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Slackware 9.1 Released
ThatComputerGuy writes "Slackware 9.1 is now officially released. This is another great release, featuring GCC 3.2.3, GNOME 2.4.0, KDE 3.1.4, ALSA, and Kernel 2.4.22. Check the official announcement for the full feature list. Note that ftp.slackware.com will not allow ISO downloads starting with this release; instead, the first distribution of the ISOs will be via BitTorrent."
are you implying Slack is a distro with lots of holes? I think you don't know anything about slack.
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
I've tried just about all of them except for Slackware, and am wondering if it offers a significantly different experience than, say, Debian
or Gentoo - from an administrative as well as end-user perspective. Thanks!
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
I remember starting on Slackware in 1995. Not hard to install, well it was fun so I guess I didn't mind the effort ... but X let me down cos I was using some weirdo video card that must have been handcrafted by a bunch of orcs. Ahem, anyways, I've been using Redhat since 4.2 with the occassional digression to Mandrake ... and you know ... the more bells and whistles the harder it seems to be to do anything constructive. I just spent way too much time trying to figure out how to customize the menus ... I gave up ... the obvious way of using the "add menu item" just plain doesn't work. And then I went to change the names of the workspaces and it didn't work .. because it seems that when you make the changes it is not stored in the same xml file that it reads from ... sheesh ... yeah I know this a gnome problem not redhat (or maybe I should just go back to KDE) ... but you'd think Redhat would check these things. All I kept thinking was , if this was Enlightenment (may it rest in peace) or WindowMaker it would be simple. And I started thinking very wistfully of Slackware. Hmmm.
I would've gone Debian, but since I'm on a dialup I can just imagine how little time it would take me to hate apt-get. And I've tried Suse, nice and consistent ... but I dunno irritating.
So I'll probably give Slackware another go.
Bitter and proud of it.
Slackware is above all a very focussed distribution. It aims to give you a fairly complete, simple and stable operating system for 486+ computers, that can be easily customized by yourself. In the past, there were also Alpha and Sparc versions, but now I think only Intel is officially supported. Slackware does not attempt to include every open source software package under the sun. There is sendmail, but not postfix, qmail, exim etc. There is mysql but not postgre, firebird, etc. There are a few window managers, as opposed to dozens. It does include the usual development tools and the most common libraries. If you want something not provided in the default distribution, you are expected to download and compile/install it yourself. The result is that the complete distribution can more or less be managed by a single person. Of all the major distributions, Slackware has probably the smallest development team. If the Mandrake or Gentoo company (yes folks, Gentoo is not a non-profit org like Debian!) were to fold next month, it is not easy to continue the distributions, because they need a reasonable amount of supporting infrastructure and developers. If Patrick Volkerding quits next month, I can maintain my own Slackware tree reasonably well, because I have a reasonable overview of how the entire distribution works.
What happens to slack if Pat dies?
IIRC slack is Pat's HD image
That's not my experience... The highest download rate I saw for Slackware over bittorent was about 11KiB/s. My connection has a 150kbyte/sec down cap, which I frequently hit on other occasions. However, if we're too poor or cheap to buy the CDs, then we don't have bitching rights. :)