has to be set up like Slackware's site (FILELIST.TXT, CHECKSUMS.md5, etc). Made some scripts to make this easier, under the heading of swaret-tools.
Big disclaimer-we haven't added this yet. Been very busy.

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

is an absolute piece of crap. Get a real distro like Suse.

Re:Debian

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Pathetic troll.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

You go trollbuster.

Please make your empty life more meaningful by posting things like this to Slashdot.

I just want you to know that I hate you and your meaningless life. Really.

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

is an absolute piece of crap. Get a real distro like Suse. Years behind other distros. Dos is stable, but I am not going to use it because in todays world it lacks value. I tried Debian but went back to Suse and Red Hat. The only good thing about Debian is apt.

Okay...

[BHearsum]

So Slackware 9.1 RC2 is out, now where the fuck do I download it from?

Re:Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to download the slackware-current directory and then use the isogen.sh script to create the ISO and burn it.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

You might not mind being refered to as a she, especially when you are all "dressed up" for your partner. He probably likes calling you his bitch also. But most people don't like it when they are referred to in the wrong gender. It's not like her name is Chris or Mel or some other gender neutral name.

My method of patching my Slack box:

[bersl2]

$ su -
# cd patches
# ./download-updates
wget -c 'ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-9 .0/patches/packages/*.tgz'
wget -c 'ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-9 .0/patches/packages/kde/*.tgz'
# ls -ltr
# shutdown now (or) /etc/rc.d/rc.whatever stop (or) killall whatever
# upgradepkg whatever.tgz
# (edit whatever's config files)
# init 3 (or) so on...

And if it's not a Slackware package, it gets 'make uninstall'ed or otherwise deleted, and recompiled.

Obviously, this 'Swaret' tool would just fsck up my homegrown solution. And I can't be having that, can I.

Joy!

P.S.: Whenever I start posting actual procedures I use on my computer onto Slashdot, they're usually very bad as far as *nix protocol. Examples: sudo /sbin/lsmod

Go figure. Also go lightly.

Re:My method of patching my Slack box:

[Charm]

# shutdown now (or) /etc/rc.d/rc.whatever stop (or) killall whatever

Or maybe telinit 1

Re:My method of patching my Slack box:

[bersl2]

And I thought I was going to get yelled at if I had written "telinit 3" instead of "init 3"... CONSERVATION OF KEYSTROKES IS NOT, IN OF ITSELF, A PURPOSE TO EXIST! What happened to personal preference?

</psycho>

OK, all better...

Interesting, but I'm sticking with Gentoo

[vandan]

Slackware is very solid, there's no doubting it. It makes a good server system. I'd rather rely on it that RedHat because you don't have to learn all the changes they make to various packages - ie things behave as they should. It's simple and clean and just works. I used Slackware for 2 or so years before moving to Gentoo.

I've been using Gentoo ( unstable; ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 ) for about 18 months or so now. There are sometimes a few glitches, but that's what you get when you choose the unstable branch. I'm sure the stable branch is more ... stable.

The things that set Gentoo apart from Slackware ( they're otherwise quite similar ) are:

1) Portage. It's just beautiful. You can do incremental upgrades till the cows come home, and it even handles major changes like upgrading glibc from 2.2.5 to 2.3.2 without any hickups. Amazing!

2) User forums. They *feel* like a nice, friendly, communal place where you go to hang, chat, and talk about Linux and stuff. In comparison, alt.os.linux.slackware feels like an Afghani desert - after the US military have finished with it. And of course it wouldn't be complete without the regular gang of vultures sitting atop their nests, waiting for the next non-boys-club member to turn up and ( God forbid ) ask a question. Yeah , yeah, I know. Tough love and all. Don't ask stupid questions. RTFM. That's all beside the point, which is that the they're just plain rude and childish, and I'd rather not go there - even if it is someone else who's getting flamed. It makes me feel bad to be a member of the Linux community when I see how they carry on.

I have the deepest respect for Pat. To hold together a Linux distro by himself for so long is nothing short of incredible. Well done Pat. If I need to put together a no-fuss server or even someone else's desktop that I don't wanna maintain, I'll most likely choose Slackware.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[atomic-penguin]

Um, maybe he doesn't like BE...

Slack mirro

[bigjnsa500]

Being an official Slackware mirror and probably the only one that makes -current ISOs (last one made 09/17), seems like I need to make ISOs tomorrow for this RC 2 release.

Slack rocks!

Slackware Mirror

Go Pat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Once Slack,
Never Back. :-}

V.Very cool.

[Gwala]

I run Slackware 9, on 7 of my 8 computers (alas one's a doze box - but hey, compatibility is a bitch [the next idiot to mention VMware gets my boot, in your face.])

Dependency checking is going to help quite a bit when I update these machines, I have had several sessions where after setting up a distrobuted compile, and leaving it a while, the whole thing borks and I have to go hunting for extra files.

-Gwala

Re:V.Very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look into VMWare. Really.. I mean, it saves a lot of hassels, switching machines or dual-booting, KVMs cost money and are problematic if you don't dish out for the better models.

Anyway, check out VMWare, for sure. It's great.

I heartily agree!

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

Linux has many good points in it's favour. It is more secure. I can if I so choose audit code. It is great for a server demanding minimal and well managed downtime. It is free as in speech and free as in beer.

But it also has negative points, at least from my viewpoint. Drivers are not commonly available to provide the full functionality of many pieces of harware. The code for many applications is convoluted, and requires more time than I have to fix. Taking a stock system (Compaq, Dell, etc.) it is difficult many times to get set up to provide the full capabilities of the system. Games are difficult to find and play on Linux.

Windows, likewise, has it's share of ups and downs. But based on what I need and want, I have made a choice using logic rational measures of the effectiveness of both.

At work, I use Windows. It has the stability I need, is fully (and I mean 100%) compatible with our servers and internal network, and most importantly, it is mandated by the company. I program all day at work in C++, Java, Visual Basic, SQL, and whatever else I need to get the project done and accomplish the goals set by my bosses.

When I come home, I boot my PC to Linux, and use Linux for the things I have to have 'just work.' Balancing my checkbook. Checking my e-mail. Managing my home. For these simple tasks, having Linux is a great pleasure. I go in, run the apps I need, and don't suffer feature bloat or downtime. I can rebuild the whole Linux side of my machine in an hour in case of crash, thanks to the wonderful structure of the tree. I keep my data completely seperate from my apps, have a cron job to back it up to the family server daily. All the features Linux advocates are so proud of. But the things I do not want to do when I get home is have to write 500 lines of code to make a feature work, or spend 2 hours compiling a kernel. Some days, when I feel mashochistic, I pull out my spare machine and hack away. But when I need it to work, I need it to work then.

Then I switch to Windows, and play a couple of games, do my artwork. Yes there are games for Linux, but the selection I have for Windows dwarfs the choices for Linux. The graphics capabilities of Linux are still shadowed by the commercial programs I can get in Windows for my artwork.

I look forward to the day when I can ditch Windows completely. And although there are a great many people spending hour upon hour working on perfecting and improving Linux, it still has a few hurdles before I can. I need graphics packages that are on par with AutoCad, capable of complex solids modeling in mutliple 3-D layers, that will not crash when I try to model complex kinematic animations. I need games, simulation games, role playing games, things I can play on the network with my roommates. I need the ability to hook my television to my NVidia and get simultaneous output (without spending an hour editing XF86Config files) to watch our productions.

Linux advocates are very vocal about the virtues of Linux. And equally vocal about the flaws of Windows. Eventually, their hard work will bring Linux to the point I will really have the choice to run it full time. Of that I have no doubt, and I put my money where my mouth is. But I know, for my needs, it is not there yet.

And all I ask is that while extolling the virtues of Linux, please acknowledge it's limitations. Please realize that even some of the geekiest of us would rather go home and play a game instead of hacking a kernel driver.

To all those who have poured hours into Linux, I say one last thing. Thank you. Keep up the good work.

Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it still so damn ugly?

I'm looking at the screenshots; the backdrop is over-compressed and too low resolution, the KDE (or is it gnome) taskbar-wannabe still looks plain and bland, as if they've somehow tried to round the 3d appearance of the buttons (and it looks like ass), The fonts are badly hinted and waaay too thin, and just generally not visually appealing, the underlining of the letters in the menu looks like something from Windows 3.1...actually, it's mostly just the fonts (and whatever engine draws and renders the glyphs), and the ugly 3d elements.

The Media Player winamp thingy looks great, beautiful clean interface with nice fonts. The rest of the OS? Not so good. It reminds me of the harsh appearance intuition on the Amiga had.

The shades which make the GUI elements look 3d need to be waaay more subtle. And just stupid things like in the panel at the top of the screen, the icons are just rammed across the top of the screen, with not so much as a 2 pixel border to make them look nice (look at the XMMS icon). And those two buttons near the xchat icon stick out like zits on a teenager. The speaker icon looks like it was drawn by an 8 year old.

Compare to the simple elegance of this. Ignore the one pixel cut off on the left side of the toolbar buttons (beta software glitch...)

Maybe it's just what you're used to, but most people seem to agree the UI in linux is it's worse attribute, and that it's one of OS X's best. Please, PLEASE, steal some ideas, or concepts. Go read Apple's UI guide, or even Microsoft's if they have one.

--- THIS IS NOT A TROLL, THIS IS CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM --

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be blind. OSX and its trademarked unfixable blurry fonts, overrendered windows, eyecandy for the sake of eyecandy and ONE limited window manager. What's with using that to criticize linux? With a Linux desktop the user has choice. The choice to pick just which font rendering you want, if you want it at all. The choice to pick where your screen widgets go, the choice to pick which gui toolkit you like, and how you want it to work. The choice to use the input device you want without being forced to do it the Apple way

If the Apple way wasn't blurry fonts, useless eye candy and one (overpriced) button mice it may be a valid option, but in the real world where users want choice, restricted thinking like Apple's will ensure it stays at a 1.5 to 2% market share or less.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but I need to vent guys and here I hope I find sympathy! I HATE NETCRAFT! *BSD is dying

Yet another cripping bombshell hit my beleaguered TiBook as I spent the good part of five hours helping a friend at his freelance gig while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder on less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. 5 hours. The amazing thing is at home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this MAC, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. This serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Now, I got the job to fix this as I'm the "Computer Guy" and can generally help friends and family with there computer problems. I have never seen such a tragedy as the titanum powerbook! It is collapsing in complete disarray as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

In addition, The hand writing is on the wall; during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, straining to keep up as I type this, having lost 93% of its core developers.

OpenBSD leader Theo won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. MacOS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this TiBook at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine. A recent article put the TiBook at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 TiBook users.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems. MacOS is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

I don't, I really don't, see how Apple can claim to be tops in design. Even my A600 continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, My TiBook is dying.

Fact: TiBooks running BSD at a Freelance gig are dying.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[msevior]

Having been forced to recently use Windows *shudder* I can confidently say the AA for font on modern Linux distros is first class.

If you want beauty and elegance try AbiWord-2.0 or Gnumeric-1.2 (available on this slack pre-release)

You can make a Linux desktop look anyway you like. Both the GNOME and KDE desktops are fully themeable. If you can't design your own themes there are lots of themes available that can be installed with a single click. Got bored of your desktop? Try a new layout!

See:
http://art.gnome.org/

For GNOME themes. There is a similar site for KDE but I don't run KDE so I don't know where it is.

Anyway, learn a bit before you spout off on slashdot. We're happy to flame cluseless newbee's here.

Martin

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Xyde]

Themes = putting lipstick on a chicken.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never ONCE seen a linux theme work properly. They seem to work for one group of apps, with nice background colors, pleasing simple buttons and controls, font smoothing in a way I like it (although proper hinting still seems beyond it. That's OK for a few lines of text, but a screen full of text in any WP still looks kludgy) and things work fine.

One problem is GIMP. I set EVERYTHING to look fine in KDE that I possibly can, but it doesn't change a thing in GIMP's UI. xnmap is another sinner, that seems also to escape KDE's radar when it comes to gui customisation.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[msevior]

Clearly you're a clueless Mac bigot who can't code and doesn't understand why everyone doesn't lick Steve Job's arse.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Xyde]

What does being able to code have to do with interface design? Usually the people who are good at coding have no idea on how to design a decent interface and this is precisely the crux of the problem I outlined in my original post.

I'm not a clueless mac bigot, it's just that I have used a number of operating systems (BeOS, NeXTSTEP, Amiga, Windows, QNX, Mac OS 9) over the years and linux has by far the most nonstandard and confusing out of the lot; the way it looks bad reminds me of a java application using Swing.

I think linux is a great operating system - it's stable, fast, and free - the interface just stinks.

* I know the linux is just a kernel and the gui is other software all together, blah blah save it.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

lol this is why you're having problems clueless idiot, you're starting out trying to change a gtk+ app's settings using *KDE*

Oh spare me. Use a little thought before complaining about things you know nothing about

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clara , one of my fine feathered friends looks pretty hot in lipstick. Aztec Copper is her favourite, and I home made a durn pretty little frilly blouse for her and a wig with blond curls and oh my she's a sweetie. should see her ass as she runs^H^H^H^Hwalks away from me and I just... y'know I just can't control muhself sometimes

brb, chicken.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had a clue about how to code an interface you would see why nobody bothers or cares about some ideology of consistency that Steve Jobs has decreed. If you can't handle change when going from app to app then why you're using a computer in the first place?

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Xyde]

If linux is trying to proposition itself to be successful desktop OS, why the hell should the end user have to know what GUI toolbox any particular app was written in? That's absurd.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think linux is a great operating system - it's stable, fast, and free - the interface just stinks.

Go check out screenshots from decent distros like Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE. Unlike Slackware, the others actually give a shit what the end result looks like.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

why the hell should the end user have to know what GUI toolbox any particular app was written in? That's absurd.

No, that's just common sense. KDE theme app controls the look of KDE apps. Period. gtk+ apps like GIMP are controlled in a completely different manner. If someone felt the need was there to code a themer that worked across the varied types of GUI toolkits, it would have been done by now. Since there hasn't, i think you're just acting like a spoilt child who wants every button on every appliance in his house looking the same. Ick. Conformity.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[fucksl4shd0t]

If linux is trying to proposition itself to be successful desktop OS, why the hell should the end user have to know what GUI toolbox any particular app was written in? That's absurd.

What's your alternative solution to providing a wide range of choices to user's without requiring them to know what they are?

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... At least in my opinion the Mandrake default KDE theme (is it called "Galaxy") looks disgusting. The titlebar is far too large and the curved line thingie in the middle looks coarse. Also the control buttons are too small and look plain ugly.

Red Hat's Bluecurve is much better. The rounded window corners don't look too good (because the obvious lack of anti-aliasing) but otherwise it's quite nice. Unfortunately the new version included in recent Rawhide packages has smaller, no-so-good-looking buttons.

(I don't really know about SuSE, since I haven't tried it out in a while.)

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[msevior]

Coz you clearly no nothing about what is happenning in the world of Linux GUI's and based your statements on typical MAC arrogance.

There is a very well defined set of Human Interface Guidelines for GNOME. GNOME 2.4 which is used in slackware, is almost totally compliant with these.

The panel can be put anywhere you want (which has always been the case). The AA Fonts used in Slackware are just totally beautiful. Fully on par with anything on OSX.

GNOME 2.4 comes complete with a very easy to use built-in browser which is far more standards compliant than safari or IE and MUCH easier to use than Mozilla.

There is LOTS more stuff here than you have a clue about.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, some of us have lives and real work to do on our computers. In the real world, gumdrop widgets and drop shadows etc. DO NOT an effective working environment make.

OS X looks pretty, yep, but I'd rather have my bland, chunky Linux desktop rather than some sluggish, distracting eye-candy-laden half-proprietary thing from a single vendor.

If you're doing important work, widget effects etc. simply aren't all that important -- look how CDE was used on professional UNIX workstations for ages. People had real work to do, not spend time slavering and tweaking.

Just putting some perspective on this.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[FunkyMonkey]

"--THIS IS NOT A TROLL, THIS IS CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM--"

If you really want to be constructive, go get the source code and show us all how it's done.

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[naarok]

Maybe this is why some people are put of on linux. The guy makes some comments about the visual appeal of a screen and suffers verbal abuse and the typical "If you don't like it, fix it".

Criticsm can be a good thing. Now I'm not a huge fan of the Mac screenshot Xyde presented, but lets not be children about this. Personally, I think the Mac fonts of the screenshot did look better than the Gnome shots. Since I'm not a font magician and can't just fix it, does that mean I'm not entitled to say I like those fonts better.

Come on and grow up!

Re:Why is linux still so ugly...

[FunkyMonkey]

Aren't you getting a little defensive? So you think that the comment "Why is it still so damn ugly?" is constructive? For your enlightenment, that type of comment is called an insult.

Gee wiz, I've never heard anyone suggest reading Apple's UI guide. What an orriginal suggestion.

My comment was not even slightly abusive. In fact it appears to be quite constructive. The guy just wanted to bitch and I suggested that he stop bitching and do something about it.

Oh, and do you really believe that slashdot is the appropriate forum for constructive critisism regarding UI design? Perhaps the KDE or GNOME forums would be more appropriate. Just a constructive suggestion.

"Maybe this is why some people are put of on linux."

If anyone is "put off" by the idea of helping out, screw them. I don't give a shit if people don't like Linux or feel put off, they should just stick to their Mac or Windows or whatever. Linux is by users, for users - I'm sure an intelligent, sensitive person like yourself already knows that. And being one of those users myself, I also know that you don't need to be a magician to write code.

So, just for you I'm going to regress to childhood - you grow up and take a little responsibility instead of assuming everyone else should fix it for you. Mommy still wiping your ass too?

Besides, this is slashdot - you know, the place where a bunch of idiots come to reveal their stupidity in a public forum.

GO SLACKWARE!

[Anonymous Coward]

GO SLACK! The good o'le distro! Viva Slackware!

Why is linux still so ugly...

[Xyde]

Why is it still so damn ugly?

I'm looking at the screenshots; the backdrop is over-compressed and too low resolution, the KDE (or is it gnome) taskbar-wannabe still looks plain and bland, as if they've somehow tried to round the 3d appearance of the buttons (and it looks like ass), The fonts are badly hinted and waaay too thin, and just generally not visually appealing, the underlining of the letters in the menu looks like something from Windows 3.1...actually, it's mostly just the fonts (and whatever engine draws and renders the glyphs), and the ugly 3d elements.

The Media Player winamp thingy looks great, beautiful clean interface with nice fonts. The rest of the OS? not so good. It reminds me of the harsh appearance of intuition on the Amiga. The shades which make the GUI elements look 3d need to be waaay more subtle. And just stupid things like in the panel at the top of the screen, the icons are just rammed across the top of the screen, with not so much as a 2 pixel border to make them look nice (look at the XMMS icon). And those two buttons near the xchat icon stick out like zits on a teenager.

Compare to the elegance of this. Ignore the one pixel cut off on the left side of the toolbar buttons (beta software glitch...)

Perhaps it's just what you're used to, but most people seem to agree the UI in linux is it's worse attribute, and that it's one of OS X's best. Please, PLEASE steal some ideas, and/or concepts. Go read Apple's UI guide, or even Microsoft's if they have one.

--THIS IS NOT A TROLL, THIS IS CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM--

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Neo-Rio-101]

**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 *****

64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE

READY.

"Minimalistic" is NOT a word!

[Icephreak1]

" The packaging system is minimalistic. It does not support dependency resolving, but so far I did not felt that I need any."


When will people learn that "minimalistic" is not a fucking word. If your vocabulary fails to exceed that of your average three year old, goddamnit, don't make up words to suit your stupid self.

- IP

Re:"Minimalistic" is NOT a word!

[fucksl4shd0t]

When will people learn that "minimalistic" is not a fucking word. If your vocabulary fails to exceed that of your average three year old, goddamnit, don't make up words to suit your stupid self.

Um, my 3-year-old son knows that minimalistic is not a fucking word. And he makes up words all the time. :)

I feel for ya, man. I chew my wife an asshole every time she tells me "I was conversating".

Re:"Minimalistic" is NOT a word!

[Anonymous Coward]

What if your intelligence does exceed that of the average 3-year-old?

My suggestment is that this should qualify you to make up your own words.

I don't see 'goddamnit' in the Concise Oxford...

She's a chick...

[moronikos]

Eugenia runs OS News and seems to not like very much. The fact that she really likes it is a surprise.

Gentoo worth trying

[Fastball]

I started with Slackware 96 in 1996 and used it until the Redhat hype got to me. Ran Redhat from 6.1 to 8.0. I'm a web application developer which means I build LAMP servers (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl) from source all the time. With each release, Redhat was seriously get in my way of accomplishing this. I was singing the RPM dependency blues (install Perl to install VIM?).

I finally decided to give a source based distribution a go, and I went with Gentoo. As most trolls on /. will make abundantly clear, you'll spend a couple days or hours if you have a weekend and are sedentary to compile your base system. Of course you can start with a stage 3 install and save 8-16 hours of compiling time.

But, brother, once you've got your base system installed, you'll wonder how Redhat became the poster boy distro for Linux. It is nice. You've just got to try it.

The same can probably be said for Debian or Slackware. You simply get a "truer" Linux the closer you stick to source code based distros.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? It's the rule of thumb for blacks, too. Extra points for not being a young white male.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[The_dev0]

LOAD

PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

Re:Linux Mandrake 9.1 HOWTO and Documentation Guid

[Anonymous Coward]

The day part III belongs to part V is the day Linux is ready to the masses.

Re:Linux Mandrake 9.1 HOWTO and Documentation Guid

[CAIMLAS]

A MANDRAKE HOWTO - The Condensed Version

1) Insert CD.
2) Click.
3) Click.
4) Click.
5) Click.
6) Click.
7) Take CD out and reboot.

Wow - Notice This Screenshot?!?

[deadlinegrunt]

Here. Nothing beats an eye candy screenshot full of pr0n spam.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[KillerHamster]

$echo Mac OS X | grep e

$

Sorry, no 'e' in there.

You know what this means....

[NerveGas]

The next RedHat release will, of course, be "10.0", invalidating all of the people who got their RHCE on 8.0, just like they invalidated all of the 7.x RHCE's by jumping straight from 8.0 to 9.0.

RedHat should just drop the .x extension, becuase they don't particularly seem like they're going to use it again.

steve

Re:You know what this means....

[codemachine]

Um, they did as of RedHat 9. They do not call it RedHat 9.0 anymore. I'm pretty sure RedHat 10 will be the next release, unless they decide to call it RedHat X.

Re:You know what this means....

[Anonymous Coward]

When binary compatiblity is broken, RH raises it's major number. Between 8.0 and 9.0, binary compatibility was broken, major number was increased. Also, RH has cleared up the position on the RHCE. They stated it follows the AS line of products, not the regualr RH distro.

Seem familiar? It should, it's been discussed to death..

Re:Linux Mandrake 9.1 HOWTO and Documentation Guid

[bushboy]

M$ Whores ?

For such a helpful post, was that really neccessary ?

It's people like you who give Linux a bad name.

Suse 9.0 Anyone?

[Ripplet]

Hey mods this is only slightly offtopic OK!

'Ole Suse seems to be falling behind in the version wars here, anyone know when 9.0 is due out? Hopefully in time for the Xmas rush, so maybe any day now?

Nice screenshot on their page.

[Jafar00]

I love this screenshot they have. Check out the Evolution Inbox with 133 Spams in it ;) fR33 Pr0n? ;)

Re:Nice screenshot on their page.

[Jafar00]

oops. forgot the link. http://img.osnews.com/img/4637/slackware2.png

Word? Not!

[rastos1]

From my e-mail archive:

From: Chris Lumens >chris@slackware.com>
To: rastos ...
...
rastos> - out of curiosity, what tools did you use to create SlackBook?
chris> vim and SGML tools. The second edition will be vim and TeX.

Chris is one of the autors of Slackbook.

As Alan writes in previous reply there is new edition in work now, which is done outside of Slackware core team (AFAIK).

Re:Word? Not!

[Le Marteau]

It's true.

If you look at the HTML for The Book from the Slackware 9 CD's, most of the links don't work because they are mapped to a networked drive, using DOS conventions. And the meta tags in the HTML prove it was, at some point, edited with Word.

The Book was probably edited properly, then some pinhead down the distribution chain used Word.

The OED say it is.

[Hittite Creosote]

When will people learn that "minimalistic" is not a fucking word.

Maybe you should write to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. They seem to believe it is a word.

Re:The OED say it is.

[Icephreak1]

Doesn't make it correct. What other word do you know that has two adjective forms, one of them the result of fools that don't read enough to know better?

"Minimalist" is correct and it is an adjective as well as a noun. "Minimalistic" is a pretend word that pretends to be an adjective.

If enough ignorant people use a word enough, it becomes official. "Irregardless" is in the dictionary too and it's just as incorrect. We're paving the way for a generation of dummies, I tell you.

- IP

Re:The OED say it is.

[Hittite Creosote]

We are a generation of linguistic dummies. We're under the delusion that something that is 'terrific' is a good thing, rather than something to run away from screaming because it begats terror.

WHy is this modded as a troll??

[Viol8]

Ok , which 13 year old idiot moderator made the parent a troll?? He's quite correct about ldd , its
a standard unix tool for gods sake thats available on every version of *nix out there. Just because it doesn't have a fluffy wuffy fwunt end for idiots doesn't
mean that it can't be used!

I'm not using bittorent for security reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want my PC connecting to unknown bittorent users all over the world, potentially exposing security holes in the client software

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[M1FCJ]

No no no. Who uses a tape. Use a disk drive like a real man.

LOAD "*",8,1

Sadly I no longer remember the load syntax of my lovely Spectrum. :(

What's the problem? Use urpmi

[buchanmilne]

Just:

# urpmi.setup
(add 9.2 source)
# urpmi urpmi
# urpmi --auto-select
# urpmi kernel
# reboot

No need do re-customise your system ...

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[fyrie]

RUN

The point of beta

[wumpus2112]

Is to be tested. Since the chips were launched yesterday (Sept 24, 2003), it would be hard to have a thourough test. I will admit that Opteron has been out for some time, but doubt that enough Mandrake users have one to test it enough.

Wumpus

Uhm...?

[SStrungis]

Where can I get ISOs of this latest version? I can't seem to find links on either linuxiso.org or Slackware's main website. Most of the posted mirrors aren't carrying any ISOs past 9.0.

Scott Strungis

Re:Uhm...?

[fok]

There are no ISOs.
Download the packages from a mirror near you then read this and make one.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[The_dev0]

hehe, I couldn't remember the proper syntax for loading from the floppy. I still remember "double siding" my floppies with a hole punch. Ahh... the memories...

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[Anonymous Coward]

you're thinking young greek boys, but only during war time or when the troops are in the field.

Ease of installation

[breman]

Since we are talking about ease of installation, new users may find it interesting to know that you can run version of Slackware from a DOS/Windows partition called ZipSlack/BigSlack without having to resize or reformat your existing drive. Just unzip and edit a batch file. I think the web site says it best...

What is ZipSlack?

The text below is taken from the URL above.

ZipSlack is a special version of Slackware Linux. It's an already installed copy of Slackware that's ready to run from your DOS or Windows partition. It's a basic installation, you do not get everything that comes with Slackware. If you want everything with ZipSlack, then you should try BigSlack.

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[korba]

Spectrum syntax is:
LOAD ""

Re:And I love things spelled with an "e"

[M1FCJ]

I used to use a scissor. Those Commodore floppy drives were really noisy, weren't they?

I seem to remember a app to play a song using the floppy head. Talk about abusing hardware...