First Impressions of Slackware 10

Eugenia writes "Michael Hall wrote an informative article about the first impressions of the recently released Slackware 10, mostly discussing the domain Slack excels: the server. Michael concludes that 'Slackware 10 is a well-rounded distribution that will continue to make a first-class Linux server platform. Changes in the new release are incremental, not radical, and Slackware remains one of the most stable, reliable and flexible distributions available today.' The article also sports 14 screenshots."

Comments

slack 10

[Anonymous Coward]

needs better package management. otherwise it is sweet

Re:slack 10

[Eudial]

needs better package management. otherwise it is sweet

It has great package managment, no dependencies, swift upgrades, simplistic interface, doesent use some obscure packaging format or anything like that either, just plain tar.gz =)

Re:slack 10

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe, but it is still the truth

Re:slack 10

[Anonymous Coward]

I have also found the default no-deps system better than apt in debian.

However, for installing some multipackage stuff (for example Gnome 2) there just has to be a dependency manager. That's what swaret is for.

Re:slack 10

[slayer99]

no dependencies

Or, in other words, it needs package management.

Re:slack 10

[Eudial]

Uhm, no.

Just install all gnome packages?

Re:slack 10

[killermookie]

Or, in other words, it needs package management.

Slackware has had swaret for quite some time. I've been using it since 9.0 and it's come in handy many times. It checks each package install to see if all libraries are up to date and recommends, downloads and installs whatever you're missing.

Re:slack 10

[kristaps.kaupe]

Why I need package system if I have ./configure, make and make install?

Re:slack 10

[Kaliban923]

There are package management systems out there for slack that even check dependencies. I recommend checking out swaret or slapt-get

Re:slack 10

[zurab]

It has great package managment, no dependencies, swift upgrades, simplistic interface, doesent use some obscure packaging format or anything like that either, just plain tar.gz =)

May be funny (ha ha), but not accurate. First of all, tar.gz is not a package management system. And second, just because you compile from source doesn't mean you have "no dependencies." The dependencies are the same - the difference is instead of clicking on a pre-compiled RPM binary, or typing apt-get command, you have to locate and download the source.tar.gz of the dependency in question, then compile, install and configure it yourself. Not that this is wrong thing to do, but don't confuse it with "package management, no dependencies."

Re:slack 10

[Anonymous Coward]

./configure, make and make install

Thats soooo late 90's. Nowadays the correct way is emerge -Du world

Re:slack 10

[Eudial]

what i meant by tar.gz is the compression slackwares .tgz-system uses. which is tar + gz

Re:slack 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, in other words, it needs package management.

In other words, if you don't like it then use another distro!

Re:slack 10

[Glytch]

If you want Redhat you know where to get it. Leave Slackware alone.

Re:slack 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you are running a production box, how do you keep it patched? Let's see: Check the advisories for problems with your packages. Download patches, apply patches,

./configure, make, su, make install

for each one. Or, (debian example):

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

and you're done. That's what a package manager gets you.

Re:slack 10

[Poor College Student]

Its more than simply getting the packages onto the system, a good package management system keeps you informed when relevant updates are available.

I personally find that more convenient than browsing freshmeat or subscribing to lots of different mailing lists.

Re:slack 10

[Peaker]

No dependencies? Simple tar.gz with no metadata?

You say that like its a good thing...

Re:slack 10

[Silvertre]

If you want to use gnome on Slackware, grab a copy of the Dropline gnome installer from http://dropline.net/gnome/

Re:slack 10

[Rotting]

As far as packages for Linux distros is concerned I honestly prefer the slackware packages over any other.

One time I tried upgrading gnome using packages and for whatever reason the newer version was not working quite properly (it was unofficial packages but I thought it was worth a try). I wrote a quick shell command and it uninstalled all new gnome packages and reinstalled all of the older ones. No complaining about dependencies (I know... --force or equiv for others) and it was all handled so cleanly and easily.

Perhaps I am biased because slackware was the first distro that I used nearly 10 years ago now but it is easily my favourite still and I have tried many other distros over the years :)

Keep up the good work!

Re:slack 10

[tzanger]

Or, in other words, it needs package management.

Don't be an ass; I prefer my package manager to keep track of what files are in what package and That's It. RPM and Deb and whatnot just don't cut it. In the 7 years I've been using Slackware I've never run into a problem with requiring a package ... You try to run a program, it says "can't open libfoo.so" and you go "Hmm, libfoo, I bet that's in FooWare-4.18-i386-1.tgz" -- Piece of cake.

And TBH I don't know of ANY software suite whose dependency lists are so bizzare that you need a dependency tracker to keep them straight... Well, short of Gnome, anyway. Even KDE isn't bad -- if you want KDE, you install the KDE packages... no dependency hell. Oh you need Qt? No problem, it tells you. It's all fairly well organized. All the dependency trackers seem to do is screw up.

Re:slack 10

[PenGun]

Security patches appear when needed ... So:

Download slak patch

upgradepkg the-package.tgz

You done.

PenGun
Do What Now ???

Re:slack 10

[tzanger]

It is a great thing. installpkg installs. removepkg removes intelligently. upgradepkg upgrades intelligently. Dependency trackers are more hassle than they're worth, IME.

The only thing I wish removepkg allowed as an 'uninstall.sh' execution from the package. That's it. I don't want another damned thing out of the package manager. No interactivity, nothing.

Re:slack 10

[quinkin]

Not yet released for Slackware 10...

Q.

Re:slack 10

[Anonymous Coward]

dropline-installer --force

Re:slack 10

[LinuxSneaker]

However, Pat removed swaret from /extra about 5 months ago. A user complained to him about some flamewar posts that were made on freshmeat. I was CCed, and answered immediately that I took care of it, but Pat removed the package before he read my answer.
I've not approached Pat yet about putting it back in-I wanted to release the next version, which will support compiling and rollback capability.

Yay!

[i love pineapples]

Slackware has always been my favorite distro, so I'm really excited to see what's in store in this release. For a supposedly "hard" distro, I've always found it quite easy and painless to install.

Re:Yay!

[Neil Blender]

Slackware has always been my favorite distro, so I'm really excited to see what's in store in this release. For a supposedly "hard" distro, I've always found it quite easy and painless to install.

Maybe if you installed from the 50 diskettes it used to take 10 years ago, you'd know why it was considered 'hard'.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I found it to be an exelent distro, the only problem that I have with it is that it did not find one of my nics, is there any place that I could go to find the proper divers.

Re:Yay!

[i love pineapples]

Maybe if you installed from the 50 diskettes it used to take 10 years ago, you'd know why it was considered 'hard'.

Tedious, yes, but not 'hard'... to me, a hard install would be having to spend hours upon hours configuring/tweaking/swearing at the thing to get it to do even just a basic install. At least I can watch a movie while popping in disk after disk.

Re:Yay!

[dleifelohcs]

/usr/src/linux

I hear that's a great place to go for nic drivers.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a consultant that's big on trying to push us to SuSe.

He asked, "why don't you use anything big like RedHat or SuSe or even Mandrake?"

My response was, "because that's the problem - they're too big with RPM dependency issues that occasionally rise - plus, it costs too much."

I have been using Slackware 8.1 since it came out for all of our production servers and I've not had a single problem upgrading them from the core distribution base.

I'm also not fond of the fact that SuSe isn't free, RedHat, for all intents and purposes, is no longer "free." Mandrake is faultering a bit in terms of being a cash-strapped company.

Slack, for all of my knowledge about it, has never had these kinds of problems because Patrick never decided to make it a "corporate" puppet like the other distros are. Granted, it may "look nice" in terms of big names being linked to your services and such, but for ease of use, stability, etc, give me Slackware any day.

I would use Debian, but it doesn't "fit" into our infrastructure the way Slackware does.

I would use Gentoo, but I don't like being locked into specific compile-time flags. (Yes, I know I can change them, but why should I be bothered with that?)

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago, if you knew what Linux was, you'd jump at the chance to load 50 disks. Between 8-9 years ago, all the windoze freaks jumped at the Win95 diskette install.

Re:Yay!

[RLiegh]

Maybe if you installed from the 50 diskettes it used to take 10 years ago, you'd know why it was considered 'hard'.
I installed it from diskettes when I first learned linux. As I remember, the base set (the A series) took up far, far less than fifty diskettes, and I was able to figure out pretty quickly to just install the base series, one or two apps from the N series and then fetch the rest by hand from the net (which I'm sure most people figured out rather quickly as well).

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

i concur, i am using Slackware-9.1 and find it to be about the best distro i ever used, i might grab the slackware-10 ISOs after a few weeks when the serviers get a much needed rest...

Re:Yay!

[drachen]

This is funny.

First of all, it was far less than 50 diskettes to get a running system.

Second of all, how else would you recommend installing it back then? Did you have a CD burner in 1994?

Third of all, while there were CDs that you could install slackware from back then (usually attached to books or magazines, that is how I got slackware 3.0, while I had installed a previous version from floppies) not that many people had CD drives back then. I still have a stack of Windows 95 installation floppies (which I'm not going to dig out and count) but there were more of them than the number of disks it took to get slackware working with X and devel tools.

I realize you probably weren't being serious, but please explain what's so 'hard' about using a floppy disk. If you meant the distro itself was 'hard' then you probably haven't used it.

/* still uses slack to this day */

Re:Yay!

[reallocate]

I once installed OS/2 on a 12-meg Toshiba 386-SX laptop using more than 40 diskettes. Didn't last long.

Re:Yay!

[Shulai]

Some time ago, when installing a Slackware for a customer, my sister using our main computer, and our second one had its HD broken.

So, I changed vt, chrooted into /mnt, then configured eth0 and launched lynx to surf a little bit while the installation keeps copying things.

I dare Windows to allow me to do that!

Re:Yay!

[TeraCo]

Call Doctor Science, and have him turn this crotch punching robot into an omelette eating robot! Are you speaking to Doctor Science.. right now?

Re:Yay!

[darkjedi521]

I would use Gentoo, but I don't like being locked into specific compile-time flags. (Yes, I know I can change them, but why should I be bothered with that?)

What do you mean by locked into specific compile time flags? I was under the impression one of the benefit's of gentoo was that you were no locked into the vendor's compile time flags

Re:Yay!

[JWSmythe]

hehe, that's how I started using it. I'd always have a disk failure half way through, and have to try again. I hated floppy disks.

We've been using Slackware on our servers for years, and loving it. Over 100 machines currently deployed. We install it, and re-roll it into a nice tight installer to deploy to our servers. Once we have our deployment package, it takes 5 minutes from the first time a new machine is turned on, to the time it's ready to serve.

We've installed Slack 10 on a few servers, and have had no problems. I still haven't done my workstations yet, but they're Slack 9.1 . I'm nervous about it changing X on me.

Re:Yay!

[SphericalCrusher]

Well, installing Slackware has never been the difficult part of it -- just getting to use that command line like a pro and well, getting to know Slackware normally takes the cake. I can use it just fine though and it's right next to Debian and SuSE as my favorite distro.

Long live the penguin!

Re:Yay!

[Lshmael]

Configuring the USE variable

If you do a Stage 1 installation, you can configure the USE flags during installation, otherwise, I assume that you get some sort of Gentoo default. "Locked" is poor verb choice, since as AC grandparent mentions, you can change the flags.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this guy up! I thought it was funny as hell.

Re:Yay!

[Dot.Com.CEO]

emerge -e world re-compiles all packages installed to your updated flags. That should take about a couple of days...

Re:Yay!

[shippo]

Or if in my case, you had a CD drive but there was no driver in the then Linux kernel to support it. Installing meant using DOS to make copies of the base installation floppies. Then installing was done via my DOS partition, usually a set of packages at a time.

And then there was the time taken to uncompress the packages and install them. Mind-numingly slow on a 386SX-25 with a slow Conner hard drive. Eventually a kernel driver appeared for my CD-Rom, which had to be installed via a kernel patch. It took hours to recompile it!

Re:Yay!

[mattyrobinson69]

get a torrent - theyre listed on slackware.com

when you get a torrent, your uploading too so your actually making the situation better.

Re:Yay!

[redog]

"I would use Gentoo, but I don't like being locked into specific compile-time flags. (Yes, I know I can change them, but why should I be bothered with that?)"

Or you can ignore the fact that they exist and your binarys will be built with the default flags. Some packages ignore the gentoo set comile flags all on thier own. Sorry to bother you.

Re:Yay!

[jred]

I tell you what was hard about installing my first slack system (don't remember what ver, kernel was .89 or .92 or something like that) from floppy... downloading the fuckers on a 14.4 modem. Of course, since I didn't know which sets I needed to get a running system, I also downloaded 50+. Painful.

Re:Yay!

[HungSquirrel]

Xorg is no big deal. The configuration is basically identical. It's only a pain if you try to upgrade from XFree. Installing it clean on Slack 10 is no different than installing XFree. Only the name of the config file changes. :)

Re:Yay!

[JWSmythe]

That's why I did the servers first. I like wiping out everything except for a few configuration files, and all the user data, and reinstalling everything else.

But, my workstations, I'm a bit more attached to. I have all kinds of crap that I install and scatter all over the place. I actually did fine with the Slack 9.0 to Slack 9.1 upgrade, so I don't know why I'm nervous. Once I do one, I'll be fine. Maybe I'll try an upgrade, see if it hoses anything, and then do a fresh install (keeping my files, of course)

Re:Yay!

[drachen]

So true... :)

Another killer was doing an ftp-install of FreeBSD... That was probably my first reason for becoming a FreeBSD user. I could trim down the install to such a minimal level that it didn't take as long to download as any of the linux distros would have. And central source updates made keeping up-to-date over the modem rather easy for our lowly bandwidth. :)

I love slackware

[JoeShmoe950]

I loved Slack 10. Its install isn't half as bad as people make it out to be. Its 20x easier than the debian install. Then, its fast, stable, and if your not new to Linux, its not really that hard to use. I wish that it had some Apt-Get sort of thing (besides Swaret/Slapt-get which have a low package base in comparison. They don't have even bzflag if I remember correctly(correct me if I'm wrong)). Ignoring package management, i'd say its one of my favorite distro's. Its just so stinkin fast to install and use.

Re:I love slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

one thing i wish is that the menu system between gnome and kde, etc. where that same like in mandrake. i do not like going inot gnome and most of the item are missing from the menu but KDE has it...
and forget about fluxbox....

Re:I love slackware

[BRSloth]

Well, that's a problem with KDE [ok, fell free to bash me].

KDE is, currently, not following the freedesktop.org recomendation for menus. IIRC, KDE 4.0 will. Until then, we will have to rely on external programs to sync them.

Re:I love slackware

[eeg3]

I wish that it had some Apt-Get sort of thing (besides Swaret/Slapt-get which have a low package base in comparison.

Although slackware's 'pkgtool' is rather disappointing tool, you can install NetBSD's pkgsrc for slackware, and it can handle and install all your packages. I have found pkgsrc to be very useful, and very eloquent.

For a walkthrough on getting it working in slackware, Marrti Kuperinen has created an easy guide that can get you up and running with pkgsrc on Slackware in no time.

Re:I love slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE has been following it for quite a while.

Re:I love slackware

[Atmchicago]

I agree that swaret/slapt-get don't have that many packages. However, you can turn on repositories, or go to www.linuxpackages.net to help fill in the gaps. These aren't perfect either, but they do have bzflag, evolution...

Re:I love slackware

[RevAaron]

eloquent? do you mean elegant?

eloquent: adj.
1. Characterized by persuasive, powerful discourse: an eloquent speaker; an eloquent sermon.
2. Vividly or movingly expressive: a look eloquent with compassion. See Synonyms at expressive.

unless.... does pkgsrc speak to you? am i not the only one? does it tell you too to KILL KILL KILL?

Re:I love slackware

[DMadCat]

I wish that it had some Apt-Get sort of thing (besides Swaret/Slapt-get which have a low package base in comparison. They don't have even bzflag if I remember correctly(correct me if I'm wrong)).

This is Slackware... who needs packages?

Just download the source, configure using --prefix=/whereveryouwanttoputtheprogram, build it, install it, static link the binary in one of the bin directories and run the silly program.

I keep hearing about how the packaging system in Slackware sucks but I've never run into a program I couldn't run on Slack.

Re:I love slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm not an idiot (just an AC) but i don't know how to do any of that. i'm familiar with the UNIX command line, i just don't know how to compile. and yes, i googled it. no good explanations available. anyone want to enlighten this poor AC?

Re:I love slackware

[eeg3]

eloquent? do you mean elegant?

It was a typo... or was it? Maybe i'm going to go on a killing spree. You'll know soon when you read the post regarding the Slashdotter whose computers led him to homicide. Then again, slashdot posters would probably lead me to such before pkgsrc.

Re:I love slackware

[JoeShmoe950]

Another thing I did like about slackware was that it came with enough libraries already that I could compile nearly anything without downloading deps. Unfortunetly, I have older hardware, so compiling things takes quite a while for a big program. Its also more convienent to simply type apt-get bzflag, or whatever program instead of downloading, extracting, configuring, compiling, etc. which also takes some time (compiling). I compile most of my programs, but a good binary system would be nice.

Re:I love slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Just download the source, configure using --prefix=/whereveryouwanttoputtheprogram, build it, install it, static link the binary in one of the bin directories and run the silly program.

Welcome to dependency hell. Sorry, you've got version 1.2.4 of such and such library but you need 1.3.4. Go upgrade all packages that require that library so they work with 1.3.4... but which ones? That's why almost all slackware systems I've ever seen have been a complete clusterfuck of dozens of different versions of libraries because you're afraid to delete the old versions. Lame!

Re:I love slackware

[manwal]

This search gave me a whole bunch of good ones. Here's one of'em

Re:I love slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you're a slack user, I'm curious which method you would preferr: gento/bsd style portage/ports, or apt-get/rpm

Re:I love slackware

[fodi]

hey dude... been a while since I linuxed (read: a couple of years), so can't tell you the commands off the top of my head, but most apps you download (in source format) will give you a readme with instructions. For most, I THINK it's ./configure && make && make install

You can run them as separate commands, but separating them with ampersands you force the first one to finish successfully before the next command is executed.

Re:I love slackware

[bgbarcus]

I started on Slackware many years ago. Then I made the rounds of the "easy" distros with their fancy package management systems. Finally I rescued myself from dependency hell by returning to Slackware. Tarballs are the best package system for me.

Re:I love slackware

[RevAaron]

now that was eloquent.

Re:I love slackware

[Spacelord]

... static link the binary in one of the bin directories ...

Static link? I am sure you mean creating a *symbolic* link, because that is what the "-s" in the "ln -s" command stands for.

Static linking is something entirely different, and has to do with the way you compile a binary. A statically linked binary includes all the libraries it depends on in the binary itself, whereas a dynamically linked binary just refers refers to the shared library files and the linking is done at runtime.

Re:I love slackware

[13Echo]

This is one of my favorite parts about Slackware. Everyone complains about "dependency problems" on most distributions, but I've been using Slackware for years and have yet to experience but an occasional missing library. 9 times out of 10, that library is some obscure game library for some opensource game... A library that no other programs will ever use. "Battle of Wesnoth" comes to mind, since it requires about a million obscure libraries. Most of the time, Slackware has no problems compiling most programs since it has the most important libraries.

Re:I love slackware

[MattGWU]

You must be new to Slackware. Woe were they who tried building their first GTK2 app on a Slack 9 system.

Re:I love slackware

[DMadCat]

Right, symbolic... it was late, I was tired. Thanks for the correction. :)

Re:I love slackware

[schemanista]

It's always a good idea to cd into the source directory and then:

% cat README | less

or

% cat INSTALL | less

... before you do anything else.

Re:I love slackware

[ross axe]

% cat README | less

That has surely got to be a prime candidate for the useless use of cat award. Good advice otherwise...

My first impression...

[NeoGeo64]

Slackware 10 did something previous versions did not - it automagically configured my X server (thanks to the new XORG, I think) so after install all I had to type was startx and I was ready to go.

I'm currently backing up data on my local network fileserver box and going to wipe the HDD (was running Red Hat 7.3) and upgrade to Slackware 10. I've used Slackware before in server enviornments, and thats where it shines the most.

Re:My first impression...

[Eudial]

Old slackware versions has a default xf86config, just like xorg, the difference is that the xorg version seems to work with more setups [no detection at all] =)

Re:My first impression...

[NeoGeo64]

XORG is much better than XFree86. I love the fact that with open source projects anyone can take the code and improve upon it vastly.

Way to go, XORG team!

Re:My first impression...

[siplus]

slack9 did that for me on my laptop as well one question though: when i used slack9 on my laptop (currently FC2, but was primarily RH9 in the past), my touchpad didn't work. and idea if this will 'automagically' work in slack10?

Re:My first impression...

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC on Slack 9 (maybe even 8) X defaults to VESA which almost always works, but is not what you'd really want to use daily. Has this changed in 10?

Re:My first impression...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Slackware before in server enviornments, and thats where it shines the most. Yeah, Slackware really shines running Oracle and SAP. Are you kidding me? Did you ever run a server that does more than provide NAT so that mom can download her recipes while you play Counter Strike?

Re:My first impression...

[pavon]

To expand on what a couple of people have said, slackware has had a default XF86Config file for quite some time (always?) However in the past it defalted to using the Framebuffer X driver, and it 10 it defaults to using the Vesa driver. In both cases you need to change the XF86Config (now xorg.conf) to use a specific driver if you want decent performance.

This change is not (directly at least) related to the change to Xorg - they could have done it with XFree86 as well. Also while I agree that Xorg is the way to go, alot of the technical praise they are getting is misdirected. There is really almost signifcantly different between it and XFree86 4.4, and most of the improvements that people see in Xorg are really improvements in XFree 86 since the 4.3 series.

Re:My first impression...

[Xeleema]

Depends on the laptop. In my experience, the touchpad is usually riding the PS/2 (/dev/psaux).
You might want to check-out LinuxLaptops.Org or the Slackware Linux Phorums over at UserLocal.Com.

Re:My first impression...

[Sunspire]

The first release of Xorg was indeed pretty much XFree86 4.4rc + some patches. But technical praise is still merited IMO, take a look at one of the Xorg mailing lists. They've managed to rally all the relevant X developers to their banner, and there's lots of neat stuff going on. Particularly check out the "Next X.Org Foundation release plan" thread. Probably in August we will see the first Xorg release with the much awaited desktop composition manager. In comparison, the XFree86 developer mailing list is an empty wasteland and the "forum" list is all spam these days.

Forking XFree86 was the best thing to happen to desktop Linux in a long time.

Re:My first impression...

[Kilroy_Says]

Certainly dindt like my LCD monitor very much then... ive had to screw with XF86Config every time i installed linux using this monitor, kinda sucks that some of the resolutions dont work(well its a 1280x1024 but it wont even go 800x600 in lilo... goes blank aside from a banner flashing "MODE NOT SUPPORTED")

Re:My first impression...

[pavon]

Oh yeah, they are doing some kick-ass things that we will see in the next release, absolutely. Just saying that we can't give them credit for the advances in this current release. Then again, the work is mostly being done by the same people, just different organizers.

Re:My first impression...

[Kilroy_Says]

well if you want a kick ass system then sometimes you need to kick its ass first =P

Re:My first impression...

[Planesdragon]

80s, eh?

So, tell me, what was the video like on Windows 2? And why did they drop this wonderous autoconfiguration for Windows 3? (Which I have fond memories of having to choose a different driver when I wanted to change the resolution.)

Re:My first impression...

[AndroidCat]

What other features does it have that Windows had in the 80s?

I don't recall Windows 2.1 being all that automagical. But that's okay, it was rarely worth installing so it wasn't too much of a hit.

Re:My first impression...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle runs better on solaris/sparc64 you dolt. The hardware is uber. he's talking more about http/smtp/ftp/smb/vpn/dns/dhcp/etc...

Re:My first impression...

[adamshelley]

I had the opposite experience. Usually i run xf86cfg with a good success rate. xorgcfg bombed for me. it seemed like it was generating a bunk config at runtime. :(

Re:My first impression...

[beakburke]

Not every server runs Oracle or SAP. Those that need to run Oracle are gonna run it on a OS/hardware setup that Oracle supports. Same goes for other Enterprise software. That doesn't mean slackware isn't a great server, just that it isn't supported as an "enterprise" level linux distro. But then again, neither is debian. Only SuSE and RH really get the ISV support.

Re:My first impression...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

OK, OK, make that early 90s instead.

Re:My first impression...

[Planesdragon]

Mid 90s. MS didn't have video auto-detection until Windows 95, which was most assuredly in the latter half of the 1990s.

This is a case where'd it'd be better to rib on Linux for being so far behind Mac. Maybe a joke that Slackware took some of the technology from OS X, perhaps?

Re:My first impression...

[ScrappyLaptop]

I would tell you that maybe, just maybe it is the monitor's fault, but that wouldn't be helpful. I had a fun time a few years back getting slack to run on an iOpener internet appliance. Weird LCD, if I recall, prompted a little trial-and-error on the X configuration. Why don't you copy your X configuration file to a floppy or CD or just ftp it somewhere safe? That way, whenever you do a new install with that monitor but before you ever get around to setting up X (you are doing a slack install, so you do all the command line stuff first, right?), just bring in your tried-and-true configuration file.

Not a sig, just a thought; identifying the problem is the fun part, after that, it's just applying the solution over and over again.

Re:My first impression...

[jarryd]

"...it automagically configured my X server..."

There has been a program (xfree86setup, and to go with XORG, xorgsetup) that probes your video card and monitor to use the "correct" drivers to run X. I'm not sure whether or not it is compiled into the package, but I believe it has been in there since 8.1 (9.0 at least).

Re:My first impression...

[trocade]

You could always use X -configure to get Xorg to configure you X system for you.

(Also works with XFree86)

The only problem with Xorg is that it does not detect the monitor vertical refresh, which XFree does. (Just find the Monitor options in in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change them to a valid value.)

Re:Man

[daft_one]

Ahh, but here's the rub... It's made FOR slackers. Hence the simplicity ;-)

Package management.

[Coram]

Slack was the first distribution I used when i became a linux devotee. It was great for learning the guts of the system in ways i probably would not have if i had started with something "easier". I don't think i could go back to it without an adequate package management system. Debian and Red Hat are still leaps and jumps ahead in that department.

Re:Package management.

[BRSloth]

Well, the package management is what I really love on Slackware. The lack of dependency checking is something that could be scary at first, but you learn a lot with those "error loading shared library".

That's just what Slackware is: excelent for some, missing parts for others...

Re:Package management.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried Debian, Redhat, Storm, mandrake.... I hated all of them.

I don't really *like* the slackware install, but it's way better than anything else.

Though-- I've got to say, I can no longer configure printing-- wtf-- it's so complicated (supposed to be easier???). I use my ancient 486-120 with slackware 4.something to do printing.

Ever improving

[mishehu]

I have been using Slackware since not long after it officially became Slackware. I have tried out other distros, and while each has its strong points, the part of Slackware that I like so much is:

1. Simplicity
2. Customization, and ease with which that you can build your own packages

Slackware has always cut the fat from the install, and if you *really* want library-foo, you can find it either as a premade package, or build it yourself.

My clients' servers run on slackware.

Re:Ever improving

[Santana]

Sounds like BSD to me

Re:Ever improving

[Pizentios]

Slackware is really similar to BSD....is't almost uncanny.

Re:Ever improving

[beakburke]

I think this is intentional. Partially due to it's age and partially by choice.

Anyone else...

[dignome]

... look at the article for the screenshots alone?

Re:Anyone else...

[kidgenius]

That's probably why it got /.ed so quickly.

Ouch. Poor Advertisement!

[fluxrad]

I sure hope osnews.com isn't running slack as proof of concept ;-)

Re:Ouch. Poor Advertisement!

[Foggiano]

Nope, looks like they are (or were) running Red Hat.

Slackware 10 kicks ass

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe I wasted so much time running Redhat 8.x, 9.x, and Fedora Core before installing Slackware 10. I will never go back to RPM hell. Slackware 10 rocks on the desktop IMHO. KDE 3.2.3 works and looks great. One minor hiccup moving to kernel 2.6.7 regarding removing ide-scsi emulation and everything is working great. What a dumbass I've been all this time... Thanks Patrick.

Re:Slackware 10 kicks ass

[mattyrobinson69]

2.6.7 doesn't need to do scsi emulation for atapi ide cd writers anymore - it uses native atapi (as of 2.6 iirc)

Re:Slackware 10 kicks ass

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the oppisite, started with slack then got red hat and said.. wow everything works with as little trouble as possible. Now the only things I configure are tweaks, since things work out of the box for the most part. (see parents happiness about actually not having to configure X with slack 10, only had to 'startx') My RH box has been doing that for 4 years.
I never understood how a slackware user could say "rpm hell" in the same breath as "I like slackware" surely tracking down cryptic compile errors isn't any easier than . Not that I see those RPM errors anymore since using yum or apt-get but it does happen to those not familiar with rpm tools; Or GUI clickity, click people.
glad you use linux I just don't see what problem slack fixes when rpm hell is your biggest complaint. Honestly the only thing I liked better about slackware over fedora was the cool name and nobody made fun of me for using 'dead rat'

Re:Slackware 10 kicks ass

[robotoverflow]

Only on /. can you be modded insightful for calling yourself a dumbass.

Re:Slackware 10 kicks ass

[Anonymous Coward]

I went through the same things with older versions of Mandrake, RedHat, and even less common distributions like Stormix (years ago).

I also felt that they were a waste of time. After switching to Slackware several years ago, I couldn't believe that I hadn't tried it earlier.

Re:Slackware 10 kicks ass

[Anonymous Coward]

At least it wasn't modded flamebait.

Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[jayminer]

Unfortunately another OSNews article about Slackware Linux. From the article:

Michael Hall is a freelance Linux consultant and web developer based in Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory. When not hacking Linux in some way, ...

Is this guy really a Linux guy? No, please don't tell me that.

Slackware users are generally addicted ones, and (as a long time Slackware user, since 1996) I'm seeing that Patrick (is the main and in many cases the only Slackware developer) is taking Slackware to the modern world without giving up any classical Slackware ideology (Simplicity, security etc.). Many people looking over my desktop (with plain KDE 3.2.3, Noia icons and Plastik theme) is being shocked by the responsiveness (of the 2.6 series with mm patches) and the eye candy. They don't believe that this is Linux. They're used to the ugly (please no flamebait mods) Bluecurve of Red Hat.

No I'm not against any graphical configuration tools or this and that. I'm just against breaking the rule of changing the default UNIX tradition of configuration files. Any graphical tool should be like Webmin, which leaves the structure as it is.

Slackware is beautiful with its simplicity, please leave it as it is.

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[pavon]

No I'm not against any graphical configuration tools or this and that. I'm just against breaking the rule of changing the default UNIX tradition of configuration files. Any graphical tool should be like Webmin, which leaves the structure as it is.

This is what brought me back to slackware. I started with RH 4 but could never get it to work with my hardware. So I tried slackware and really enjoyed it. I learned so much about how Unix works on that slackware version. Anyway since then I have tried a different distro each time I am ready to do a complete OS upgrade. Here is what I learned.

As far as packaging goes rpm sucks unless you verify or build your own because the majority of 3rd party package builders do it wrong. At that point it's just as easy to go with slackware or gentoo. Apt-get seems really nice. Unfortuneatly, I didn't get much time with Debian (one week to install, then two weeks later my harddrive dies).

As far as configuration goes, those GUI tools are a pain. I tried 4 releases of RedHat and got to learn 4 ways of setting up PPP, and each of which seemed to get progressively worse. And of course once you use the GUI tools, it creates it's own config files from which the unix ones are generated. So after the easy way fails if you want to do it the manual way, you first have to figure out how to disable the distro provided tools, which is not always easy. The *drake tools are the flakiest things I have ever seen seen. They basically just issue some script commands and don't do any error handling. If something goes wrong, the window just disappears and you are left wondering if it worked or if not why it didn't work, and what state you system is in. Totally lame. Yast is the nicest of the bunch, but again you really need to decide to let Yast do everything, or do everything the manual way, because otherwise you will tromple all over each other.

As far as I am concerned, you can take your GUI configuration tools and keep them. Slackware may not be the easiest distro, but it is by far the least complicated. Even better, all the time I spend getting things to work on slackware, I am actually learning about how Linux works rather than figuring how to get around some broken config tool. That is the first thing that struck me when I started using slackware again. With the other distros I had gotten frustrated with all the maintainance I was doing that was all related to stuff I would never use again - fixing dependency errors, unbreaking harddrake - and this ended up driving me to Mac OS X for my main computer. With slackware I don't have to think about those kinds of problems, and I actually enjoy the problem-solving and discovering that I do have to deal with. It reminds me why I originally became so absorbed with linux in the first place.

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[xgamer04]

I'll agree that GUI tools SHOULD NOT EVER do screwy crap to your config files. I don't see what's so hard about making a gui-config-thing that just edits the config file...then again, I don't make do much coding...

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[pherthyl]

I know it sounds easy to edit a config file. And in the simple case it is, but in reality its complex, very complex.

You have to account for every different way a config file could be written, every stupid weird way some user might have written a valid file, and much harder, an invalid file. You have to figure out what to do when the file is unreadable for some reason, how to recover, how to get past it.
RELIABLY parsing and keeping track of config files that users can edit is not a trivial task.

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[Pros_n_Cons]

Mind explaining to me why you can only 'learn linux' on slackware? I'm really interested in the answer to this because everyone says it but never says why. I can't edit config files with red hat because it has a GUI to do it? I've used red hat for years, I only use one GUI config tool system-config-securitylevel because its faster than throwing in IPtables rules, the others I do by hand, someway, somehow, I've learned linux dispite having GUI software installed.
To anyone who answers I hope you don't bring up slackwares INIT scripts as the REAL way to learn linux cause thats not linux at all. Try being LSB compliant first if you want to have an argument as to which distro teaches you LINUX not bsd or 20 year old unix.

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[Lord Kano]

Any graphical tool should be like Webmin, which leaves the structure as it is.

PRECISELY!!!! That is a gripe that I have with "administrative tools". If it can't parse and then write configuration files with the correct structure, then if there is a bug it becomed nigh impossible to track down and fix a problem with said file.

LK

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then your file format is not good.

I know Unix people don't like binary files to store information, but hopefully OSS developers will catch up on the benefits for GUIs...

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[MntlChaos]

Parent poster hit the nail on the head. When I first installed redhat, the number of scripts it had to do anything and everything made me feel afraid to start tinkering for fear that I'd mess everything up with those scripts. Slackware has a minimal number of scripts, and pretty much gives you the reins of the system, instead of giving you a pretty little image with a bright head covering on it.

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Yes, when I'm trying to teach people who have only ever used Windows (and likely only since after an autoexec.bat was long dead), I like to toss them in the SysV init deep end, and just let them drown.

Of course eventually they will need to learn SysV, but that can wait a few months(or even a few years). Slackware style init is superior for single user desktops, and even the dullest person can be taught to work with it well enough to not screw it up.

But go ahead, let's start the init flamewars again.

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[reallocate]

Of course, you can learn Linux on any distribution. Claims to the contrary are false.

In my experience with other distributions, however, you need to learn enough about their own approach to graphical configuration to, at least, understand how to avoid getting into trouble when you edut config files manually.

For example, I just did a SUSE 9.1 install and everytime I opened a config file it seemed to be prefaced with a statement declaring: "Do Not Edit This File. Generated by XXX_Widget. Manual edits will be overwritten."

Slackware doesn't do that.

Re:Nooo... Another OSNews article.

[13Echo]

When you learn on RedHat, you learn to use "RedHat".

When you learn on Slackware, you learn to use "Linux" (and even UNIX).

Most RedHat users (you are a minority in this case) have extreme difficulty moving to a distribution that doesn't have their unique tools. Same goes for Suse/Mandrake users. Slackware users, on the other hand, can almost always work on another distribution without too many difficulties.

I hope that answers your question.

Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[dhartman]

I've been a "Slacker" from way back. (version 3.0) Slackware first appealed to me because it didn't have all the fancy-fandangled configuration utilities which prevented a new user from really understanding the inner workings of a Linux distro. I've learned (through just a _few_ mistakes) all the little details and now am quite comfortable working on almost any distro. (although I rarely use anything other than Slackware, even for desktop boxes).

I want the same stability that people want in a server on my desktop. If there are a few programs that are missing, usually a trip over to Linux Packages is enough. If not, take the time to learn about compiling (however use 'checkinstall' rather than just installing the compiled program--makes it much easier to maintain a clean system). Package management tools such as Swaret and slaptget have made it easier than ever to maintain an up to date system (with options to update to the latest security fixes in the specified version (say 10.0) or to the -current tree.

Slack on!

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[drinkypoo]

Slackware appealed to me in the old days (2.0) because I could install everything I needed from about nine floppy disks, but now I want something that actually has a broad selection of packages since I install from CD. Hell, only one system in my house even has a working floppy drive.

As far as I can tell, the primary use for Slackware is assembling a minimum install (install the A, N and D sets more or less completely) and then to build everything else you want manually. If you want to fit a complete linux system into a small (say 500MB) space then slack is probably your best bet.

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[The Conductor]

If you want to fit a complete linux system into a small (say 500MB) space then slack is probably your best bet.

I was able to put Slack on a laptop with 340 MB hard drive. Installed just enough to get Abiword working, plus Pine & Links and just about nothing else. It barely fits. Abiword and its Gnome library dependencies take almost half of the drive space. A smaller but less capable alternative is Ted, a *.rtf editor. I had to use XFree86 version 3.3.6 (from Slack 7.1) because the newer versions don't support the obsolete video chip set.

The ldd command is your friend when doing a minimal Slack install. It will tell you which *.so files you need to run a particular program. Oh, and rm -r /usr/doc/*, and ln var/log/syslog -> dev/nul; every byte counts!

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[RevAaron]

Heh. Weird that 340 MB constitutes a "minimal" install of Linux. I must come from an older school... I installed RH 5.2 on a p60 lappy with a HD about that size over a parallel port connection without incident and space left over. No need to delete docs or anything.

But then again, I used to run slack on a 486, with a 100 MB ZIP disk as /root. Wasn't cramped then, but like I said, I must be from an older time. :)

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[drinkypoo]

When I ran slack I had a full system with X on a 386DX20 with 8MB ram and a 120MB disk. I was very proud of my big fast 32 bit system, though I did wish I had a bit more memory :) These days, however, 500MB is not very much, let alone 120...

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[mvdw]

Bah, amateurs. I installed slackware 10.0 into less than 128MB, less than 90MB if I didn't install SAMBA. It was a pretty minimal install, though - just basically the essentials out of A plus CDRecord, DVD recording, wget, links, samba, and tcpip. It was basically built as a recovery installation for making/restoring windows partitions - beats paying for ghost!.

I was amazed that dvd recording worked out of the box on the USB dvd recorder I plugged in, although there were issues with recording on-the-fly, probably related to the slow USB port.

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Read his post again. It's that bloated turd called Gnome. But if he needs Abiword, I guess I shouldn't belittle him for it.

WindowMaker forever!

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[RevAaron]

Exactly. I ran WindowMaker. And wrote papers in LaTeX in emacs or pico. /me shrugs; worked for me.

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[dunkelfalke]

holy shit. not meant to flame but dos/windows 3.11 and the whole microsoft office for it used less than 100 mb and were bit more powerful.

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[The Conductor]

Well, Abiword is billed as lightweight, but it won't load without opening audio libraries. Not saying the sound won't work; the program won't load. I would have rather had the 2 MB of disk space. (My happy little Amiga, built from hardware not much more powerful, won't load libraries until they are needed, a feature that has vastly improved her longevity.) But Abiword is the smallest thing I know of (besides Ted) that can interoperate with MS Word 2000.

The definition of "lightweight" shifts with time to mean, "one-tenth as bloated as the similar MS products." By the standrds of ten-year-old hardware, that's still a lot of bloat.

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[The Conductor]

That points up the limitations of closed-source software. I did try to work the native Win3.1 install but got stuck without a paddle rather quickly. Not many copies of MS Word 5 at the local Comp*USA.

I pulled out a floppy of Winsock & Netscape 1.1 from my closet. Winsock could connect but it crashed before I could do anything. It is easy to forget: Win 3.1 crashes like Atlanta in a blizzard on anything less than a Pentium; this is a 50 MHz 486. By contrast, Linux never crashed in all my tinkering (not counting floppy read errors during boot-up).

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[Anonymous Coward]

"Abiword and its Gnome library dependencies"

Cool setup (I have a similar thing on an old laptop), but note: AbiWord does NOT need GNOME! You can build a plain GTK version, and it's only missing a couple of trivial features.

Well, this was certainly true of AbiWord 1.x, and AFAIK it's the same in 2.x. So ditch all the GNOME dunk, compile AbiWord for GTK only, and use that space for cool stuff :)

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[RevAaron]

Yeah, except Win 3.1 sucks balls. As does anything that runs on it. At least, that's my experience; I'm not talking about "all Windows r teh suck"- I use 2k and XP with few real complaints. But 3.1 was hell. I used DOS and then Linux, never touching anything until 98, though I should've waited until 2000. But on a machine that old, I say use DOS and Minuet + Lynx or Anarchon (so?), a graphical dos browser.

Re:Stable, easy to administer AND a fast install

[The Conductor]

AbiWord does NOT need GNOME! You can build a plain GTK version...

Ooh neat...gotta try that. Hopefully it will run faster too; it's sorta sluggish as it is now.

Slackware !!!!

[Mr. Stinky]

Yes, agreed with the idea that it's best for servers. I use it to power all my web servers, and without all the bells and whistles, I can really keep a firm grasp on the very few things I actually need running. No 5 CD install, just a very narrow footprint perfect for hosting. All my mentors used Slackware too, so how could it be wrong???

Could someone please enlighten me?

[InternationalCow]

As to the purpose of these screenshots? I find the article moderately informative- ie if I want a desktop I won't go Slack, if I want a server I probably do, but, what are the screenshots meant to illustrate? They do not illustrate any point of the paper, reminding me instead of the screenshots of yore when men were men and windowmanagers were windowmanagers, showing just a big heap of windows on a screen trying to look cool. In all, IMHO not a very good article with lousy illustrations. If I were interested in Slack I wouldn't waste any time reading beyond the first two paragraphs.

Re:Could someone please enlighten me?

[PitaBred]

To each his own. I choose Slack for my desktop because it's so simple. Patrick doesn't add any kernel hacks, any funny compilation flags, anything. It just works as it's advertised. And if it breaks, it tells you why.

Re:Could someone please enlighten me?

[iomanip]

I am in full agreement on that one. What kind of servers does this guy install. Having multimedia applications like muine and xmms on a server???? And what server is going to need a non-linear video editor???

It would seem that if those were actual screenshots of his server then he is smoking some serious crack. I'll take two of whatever he's having.

On the other hand though, I could argue against myself and talk about how screenshots of a properly running server are pretty damn boring. Might as well take pictures of paint drying and you might get the excitement level of a servers screen shots.

Re:Could someone please enlighten me?

[MoThugz]

I don't think the screenshots and the article are related.

The article is by Michael Hall while the screenshots (seems like they) are from Eugenia's (the article submitter and OSNews' Editor) Slackware destop.

Re:Could someone please enlighten me?

[losinggeneration]

I agree, I like Slackware for my desktop. It works well IMHO. Just as well as Gentoo or Mandrake or Debian or Redhat or.... anyways, I believe Slackware makes a fine desktop environment if you install the second CD also (it includes GNOME and KDE.)

Slackware 10 is

[mst76]

really not all that much different from Slackware 9.1 as far as I can tell. Just the usual package updates as you would expect. The core of what makes Slackware Slackware (installation, directory layout, config files, pkgtools) is pretty much the same. But maybe for me the difference seems even less, since I've been synching with Slackware-current every few weeks for about a half year now.

Re:Slackware 10 is

[reclusivemonkey]

I personally use the Gnome Desktop and was previously updating Slackware 9.1 with Dropline Gnome to get a Gnome 2.6 Desktop. Call me strange but I feel in love with spatial nautilus almost instantly (after refiling of course). However as Slackware 10 now comes with Gnome 2.6, I don't feel the need to use dropline any more. Is it just me or does Slackware seem to be speeding up??? I would say if anyone has been put off Slackware in the past for it not being as up to date as some other ditributions, take another look at Slack 10 I think you'll be impressed.

Re:Slackware 10 is

[Anonymous Coward]

already obsolete ... in Japan

Rocks

[siskbc]

Same stable slack. My only complaints is that it could be better at recognizing devices - changing kernel config based on detected sound card wouldn't be hard, nor putting the correct 3 lines in XF86Config for a 3-button mouse.

But that's slack. No bloat. Anywhere. You want it bloated, punk, you put it in your frikking self.

Re:Rocks

[Nemith]

Uhh... there is hotplug in 9 and 10. That will detect any pci/usb items and try to modprobe the right kernerl module. This works like a charm!

Re:Rocks

[consolidatedbord]

Hot plug doesn't add zaxismapping to the X config file though.

I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Lord Kano]

then I tried Gentoo. It makes Slackware look like Mandrake.

I think that Slackware is a great distro for learning about Linux. I also think it's a great distro for creating a server that will operated in a relatively secure environment (read:intranet), however I think that there are better solutions for internet accessable servers, because of the lack of a serious package manager and quick/easy security updates.

LK

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[PitaBred]

You don't want a compiler on most servers. Strike one against Gentoo, and it's a biggie.
And using swaret/slapt-get, updating is a no-brainer. Besides, why do you need a package manager on a server. Are you really installing/changing a whole lot? Maybe you need to rethink your concept of a server
Anything else?

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Lord Kano]

Besides, why do you need a package manager on a server.

Repeat after me... "Security Updates"

LK

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[PitaBred]

Wow. Nice tone.
Too bad you can't read. Notice where I said swaret/slapt-get? Yeah, that takes care of security updates.
You may apologize now.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[The Conductor]

there are better solutions for internet accessable servers

My biggest beef with Slack is its use of sendmail, not known for being secure. Not everybody needs all of its 569,876 features. Exim & QMail aren't even included, even in Slack 10.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Anonymous Coward]

k, get on the slackware mailing list, you find out when there is a new security update availible.

Hit your favorite ftp,rsync,http or whatever source, grab it from the /patches directory, download it, and type installpkg packagename. It grabs from the current directory where you downloaded to, and installs it.

I DONT SEE WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS, if anything thats called package management. Heck of a lot simpler than RPM and hoping it works, since this does, every time.

Slackware is also one of the best documented linux distributions out there in my experience. Obviously thats because everything is simple and standard, which means the official documentation for whatever program applies flat out. Slackware doesn't try and circumvent the way any program works, it works like its supposed to and makes sure everything else does too.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[zoloto]

if that's your biggest beef, it's a non issue right?

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Anonymous Coward]

Slack runs all our public facing servers, daemons are regularly compiled from source on an internal dev box and installed manually on the production machines via SSH. sshd is bound to internal facing eth interface and only accessable from the development machine. How does leaving a compiler on a production server improve on that?

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Anonymous Coward]

It only takes 45 minutes to download, build and configure postfix. It takes longer than that just to remember sendmails config is for masochists and you should be using M4. Anyhow, Sendmail is included for err ... historical reasons ;-)

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[tzanger]

Exactly. I generally have a USB drive with a full (development) system on it for my slackware installs, and then my individual servers have about a 250-300M minimum install. Anytime I need something (kernel, asterisk, perl module, etc.) I plug in the USB drive, mount it and chroot. I build what I need, use checkinstall and make a slackware package for it... now all my servers can use it. Having a full development system on every server is not only wasteful, but a huge intrusion vector.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Umrick]

Well, we use a 2nd box for all building actually.

After base box is set, emerge unmerge gcc, emerge inject ggc-version so portage doesn't add it back, set package repository in make.conf and use emerge -k for all installs.

Viola no compiler...

Another slightly less secure option is to simply go through and set ALL compile tools:
chown root:root *
chmod 500 *

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[tzanger]

Repeat after me... "Packages"

You've got to have your head fairly far up your own arse if you think you need a compiler to stay secure. I replied to the same post you replied to with a description of how I keep my systems up to date without having to include a half gig of development tools on every server. In fact, having a compiler on your servers decreases the security of the rest of your network, as it's trivial to build apps to further penetrate your system.

Sure the attacker could bring in his own tools once you're compromised but with a development system sitting there it's far too easy.

So again: repeat after me... "I can keep my systems up to date without a compiler on every freaking system!"

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[tzanger]

The stock qmail system really isn't all that shit-hot, and you're not allowed to distribute binaries of any patched qmail binaries. I'm a diehard (over 5 years, dozens of servers and probably hundreds of millions if not over a billion emails) qmail fan but I'm starting to see the benefit of Postfix. TLS, filtering, header rewriting, antispam all out of the gate... My current qmail install has over 25 patches to do the same thing.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Hatta]

Hit your favorite ftp,rsync,http or whatever source, grab it from the /patches directory, download it, and type installpkg packagename. It grabs from the current directory where you downloaded to, and installs it.

That's a lot more work than apt-get update; apt-get upgrade. Stable never breaks either.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should read what you wrote again. I'll quote it for you:

"And using swaret/slapt-get, updating is a no-brainer. Besides, why do you need a package manager on a server. Are you really installing/changing a whole lot?"

You mention using a package manager for keeping up to date, then ask why someone needs a package manager on a server. Yeah, ok...

"Maybe you need to rethink your concept of a server"

Ahhh, here we go. This explains your little attitude problem. You're another one of the many "admins" who thinks they know everything and that if someone's not doing it "their way" then they're wrong, they're incompetent, they should be fired, etc, etc. There's a lot of them here on slashdot. I'd be willing to bet that most of them still live in their parent's basement.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[evilviper]

You don't want a compiler on most servers.

I hope you mean for space reasons.

Anyone that says having a compiler installed is a security threat, has no idea what he is talking about.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Anonymous Coward]

Will you freakin Americans stop bitching and play nice? Geez, you always have to make the next person look as bad as possible. Do you feel insecure or what? I really like /. , but sometimes I just get sick of the way you arrogant Yanks keep insulting each other always trying to prove that you know more than the other. Whatever!

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Azar]

>You don't want a compiler on most servers.

I hope you mean for space reasons.

Anyone that says having a compiler installed is a security threat, has no idea what he is talking about.

Not true. It's generally a good idea to keep devel packages and any unnecessary compilers (or -any- unnecessary software) off your production servers. It's not a security threat, as in it will increase your changes of being hacked. It's simply about attempting to minimize damages in the event that it does happen. Having a working compiler and the development libraries provides additional firepower to the attacker (or possibly a disgruntled local user with an account on the system). Not having devel libs or a compiler can help to minimize the damages. It may not be much, but a compiler in most (though not all) cases, is extraneous software that should simply be left off production servers.

Any custom software packages created for a production server, should first be compiled on a developmental or test server, packaged as a binary, and then installed on the production server. This is simply a good standard practice. In fact, I believe there was even an article posted in the last day or so that mentioned this...

Ah, here it is: What you shouldn't put into production.
(See the section entitled "Eliminate unnecessary software")

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[Azar]

Hit your favorite ftp,rsync,http or whatever source, grab it from the /patches directory, download it, and type installpkg packagename. It grabs from the current directory where you downloaded to, and installs it.

That's a lot more work than apt-get update; apt-get upgrade. Stable never breaks either.

Slackware is quite flexible that way. There are many different ways to update your system. You can upgrade "by hand" like he described or use a number of different tools including

slapt-get --update; slapt-get --upgrade

Granted that is two additional letters at the front and two additional characters in the middle you must type for the command, but we Slackware users cope somehow. ;)

Slackware stable is rock solid and typically has up to date packages when it's released (see here for what comes with Slackware 10). And Slackware current? Bleeding edge packages without the bleeding edge stability.

I have great respect for Debian, but Slackware stays on my system.

Re:I thought that Slackware was hard to install

[evilviper]

Having a working compiler and the development libraries provides additional firepower to the attacker

No, it won't. The only thing it does is to require them to compile the program on their own boxes, and then transfer the binary. I'd dare say anyone with the tiniest bit of skill will do so anyhow.

Removing a compiler may give you a warm cozy feeling, but that's all it'll do.

Any custom software packages created for a production server, should first be compiled on a developmental or test server, packaged as a binary, and then installed on the production server.

Well, it certainly isn't good to do testing on your production server, but that has nothing to do with security either.

I believe there was even an article posted in the last day or so that mentioned this...

Okay, I read the story, and the author makes the same misguided mistake as you do.

Should we go duct-tape our windows now, for security? Should we put on surgical masks to protect ourselves from viruses? After all, it's POPULAR!

I've secured systems, I've broken into systems. I'm well aware of what does and doesn't secure a system... You will never get any security improvement from deleting a program/file, unless it's SUID/SGID.

It is not as hard as people say

[joey.dale]

Slackware's stigma that it is hard is really undue I know many newbies who use slack and have no problems with it.

-Joey

Tsk Tsk...

[Anonymous Coward]

mostly discussing the domain Slack excels: the server

Apparently they haven't installed it on their own servers yet.

Re:Tsk Tsk...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slack does NOT excel on the server. It excels in the home testing environment where people can get their feet wet and learn how everything works.

You want something that excels on the server, you go with the big boys who've tested things to the bitter ends, patched the obscure problems they fount, enhance stability, and basically put their reps on the line: Red Hat and Suse.

My impression

[Lispy]

I have it in use since day one (including the excellent Dropline-Gnome suite. Pat did a great job as far as it concerns me. One downside is that OpenOffice.org and Evolution are not included due to space restrictions. Another one maybe, that you can't install the 2.6.7 kernel from within the installer. No big deal, though, since all you need to do for an upgrade is a simple installpkg.

Aside that, it's a lightning fast distro that hasn't failed on me yet. Also, IMHO the greatest distro for starters since learning under Slack is learning it "the right way" and will help you later on with other unixlike systems.

Re:My impression

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, IMHO the greatest distro for starters since learning under Slack is learning it "the right way" and will help you later on with other unixlike systems."

There are tons of Apple users using OpenBSD in the core of their OS. Are you suggesting they're using it the wrong way? Lots of people like Unix and Linux -- but no one wants to be their own sysadmin. But even so, I learned on Redhat. Could you imagine the shock, I dare say, shock when I learned I could take my redhat skills and apply them to Solaris? I even applied them to HPUX.

"Hide the children, Margaret, here comes one of those redhat users".

I, personally, don't think there's any "right way" to learn linux. But if you do want to learn the way Unix has historically been administered, then you can learn slackware.

I suspect though, that when Sun and HP created gui administration tools, will hisotrically be the day that the true Unix way died.

Re:My impression

[Lispy]

Of course not. Its alright to use GUI-tools, I do so everyday. But it helps to know WHAT those tools actually do and where. From what I experienced if you want to get the system to do exactly what you want yuo still have to edit conf-files (and probably always will). Slack enables you to learn from bottom up, wich is fun and helps to relax you much more whenever you see the latest GUI-frontend.

Rather simple article

[TheVidiot]

The article only states "404 Error" -- They appear to be commenting on the stability of Slackware, and perhaps the number of bugs in this release.

I assume the review can only be negative....

Re:Rather simple article

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, your the one that's ASS u ming!

Re:Rather simple article

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be that, the sites just /.'ed? apparently, you've never seen a site that's been overloaded. nuff said.

Re:Rather simple article

[TheVidiot]

Could it be that you don't know what sarcasm is?

Slackware devotee

[dlek]

I started on with RedHat, which was a good start and introduction to Linux. I used it for a while, ditched the configuration tools because they were at the time buggy as all hell. I can't remember why I switched but it might have had something to do with them shipping beta GCC in a stable release--a colleague recommended I go to Debian.

Debian was okay but didn't "take". I felt like I was joining a political party by using it. Nothing about it particularly impressed me, and I used it for a short time before I upgraded my machine and decided to try something else.

Due to my experience with BSD, a friend suggested I try out Slackware. I did and haven't looked back. (At work I've used RedHat and Fedora for the past year on my workstation, but that's to get reacquainted with it now that I'm a sysadmin over a number of RH boxes. I'm going back to Slackware as soon as I get a free lunch hour.)

Slackware's clean and lean. The configuration files are where I want them, it never installs something I didn't ask for, it's stable, and I basically get good vibes from it.

I'm such a devotee that a friend bought me a Slackware cap for my birthday last year... :) And I actually wear it sometimes.

Re:Slackware devotee

[jsgates]

Just sometimes? Eesh, I used to wear mine to work.

Re:Slackware devotee

[dlek]

Love to... at least on Fridays during the summer... but I work at a University and such things are frowned upon here.

If I had the golf shirt...

Re:Slackware devotee

[Sunspire]

I've pretty much gone exactly the opposite way. Started with Slackware 0.96 back in the day. Configured my machine day in day out, messed with X modelines on black and white monitors and 386's, configured everything just because I could.

These days I run Fedora core. I issue "yum install monodevelop" and the system downloads and configures a whole damn new development toolchain and runtime environment for me, probably downloads a hundred megs of binary software distributed over twenty packages or so. 10 minutes of Slashdot reading later I've got a new development IDE to play with. You know what? I don't miss the bad old days at all.

It's not that I can't configure anything you throw at me. But for all that configuration over the years I've got zip to show. You've configured something once, why in the world would you ever want to do it again? If you're writing your CUPS config by hand in this day and age you're a damn fool or have too much time on your hands. If you're using lpr, well... let's not go there. Now writing software, that gives you something quite tangible. To that I end I choose a distro that doesn't require me to babysit every damn little thing and just lets me get stuff done. I get a feeling that all these newbiews who rave about Gentoo and what not (heh, I like an old fart now, "get off my damn lawn you kids...") aren't actually doing anything with their machines except running Linux as a self serving purpose.

Article text

[Anonymous Coward]

Here it is...Enjoy!

404 Error - Page not found!

Go to front page

Re:C help

[Hank Reardon]

Try man printf.

You're casting the integer as a pointer to char in the printf; %s is for strings. Use the correct formatting specifier and everything should work.

Not Just for Servers

[Xeleema]

I have to admit, I've been using Slackware since 7.1 as my desktop OS. I was a total n00b when it came to linux, and it took me a week or so to get my X display setup and lovable, but it was a head-first dive into linux anyway. Slackware had most of what I needed; Mozilla for mail and browsing, KDE for a desktop (even though Steven seems to lean towards GNOME), and Gimp for the pictures. I just had to add OpenOffice for the wordprocessing and rlpr to print to our OpenBSD print server. But the thing that saved me the most was the beloved documentation in /usr/doc. Almost every How-To was stuffed in there! I'd recommend it for any newbie that wants to go hard-core fast. I can't wait to try Slackware 10, but I'll probobly wipe out my boxen first (as I've been using the -current branch for so long).

Re:Not Just for Servers

[MoThugz]

I can't wait to try Slackware 10, but I'll probobly wipe out my boxen first (as I've been using the -current branch for so long).

If you consistently update to -current, you should already be using 10 at present.

Try this:
cat /etc/slackware-version

Re:Not Just for Servers

[evilviper]

KDE [kde.org] for a desktop (even though Steven seems to lean towards GNOME [gnome.org]), and Gimp [gimp.org] for the pictures. I just had to add OpenOffice

Well there's a good reason to use GNOME, no? The programs you want to use depend on GTK anyhow, so you save plenty of RAM and CPU cycles by not loading another toolkit. Plus they work together better (themes and all).

Small fanboy

[halftrack]

I use Slackware 10 on my laptop and have used all versions since 8.1. It is the best distro for the technically minded people who like to be in control. Sure it's nice to have programs write config files for you, but I often find more mess than hand tuned. Slackware leaves the control (as an exercise) to the user and if you have to tune anything (it works out of the box) you'll only do it once and probably learn a little too.

Another thing some people seem to dislike is the lack of strongly enforced package management like RPM or apt. However this is absolutely in line with Slackware's no-fuss, user-in-control filosophy. With no dependency checking source and binary packages walk hand in hand and impossible legacy dependacies are a non-issue. Sure the package base could be better, but much can be found at certain repositories (like http://www.linuxpackages.net and some times at the developers site.

OT: I absolutely hate people who seem to think .tgz is just a substitution for .tar.gz, it's not!

Re:Small fanboy

[Kilroy_Says]

>>OT: I absolutely hate people who seem to think .tgz is just a substitution for .tar.gz, it's not! *feels hated* ok, whats the difference then?

Re:Small fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

What's to prevent anyone with any version of Linux from editing their own configuration files? Is there a law against it?

Having run a different version of Linux than Slackware for several years, I have always whipped out my text editor to do my configuration. No freakin' magic involved at all.

By the way, the most valuable aspect of management systems like RPM is the security of traceability. You can point rpm at any random file and find out where and when it came from, and even verify its checksum.

And un-installing an unneeded package is so much cleaner when you use a package management system. With Slackware you have to guess which files belong with what package you wish to remove. Anyone who has used Slackware actively has surely wondered at some point where such and such a file originated.

Slackware has strong points, but package management is one of them.

Re:Small fanboy

[FuzzzyLogik]

being someone who doesn't understand the difference between tgz and tar.gz care to explain?

Re:Small fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

.tgz is Slackwares packages for use with pkg-tools. It contains a setup script, descritption, a file hierarchy ment for unpackaging on the root dir and probably some more subtle differences. When you download a .tgz that doesn't have this and you try to run installpkg on it you end up with mess / (and a hot head.)

Re:Small fanboy

[pHDNgell]

OT: I absolutely hate people who seem to think .tgz is just a substitution for .tar.gz, it's not!

What's this supposed to mean? gzip thinks they're the same:

dustin2wti:/tmp 531% touch myself
dustin2wti:/tmp 532% tar cf - myself | gzip -9c > blah.tgz
dustin2wti:/tmp 533% ls -l blah.*
-rw------- 1 dustin wheel 116 15 Jul 15:58 blah.tgz
dustin2wti:/tmp 534% gzip -d blah.tgz
dustin2wti:/tmp 535% ls -l blah.*
-rw------- 1 dustin wheel 10240 15 Jul 15:58 blah.tar

Re:Small fanboy

[Kilroy_Says]

Well then i will have to avoid all .tgz's then because i cant stand packages. Perhaps it was a really bad experience i had with them using mand, but i loathe them.

Re:Small fanboy

[RevAaron]

Not sure about what this dude is spazzing about, but I and plenty others have been using TGZ as a replacement for .tar.gz for a looong time, before he ever heard of leenoocks. Mostly on DOS machines, where you only had a three letter extension- or when you're too lazy to type .tar.gz, but that is pretty damned lazy.

Re:Small fanboy

[halftrack]

Slacware does have package managing, just not dependencie management. pkg-tools keeps track of all installed files in /var/log/packages and there should be some sort of md5 sum checking (however I'm can't reach a Slackware system here at work so I can't verify that point.) The packaging system is IMHO excellent and I by time you start wondering why you ever thought dependency system are nessecary.

Re:Small fanboy

[TheGratefulNet]

hijack.

tgz is WELL KNOWN (beyond just slack) to mean tar.gz.

the fact that slack hijacked that extension and tries to add other semantics is neither here nor there.

if slack can't deal with their hijacked extension and tell which tgz is theirs and which isn't, then their pkg program is broken.

simple.

(now, what's the next problem left to be solved?)

Re:Small fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

if slack can't deal with their hijacked extension and tell which tgz is theirs and which isn't, then their pkg program is broken.

it barely matters,
$ removepkg non-slackpkg.tgz
will clean up any crud installed by
$ installpkg non-slackpkg.tgz

that's simple.

Re:Small fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree with you. This is the first time i've heard of .tgz and .tar.gz being different (though it is possible)

I used to use tar -zxvf some.tgz or tar -zxvf some.tar.gz both worked.

Re:Small fanboy

[RevAaron]

I think the source of the spaz is that Slack calls its packages .tgz, but I imagine the source of it is similar to why I cited- DOS. You used to be able to install off of DOS 8.3 formatted disks- d1.tgz , etc etc. Slackware still has .tgz packages, but they're still .tar.gz files.

Re:Small fanboy

[evilviper]

gzip thinks they're the same:

gzip doesn't care about extensions. You could use package.not_a_gzip_file and gzip wouldn't have any problem. Sure, it has a bit of a workaround for tgz files, but that doesn't mean it's trying to encourage their use.

BTW, stop touching yourself.

Re:Small fanboy

[Blnky]

I believe you have the cart before the horse. Slackware packages make use of tgz, they did not define tgz. I seriously doubt that a single Linux distribution, Slackware, convinced the maintainers of tar to support their extension, and somehow all of the other distributions could not do the same. I am refering to the -z switch on tar in this situation. The .tgz (or .tar.gz) was just a convieniant thing for Slackware to use to group and compress its package contents.

Remember to contribute...

[lordkimbot]

I always make a point to purchase a copy of the latest Slackware release. It's been a great distribution over the years, for server and desktop for me and my clients.

Definately my server distro of choice. I still prefer 'djbdns' for my external authoritative and internal caching servers system, and they run great on Slackware.

Keep up the great work!

(-1, Moron)

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Slackware is just bundling software ?

Because Pat isn't guy who does GNOME/ KDE/ Whatever ?

Moron.

My slack 10 impressions

[Man in Spandex]

First thing I noticed which was different was when the setup detected my ntfs partition /dev/hda1 and added it automatically to /etc/fstab to mount at startup. I thought this was a nice feature especially for the newcommers who always need this feature when dualbooting and not knowing much about linux. Overall, the difference is updated packages with the obvious replacement of xfree to xorg which was a great move by Pat. (like he's done any wrong move! pfft).

Slack 10 is a great solid distro which I reccomend also for people with slow connections cause it comes with source packages like the source of 2.6.7 kernel.

IMO, the best distro to learn the basics in & out of linux.

My favorite

[Kilroy_Says]

I've tried plenty of linux distros(slack, RH, gentoo, deb, mand, suse) and freebsd, out of all of them slackware is by far my favorite. Some peopel complain about a package manager, but ive never been a fan of those anyway, i prefer to do it all by source. i honestly havent noticed too much of a difference between 9.1 and 10 aside from updated software(most of which i had already updated) I, personaly, see slack as a straight-to-the-point distro; which is exactly what i want. Plenty of oportunity to update anything you want. kernel 2.6.8-rc1 works great with slack 10 =) [/rant]

a question for any slack users on sparc boxes

[discogravy]

how does it perform on sun sparc boxes? i've had a couple of ultra60's come my way and I'd like to test it out on them. How's the install on it? So far the only thing (besides Solaris) that I've been happy with on an ultra60 has been FreeBSD. Gentoo was Not A Fun Install and debian was equally unimpressive (sadly.) But I'd like to see how slack performs on it -- I started to install slackware 9 on one and something shiny distracted me for a few weeks, but this makes me curious about it.

Re:a question for any slack users on sparc boxes

[spaceyhackerlady]

Slackware's SPARC port was stillborn, but has been reincarnated as SPLACK.

Never tried it; I run Debian (sorry...) on an Ultra 5. It works fine. For me, at least.

...laura

Re:a question for any slack users on sparc boxes

[sparcnut]

The only Slackware version that runs on sparc AFAIK is splack (as the other poster at my level said). It's way outdated though, it's a sparc port of slack 7.2 IIRC. I didn't notice much of a difference in speed between Gentoo and splack. That said, this was on an Ultra 1 at 167MHz, so if there were any performance differences they should have been quite evident to me. There was a _much_ bigger performance increase when going to a 200MHz processor.

Re:a question for any slack users on sparc boxes

[ESD]

Well, I'm trying to port a selection of Slackware 10 packages to Sparc at the moment, but it's not going very fast (due to a lack of time and a slow processor). No installer (yet), but at the moment I'm already compiling from a Debian/Slackware hybrid, with Slackware steadily gaining ground.

BTW: All of these packages are optimised for Sparc v8 or higher (It might be me, but I'm really noticing a speed improvement because of the hardware multiplication/division)

Gtnx
Marcel

Good for small servers?

[identity0]

I've been thinking about upgrading my local file server(videos and stuff, nothing important) from Red Hat 9 to a more modern distro. Would Slackware be a good choice, or should I go with Fedora? I've heard that Slackware does not have a good update tool like apt or yum. Does Slack have a good GUI configuration interface, or is it all CLI?

I'm not a complete newbie, I've tried Debian, Mandrake, and RH before, so I know my way around Linux. I just don't want to go through the pain of another Debian install, and I'm not sure that Mandrake is robust enough. I'd appreciate any expert advice on this, thanks.

Re:Good for small servers?

[Pizentios]

I don't know, i've always found updats just to be easy on slack. Not sure if there's a "update tool" persay, but there's always lost of howtos out there ;-)

Re:Good for small servers?

[jlanthripp]

Slackware does not put any fancy GUI hand-holding utilities between the administrator and the system. Pretty much all configuration is done by editing config files. This is a Good Thing(TM), and here's why: Those fancy, pretty, GUI-type configuration utilities introduce unnecessary possibilities for bugs to arise. I've never seen a GUI configuration utility that handled all the options and settings I wanted to modify, and rarely have I seen one correctly handle all the options and settings that it claims to handle.

There's also the matter of standardization - once you have learned to configure your own system without a 3rd-party kludge to hold your hand and do it for you in a point-and-drool interface, you can then apply that knowledge to pretty much any Unix-like system. If all the configuration you've ever done was accomplished via a distribution-specific GUI tool, then all you've learned to do is configure that specific version of that specific distribution.

Slackware uses a sophisticated software update system comprised of the pkgtool utility (and its attendant installpkg, removepkg, and upgradepkg cousins) and an incredible A.I.system abbreviated as "S.Y.S.O.P."

Through its amazing abilities, the S.Y.S.O.P. system monitors a steady feed of bug reports (the famed B.U.G.T.R.A.Q. system, first implemented in 1997 as an experiment in networking S.Y.S.O.P. systems over long distance, high latency networks in an asynchronus way) for information on what to do with the system. A S.Y.S.O.P. system will tirelessy maintain and care for your server installation, and can even create whole new bits of software, in the form of shell scripts or what have you, in the pursuit of its goals!

While those Debian people may be happy to just blindly apt-get-upgrade their BIND installation every few weeks, and those poor Redhat users are forced to rpm -i --force --nodeps nearly every single package they want, it has been found that through proper use of a S.Y.S.O.P. system, you can ditch the automated upgrades and truly secure your system(s) once and for all time! These amazing devices will also help end users if they are clustered sufficiently to prevent burnout.

An intelligient S.Y.S.O.P. -- no server should be without one!

Large parts of the previous few paragraphs were stolen from the alt.os.linux.slackware mod-fortunes file

Re:Good for small servers?

[bersl2]

I've heard that Slackware does not have a good update tool like apt or yum.

Swaret. From 9.1 on, it's in the extras directory. It's not as full of packages as apt is, but then again, if that's a problem, you're likely not a Slacker.

Re:Good for small servers?

[ChipMonk]

If you are putting GUI configuration on your server, you just broke its small-ness.

The GUI configuration tools on many Linux systems require a slew of other libraries to make them work. Xlib at least, then on to Xm, or GTK+, or Qt, and their requirments.

At least the old "linuxconf" had a CGI mode for web browsers. I believe "webmin" has a Slackware-compatible configuration.

Re:Good for small servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

it was only included in 9.1, it was removed from current afterwards due to the author's behavior and misrepresentations. Slack 10 does not include it.

Re:Good for small servers?

[tzanger]

If you are putting GUI configuration on your server, you just broke its small-ness.

That, and it feels like you're breaking the spirit of what a server should be... You shouldn't need a graphics card or even a mouse for a server, IMHO. :-)

That's why I kind of wish slackware's install disks were split up differently... Put all the graphical, desktop-useful stuff on disk 2, and keep all the "good stuff" on disk 1, and throw in OpenLDAP, PADL's nss_ldap (with configuration option in the setup), Postfix and PostgreSQL on Disk 1. There should be plenty of room on each CD then and (IMHO) it makes it much simpler/easier to install.

Re:Good for small servers?

[Q2Serpent]

those poor Redhat users are forced to rpm -i --force --nodeps nearly every single package they want

Honestly, if you know the least bit about RPM and Linux, you shouldn't ever need --nodeps or --force. I haven't used either flag in 3 years, and I currently maintain a few RPM-based systems, including installing security updates and upgrading the entire distribution.

Stop spreading FUD.

Re:Good for small servers?

[Pop69]

You forgot to point out that there are lots more mod-quote files at http://www.etv.cx/~bartosz

Re:Good for small servers?

[geekoid]

" Slackware does not put any fancy GUI hand-holding utilities between the administrator and the system"

None of them do need it. They all have a shell. This is a good thing.
I wrote a GUI for administrators years ago. It would 'remember' what you did, you could have it get all the options for a command and put them into check boxes. You could also enter a command into the textbox and it would behave as if it was entered into the command line.

It was sweet watching the gray hairs start using it regularly.

Re:Good for small servers?

[jlanthripp]

what, pray tell, is the name of it, and can I get it from Sourceforge or something?

Re:Good for small servers?

[jlanthripp]

Yup, and I just discovered that I managed to make it into Volume 6. Twice. My nickname in A.O.L.S. is RedBeard, if you'd like to look them up :)

Re:Good for small servers?

[Pop69]

Not to boast, but I'm in 1,3,5,6 and 7 ;-) 6 being the first even numbered one I got into.

This beginner loves Slackware

[ultranon]

I'm fairly new to the Gnu/Linux world and I have to agree with those who say that Slackware is NOT difficult to install and use, especially for geeks who have put in a lot of time on other platforms. I have tried all of the major distros, and have found that Slack posseses the best of all worlds. It is not only simple and stable, but it seems to me to be the most flexible distro.

I have had the most luck getting things to work in Slack. Sure, I don't have the benefits of something like apt-get or emerge (swaret and slapt-get don't quite measure up) but I'm also not limited by those tools. I installed and configured my Slack in under an hour, everything worked, and I have been able to get, install and use every piece of software that my heart has desired.

Coupled with Dropline Gnome, I have found Slack to be an excellent, complete and attractive desktop, even for the beginner/intermediate Linux user. I think that many of those who hold outdated, or second-hand impressions of Slack would be impressed by Slack 10.

To summarize, I love Slackware and want to marry it.

Re:This beginner loves Slackware

[geekoid]

"...Slackware is NOT difficult to install and use..."
As someone who started with slackware 1, I think "Slackware is NOT difficult to install and use anymore" would be more appropriet! ;)

Re:This beginner loves Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm fairly new to the Gnu/Linux world and I have to agree with those who say that Slackware is NOT difficult to install and use,"

I agree. I got my very first computer just last week and so I am very new to this world (I haven't even gotten around to creating a Slashdot account yet, I'm so busy learning all this new stuff!) However, I found installing Slackware very easy indeed. All the necessary information is readily provided on screen and is written in clearly and unambiguously. I can hardly imagine a more "user-friendly" installation procedure.

Once installed, I am finding that my day to day tasks are adequately catered for. For example, my homework is all the more impressive from being formatted with TeX and I am finding it is far quicker to edit the contents with Vim than it is to write out the document by hand (is this true of all "word processing" environments or is the Vim/Tex combination special in this regard?) Printing's a breeze too. Once the printer driver's have been setup (very easy I found, just run /usr/share/apsfilter/SETUP as root and follow the simple questions) I can just copy my postscript file to the printer device. And I have to say I am very impressed with TeX's ability to format mathematical formulae. Obviously, I don't need to do anything more complicated than long division at the moment but I can hardly wait to try out all those fancy greek letters and funny squiggly lines.

I have to admit though that I thought Slackware was lacking in it's support for the 2.6.x kernel I've been hearing so much about. Don't get me wrong a freshly compiled kernel works out of the box, but I found that I needed to tweak the init scripts to load modules and prepare the /dev file system slightly different than what has been provided by the Slackware company. For example, I was rather distressed that Alsa wouldn't work without my intervention. As I said though, I am very new to computing so perhaps there's a simple something that I have missed.

The best thing about Slackware though is its price. It's free! Which is brilliant of course. Even better is that because Slackware is free everything I can download off the Internet is also free. For example, I have found this really great website called Suprnova which offers gigabytes of public domain music, films and also applications and games for something called Windows that I have found I can use and play with something called Wine. Why do the people who write these applications and games use this Wine system? All other programs I use just seem to run from the bash prompt without the need for it. Oh well, I have a lot to learn I suppose.

All in all, Slackware has been an excellent introduction to the world of computing and I am positively wriggling with excitement at the prospect of the coming weeks. Hopefully by then, I will be UNIX gurus like everyone else on Slashdot.

The greatest hits of......

[lexsco]

Boney M ! Man, Slack really does have it all.

Pathfinder

[staili]

I'd like to know where I could download Pathfinder. You can see Pathfinder in one of the screenshots.
Few minutes with Google revealed it uses Fox-Toolkit and it's being deleloped by Jeroen van der Zijp, but nothing else.

Re:Pathfinder

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install FOX toolkit 1.2.7 and PathFinder comes with it. Make sure you read its ./configure file to figure out how to enable AA fonts on FOX, because the default is ugly non-AA fonts... Regarding customizing the colors of the FOX apps to match your Gnome's, email Eugenia from osnews, she should have a conf file for FOX. :)

Re:Pathfinder

[Anonymous Coward]

XFE (http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/) is similar to PathFinder.

Completely not my experience with slackware 10

[RLiegh]

I've been a linux user since 1996 and I downloaded all four cds and installed slackware; and then replaced it with mandrake 10!

I had two problems with slackware; first, switching from X to console mode (using ctrl-alt-fX) locked up my computer; the other one being that upon exiting X my terminal would be totally borked (meaning that it would be set to a bizarre resolution) which would only be cured by a reboot.

I didn't have the patience to track this down when I already had a ready, working and viable alternative (several, in fact). I'm rather sad as slackware was what introduced me to linux and got me going with it...but I would recommend XP, mandrake, knoppix, debian or openbsd over slackware at this point (depending on the user, their requirements, etc)

Re:Completely not my experience with slackware 10

[Kilroy_Says]

I had that problem for a while, happened to me when i was scrtewing around with the screen resolution in lilo.conf. It would boot just fine, but once i started X, if i ctl+alt+Fx then the screen looked all screwy(angry fruit salad!), i just set vga = normal and all worked out great for me.

Re:Completely not my experience with slackware 10

[Joseph Lam]

On the contrary I got that problem on Mandrake (around 8.x) and I suspect it had something to do with the particular video driver which couldn't cleanly switch video modes on certain hardware.

Re:C help

[Anonymous Coward]

start with for (i=1;...) (single equal for assignment, double for comparisons), and make that %s a %d to print a number instead of a string.

Turn on all warnings, this would have caught both your mistakes.

JBQ

About installing

[Chapium]

I havent tried out Slackware 10 yet, but in recent history with versions 8 & 9, installing was a breeze. Sort of. I dont recall any simple way to partition drives if I didnt quite know what I was doing, and half the battle of the install was getting these "easy to install" slackware packages configured. Call me lazy, but I just like it to work, so I can see what I'm dealing with first. Especially with the X server. Well rounded? It has KDE and Gnome + some server apps. Well rounded is a bit farfetched. (not that this is a bad thing) Alright, I confess thats a slack9 rant. I'm sure 10 is the grace of god. :D

Re:C help

[Anonymous Coward]

= vs == in for()

Where were you 10 years ago?

[younixguy]

10 years ago, if you knew what linux was, you'd know that Slackware was just about 1 of 3 or so linux distributions. And while you were doing you 30+ diskette installation of Windoze 95 about 8 to 9 years ago, you probably thought it was neat!

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[AndroidCat]

There was a floppy install for Win95? It must have been a special order. For Slackware 2.1, I bit the bullet and got a CD-ROM. I could have installed from floppy, but there was no way that I would have browsed through the 2 archive CDs that came with it.

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[younixguy]

No it wasn't special order. How old are you?

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[AndroidCat]

Just about every Win95 CD passed through the office, including the betas, RCs and gold discs, but I don't remember ever seeing a floppy install. I think all the developers would have gathered just to stare and point. :^)

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[adamjaskie]

I had a floppy install of Windows 95. I had to use it to install on an old laptop with no CD-ROM drive.

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 28 floppy install of Windows 95C. I will post a picture this weekend if you want, so shut the fuck up.

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[AndroidCat]

If that'll make you happy, go ahead. If not, store those disks deeply away from all sunlight. I just said that I don't recall seeing one. Perhaps I repressed the memory?

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[Idealius]

Same here (except desktop rather than notebook). It only took 13 floppies for the upgrade from 3.1, though. And, honestly, besides the MASSIVE number of bugs Win 95 had it was quite the step up. Just look at 98SE compared to 95, then network performance between 98SE & 2k/XP -- can we say "finally" a year after XP came out???

It's still relatively low security but now it's approaching (or will soon, SP2??) comparable speed both CPU and Network based, stability, and superior 3D support. Point is I'm a friggin' Windows technician. If I recommended Linux to customers after I fixed their problem you know how much I would increase your profits regarding the namebrand game????????

I would be willing to bet at least five times what it normally is.

Like most techs my age, though (21) I care most about video.

Anyway, point is, during the time I was on dial-up using 95 & 98SE I always booted into Slackware if I really wanted fast Internet access with Linux network architecture combined with Lynx's minimalist's approach.

*Sigh*

I have a dual boot with Slackware 9.1 that requires a russian Win 98SE CDROM boot disk to run (do I look like I'm kidding??) who's major downfall regarding my use is the 9800XT's minor driver (existance??) that doesn't support 3D. I mean c'mon, 9800XT (530$+ when I bought it maybe ~5 months ago) and it doesn't support 3-friggin-D in linux.

Anyway, that's the #1 thing that stops me from using Linux. I'm a hobbyist programmer that excels in graphics hardware acceleration. If I spend so much money on the hardware and the software doesn't support it, why even bother??

I guess if my job required I know Linux I would adopt it, but until then I'm in Windows chilling just biding my time.

Keep that in mind. If someone really pursues reverse engineering ATI drivers from Windows and implementing them in Linux you will see me laugh like a moron and happily convert because the software (read: graphics design & games) sucks anyway. Popular software support for expensive hardware who's purpose is to play the latest games = a market. Point is that pretty much 99% of gameplay sucks right now anyway, so the only motiviation is the near full use of my oft-used hardware. I could MAKE 3D stuff for Linux. BOOM -- there's a chance my skills will lead to my fame not to mention the results of my skills producing a market.

I only say all of this because I WANT the GPL/Open Source to succeed.

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[adamjaskie]

Well, I couldn't tell you much about anything since 98SE. That's about when I quit Windows. I never installed Windows on my current computer, just Slackware 9, then I used SWARET to upgrade to 9.1, and now 10. I play Quake III Arena, Savage, UT2004, and, soon, Doom III, on my 9700 Pro, but I am not really a serious gamer. Maybe a couple hours of gaming a week. Most of my time on the computer is spent reading forums, chatting on IRC, and messing around with whatever thing I am currently reading about. Perl, PHP, whatever.

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't think there was a standard Windows 95 floppy install. I do remember my old win95 bugging me to make a backup of it in case "anything were to happen." Like Windows 95 would ever crash...
...
...
Anyways, don't get your panties in a bunch. It's not a huge deal.

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[Dot.Com.CEO]

What THE HELL are you talking about???? ATI's fglrx drivers work fine on the 9800XT. They're not fast, they're not bug-free, but they work.

A CD-ROM to boot????? Ever heard of LILO? Grub?

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[spudgun]

Yes Windows 95 has a Floppy Install
for Windows 95 A
Windows B and C added many more disks and were only ever seen on OEM CD-ROMs

Win95 B was Known for Stability, C added IE 4.0 and active desktop, and we all know what that did for Windows stability

Windows 95A was 13 Disks (+ 1 I think)

and I installed it on a 486 with 32 MB about 7 or 8 times before I managed to decide the hardware was faulty and corrupting the install on "Windows 95 is starting for the first time" , now that was an ugly blue/black screen.

I poped in a Slackware Floppy and it found the bad hardware on boot.

If slackware/linux had had the software back then it could have taken MS. I remember my 486/25 always ran smoother with FVWM than with Win 3.1/3.11 (which i needed for Office 4.2)

and for anyone who wants to know what slackware was like in 1996 (Ver3.1) just download it and try it on a 486. oh how I miss those Infomagic CD sets

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[13Echo]

ATI's drivers DO support the 9800 series on Linux. Sure, the drivers are far from perfect, but they work (I didn't have any problems with most games). I used them for some time before selling my Radeon and buying a GeForce card.

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[hb253]

I installed Win95 via floppy. I think it was 13 disks. What a pain.

Re:Where were you 10 years ago?

[Idealius]

Do they have 3D support?

I could have used LILO but I had trouble with it last time around: LILO would come up with "LIL" (where's the 'o'??) and then comp freezes. Grub is a boot manager too so I tried to avoid those because my last batch of problems with them along with the fact that I really don't want to risk making my copy of XP unbootable. (Hey, not likely, but still a possibility.)

(Also, in my own defense I was completely slammed last night when I made that post, lol -- it happens.)

Slacker since 1995

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a huge fan of Slackware. I've been a subscriber to the CD distro since 1995, and have installed slack on countless systems... it takes me about 40 minutes start to finish these days.

I have found that a plain vanilla Slackware install is actually a more complete multimedia system than RedHat.

However, that article sucks, and those screen shots are ridiculous.

Re:Er, no thanks

[Kilroy_Says]

wow, those are some loooooooooooooooong arms. hippy stench aka. pot smoke =D

Re:Er, no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

He is not ugly at all: (he's the first in the row)

Re:C help

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be apparent that what I'm trying to do...

It's not. =) Are you trying to print out all characters (ASCII TABLE), or are you trying to print out the numebers between 1 and 255? To print an ASCII table, try

printf("%d - %c\n", i, i);

or just use

printf("%d", i);

if you are just trying to print numbers.

Grrreeattt !!!

[ROOK*CA]

w00t ! this is great news , can't wait to get Slack 10 onto a lab box and put it through it's paces.

Anybody done testing on this puppy yet ? I would be interested to hear impressions of server side app performance (especially on Intel based servers).

Re:Grrreeattt !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

We're running it with stock kernel.org 2.6.7 SMP on dual xeon SCSI boxes with HT enabled, MySQL flies ;-)

Slackware is Classic UNIX

[ceswiedler]

Slackware is for people who want a classic UNIX system. Debian, Red Hat, etc. all have their places, but Slack is for people who grew up on, administer, use, and love UNIX.

Re:Slackware is Classic UNIX

[losinggeneration]

Errr.... Slackware is possibly the most UNIX like Linux. Though I would think if you want a more classic UNIX system to get a BSD which was at one point actually UNIX. Call me crazy. (Just so you know, I'm running Slack 10 right now :P)

Who is eugenia

[chris_mahan]

Who is eugenia Loli-Queru, married to Jean Baptiste, who is in the screenshots? With her email address eloli ~at~ hotmail ' com, and what is slackware doing installed on a celeron?

Who is Michael Hall who works for a consultancy and does server installs like the articel says, but who uses eugenia's screenshots?

mmm?

Re:Who is eugenia

[Anonymous Coward]

Use some imagination.

I run OSNews.com and the shots are mine from my slackware installation, as Michael didn't send any slack shots when he sent in his article for publication.

Oh, and my Slackware is not installed on a Celeron. It is installed on an AthlonXP.

Eugenia

Re:Who is eugenia

[chris_mahan]

So the screens don't relate to the article?

On celeron, ok.

Use some imagination? Ah, yes, I suppose. Where in france did you marry?

Re:Who is eugenia

[Anonymous Coward]

> So the screens don't relate to the article?

They are just generic shots from slackware 10. All generic Linuxes like slack are similar to this regard, it woldn't look much different if that was gentoo or debian

>Where in france did you marry?

Nancy.

Re:Who is eugenia

[geekoid]

OK, somebody has mod point and exactly NO sense of humor.

Love slak, get the subscription

[kick_in_the_eye]

I have been a slackware user from before slackware (SLS). Have had a subscription since 7.0. Get it, it supports Patrick V. and at a release rate of 6-9 months, it comes pretty cheap, and it gives you emergency disks too.

I also like...

[Banner]

That the security out of the Box is excellent and Patrick checks everything out before releasing it.

Yes Slackware is never the first out when a new kernal comes along, but how often does Slackware get hacked versus Redhat? Or other versions? Everytime I see a 'vulnerability' published, I go and check and find my Slackware box isn't running that version.

And it's not like people haven't tried to hack my server (it's been tried a lot over the years), but so far with Slackware I've never had a problem (fingers crossed!) I reccomend it to everyone worried about security, out of the box it's head and shoulders above everyone else IMHO.

Re:I also like...

[Shulai]

Well, I'd like Slack to be a bit more hackeable few days ago.
Let me explain: I installed Samba 3 to become a domain member server, on Slack 9.1 (while 10 already available, I had a nice Samba 9.1 server image I installed two weeks before, and I wanted to work as little as possible). It worked nice, but wasn't able to authenticate transparently with the PDC because it has no PAM.
Pat didn't like PAM's security issues. I respect that. But because of this I wasn't able to get the thing working. I installed PAM from source, but it still didn't work, and the fact Samba was the only thing PAM-aware didn't help, because I can't check it on a different service.
Affortunately, finally we found the customer needs were trivial and domain auth wasn't necessary at all.
Besides that complaint (and a few forgettable things I'd like to see in Slackware), it still is my distro of choice since 1995.

Re:I also like...

[tzanger]

Nine times out of ten people want PAM to authenticate to LDAP, and for that there's the FAR less bloated, FAR less convoluted nss_ldap module. It should be able to handle AD integration which should eliminate your needs ffor PAM.

Migration in a Pinch

[Drache Kubisuro]

I was able to whipe my root partition of Slack 9.1, install Slack 10, overlay my old known modified /etc/ configuration files onto the new system, and be ready to go after installing a handful of unofficial desktop packages. Apache w/https, samba, nfs, iptables, courier-imap, and so on. Basically, all server functions were available within less than an hour after install because the infrastructure of Slack 10 remained the same as Slack 9.1. That to me is absolutely critical to my happiness.

The compile environment is top notch and so zero problems occured while packaging software from source (such as courier-imap). Everything went off without a hitch. I attribute that to lack of automated configuration systems and keeping everything virgin. I'm glad LILO is still being used, because in Debian-Testing, when selecting to use XFS for the root partition, it complains that GRUB may have issues. I'm glad Slack is keeping it real :-)

Re:Migration in a Pinch

[Kilroy_Says]

Slackware is for people who want to learn. In fact, slack almost forces you to learn linux the way its supposed to be used. A) know where all the configuration files are B) know the syntax of the configuration files C) knowing command line seems to impress the less computer savy ;-) And i think screen shots of a linux distro are kinda pointless anyway because; one of my favorite things about linux; you can have it look anyway you want because of the numerous window managers.

Re:Migration in a Pinch

[geekoid]

yeah, god forbid someone want a Linux distro to, you know, just use.

Re:Migration in a Pinch

[Kilroy_Says]

WINDOWS is for people who want a computer to just.. work, with as little effort as possible. LINUX is for people who want a computer to work the way they want. you want point-and-click, go back to windows...

Re:Migration in a Pinch

[Anonymous Coward]

"Slackware is for people who want to learn. In fact, slack almost forces you to learn linux the way its supposed to be used."

After 8 years of using linux, I completely forgot to ask slackware on how I should use linux. I honestly didn't know the evils of letting the installer configure my X server for me. But I learned my lesson too late and many cute and cuddly kittens lost their lives because I chose to use RedHat/Suse/Mandrake instead.

But you know what? I just realized there are hordes of people trying to put linux on the desktop. I'll make sure that they consult the slackware community on proper linux usage so they don't make the same mistake I did. Thanks!

Re:Migration in a Pinch

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me get this straight -- so, if we all listened to you, Linux is for people who want a computer to work the way they want -- as long as it's used the way it's supposed to be used.

I'm so glad we don't listen to you.

Michael Hall wrote an informative article

[oberondarksoul]

Moderation: 5, Informative

Re:Looks great (is it 1996 still ?)

[DMadCat]

why is it i cringe when i see open source apps GUI's in a "screenshot" everytime i read the spec get all excited then i see the screenshots and think "nahh ill stick with OSX/WinXP

Because you think being a power user is using Outlook rather than Outlook Express?

Because you ditched that baby AOL stuff and signed up with Earthlink DSL, so now you're the hacker in the family?

No, no, lemme guess... you ordered the Slackware disks but when you put one in your CD drive it wouldn't Autostart so you decided it sucked.

(yeah, yeah, I know... don't feed the trolls...)

Re:My impression (correction)

[ChipMonk]

OpenOffice.org is excluded due to licensing restrictions. Specifically, OO.o uses a graphics rendering toolkit that has restrictions Patrick believes are incompatible with the GPL.

At the same time, he has no objections to someone installing it on their own.

If they'd release half life 2 on Slack 10...

[Banner]

I'd never use anything else.

Of course, by the time the release HL2, we'll probably be upto Slack 20...

(But seriously, if all the hot FPS games ran on Linux my windows box would be gone.)

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware is by far my favourite distro. It was the first one I tried back in 1996. It's simple and clean. I havent tried Slackware 10.0 yet but I'm looking forward to giving it a shot.

Liar or Ignorant

[antizeus]

And un-installing an unneeded package is so much cleaner when you use a package management system. With Slackware you have to guess which files belong with what package you wish to remove.

• Use removepkg to remove a package.
• Look in /var/log/packages/ to see what packages you have.
• Each file in that directory lists the files installed via that package.

Are you lying, or just ignorant?

Re:Liar or Ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh for fuck's sake, that's barely a package management system at all. That's like saying that cp, rm, and locate are all you need for package management. Sure, it works, but damn is it lame.

The whole point of having a computer is that it does the work for you, not the other way around. Slack is living in the early 90's with its "package management" tool and there's a whole lot of thick heads out there that feel they need to defend it as if they were defending an assault on their manhood.

Slack's got a shitty package tool. Fucking accept it!

Re:Liar or Ignorant

[antizeus]

It's one thing to call a package management system "shitty" and to insult its proponents. It's another thing to express meaningful arguments for the inadequacy of that system.

You have obviously chosen the former. I wonder, though, if you expect to convince anyone of your views, or if you're just looking for a flame war.

Re:Liar or Ignorant

[Blnky]

Slack is living in the early 90's with its "package management" tool

The comedy here is that many Slackware users have felt the same way about RedHat's dependency management. Microsoft already demonstrated how miserable it can be. To us RedHat is living in the early 90's with their "dependency management" tool. Been there, done that, already know it sucks when something gets awry, reminds me of dll hell only now its on Linux. I am still hoping Solaris doesn't jump on it whole hog. Eeech.

Before you flame me RedHat guys, keep in mind I am not saying you are wrong or right. You chose your distribution because you liked and felt like you needed dependency management. Nothing wrong with that. Slackware users didn't want dependency management, in that form, and we chose our distribution with that in mind. Ninety nine percent of the time you don't have the problems I associate with current attempts at dependency management. Be aware that ninety nine percent of the time we don't have the problems you associate with not having your style of dependency management.

Slack's got a shitty package tool. Fucking accept it!

It's elegant in its underlying simplicity and trivial in its ease of use. Just select what you want and say install. If it is these attributes that you oppose then I am not sure I can help you. I do hear, however, that they have openings for a kernel developer for Longhorn.

Re:Er, no thanks

[AndroidCat]

That's not pot, that's frop from the pipe of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs.

Re:Looks great (is it 1996 still ?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you ditched that baby AOL stuff and signed up with Earthlink DSL, so now you're the hacker in the family?

You're not supposed to feed the trolls, but that was pretty amusing anyway. Thanks for the laugh!

Re:Er, no thanks

[Kilroy_Says]

so THATS thats guys name huh? i was wondering that...

Have You Bought Your Slackware Today?

[reallocate]

Not sure what you mean by "free", but Patrick V. has been selling Slackware online for quite some time. It would be nice if people actually bought it.

Re:Have You Bought Your Slackware Today?

[daft_one]

Even better would be if people donated, while using bittorrent... IIRC, donations should go to paypal at slackware dot com.

Re:Have You Bought Your Slackware Today?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought 9.something

I also bought 7.something and 4.somthing and 2.something. Does that count?

Re:Have You Bought Your Slackware Today?

[reallocate]

I see nothing about donations at the Slackware site. Here's the store: http://store.slackware.com

Anyway, why is a "donation" (quotes because it is not a charity) "better" than buying it?

This chatter about people "contributing" to businesses is more than a ittle strange.

Re:Have You Bought Your Slackware Today?

[weeboo0104]

I first used RedHat and Mandrake back in 1998.
Stayed away from Slack because people said it was hard.

I tried Slackware version 9.0. I Downloaded it from a mirror and had no issues running it whatsoever. I loved compiling apps from source and the using Slackware packager wasn't nearly as hard as I was led to believe. I purchased 9 even though I already had the CDs and also purchased the Slackware fundamentals book for an overview.

I just got my Slack 10 CDs this past weekend and also my Slackware caseplates and my mousepad. I didn't even bother downloading the ISOs because I know this is a quality distro and have no doubts that it will run on all of my machines.

Buy your copy of Slackware today! (or kill me)

Re:Have You Bought Your Slackware Today?

[daft_one]

I) The donation info was gleaned from an old linuxgazette article (http://www.linuxgazette.com/book/view/2582). Now that I look, I don't see anything about donations on the slackware site either. Maybe the paypal account isn't even used anymore. Emailing Pat to ask is left as an exercise for the interested reader. II) All things equal, receiving money and not sending out boxed software nets more profit than receiving money and sending out boxed software. I know not all slashers have attended business school, but this seemed pretty elementary to me ;) Hence, "donations" "would" "be" "better," "even" "if" "the" "recipient" "is" "not" "a" "charity."

Install From Source

[reallocate]

Install from source.

The thing I really like about Slackware is that I can install anything I want without waiting for someone to wrap it up in whatever packaging scheme my distribution uses. Sure, you can do that in any distribution, but the packager and dependency resolver won't know about it.

when I have the time, my favorite way of installing Slackware is to install only the bare minimum, and then build things like X and window managers and apps on top.

Re:Install From Source

[Q2Serpent]

So... what do you do when you install something that you decide you no longer want? What about when you want to upgrade or downgrade something? Installing from source is fine for small things, like testing out a program by using a unique --prefix to place it in its own subdirectory, but to install an entire system like that just causes more trouble than it's worth in the long run.

Re:Install From Source

[reallocate]

Well, you can use a tool like CheckInstall which rolls everything out in a nice Slackware package. Then, you use the Slack package tools and install, upgrade or remove as per usual.

Or, you use locate and find and remove everything manually. Takes a while, but it isn't rocket science.

I've installed X, KDE and Gnome, among others, from source, and updated them.

For that matter. most decent akefiles can be executed in dry run mode so you can get a record of what's being installed where.

Re:Install From Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, in that same README file it mentions just that.. make clean, make distclean if I recall correctly.

Been using slackware since 96 and totally love it. I tried SuSE and Red Hat both disappointing as far as installs. For one, they wouldn't install on Compaq Proliants very well. Time for the old slackware CD, with a floppy with the correct boot image, or selecting the one I want from the CD, and I was off and running.

Of course, the other thing, it isn't too bloated with a plethora apps which are redundant in nature.

Not sure on the whole package deal, but I usually just download the source compile and go.

Re:Install From Source

[13Echo]

I keep my sources for most of my programs. If I want to remove the program, I simply go to the source directory, switch to root, and type:

"make uninstall"

Viola.

The majority of programs that use a Makefile for installation will have no problems uninstalling a program with "make uninstall". I've been doing this since I started using Slackware 7, and have never had a problem.

A more conventional way is to simply make a Slackware package with "makepkg". It only takes a few seconds more. "Checkinstall" is another option, but it doesn't come with Slackware by default.

Re:Install From Source

[Lord REL]

I use makepkg as checkinstall doesnt work when libsafe is used/

It just wraps packages so you just fix permissions, compile, install to a clean temporary DESTDIR and use makepkg to create the package

Re:Install From Source

[DrMorris]

I use stow for things which are not available via packages. It's not as intrusive as installing custom baked packages and much cleaner than installing somewhere under /usr/local or /opt because you don't have to rely on a make uninstall or clutter these directories with subdirs.

Re:Install From Source

[jon3k]

Um, you don't HAVE to use ANY distro's package management. I run redhat and compile 99.9% of whats on my workstation, beyond the initial installation.

Re:Install From Source

[reallocate]

Very true, but in my experience that means you can never go back and use the package manager with confidence.

Slack does not lack in package management

[bender647]

Many people don't understand that Slackware does have a package management system: its just so damn simple that you can use common Unix tools to administer it. I can check where any file on my system came from with a simple grep of /var/log/packages, and build or alter a package myself by putting the files in a directory and calling makepkg.

One week at work using "that enterprise" system with RPM, writing those silly spec files for software I was never going to distribute and I was ready to pull my hair out.

Re:Slack does not lack in package management

[part15guy]

The one thing that .tgz is missing is dependencies. It would be nice to see a list of dependencies when I install a package so I don't have to reverse engineer them.

Don't get me wrong - I like the simplicity and do NOT want a package management system that automatically loads dependencies or doesn't let me install something that it thinks requires files that are not installed.

I just would like to know what else I should install or what the consequences of removing a package are before I do it.

Re:Slack does not lack in package management

[bender647]

Swaret can do dependency checks on official slackware packages. It tells you what libs are missing and asks if you want to install them.

It is not the same as having a list in the package, and probably can't handle uninstall consequences

For some reason, swaret has a bad rap among many slackwarers, but I think if used hand in hand with the Changelogs its a great tool.

Re:Er, no thanks

[AndroidCat]

The Dobbshead. From where Dr. Dobb's magazine got its name. The Atari ST had one buried in its character set (2x2 characters). Even Microsoft uses it, "Bob" help us!

Worst Thing About Gentoo

[reallocate]

The worst thing about installing Gentoo is waiting 15 hours to find out you screwed up.

14 screenshots...

[purplepaste]

that I won't get to see until tomorrow ;-(

It's Got A Package Manager!

[reallocate]

Geez, Slackware has a package manager. It doesn't have automatic dependency resolution.

Pay attention.

Re:It's Got A Package Manager!

[Kilroy_Says]

I never said slack doesn't have a package manager, i know it does. I just never use it. I prefer to compile everything from source though, gives me a lil more control over what is installed and the options to change whats installed, AND the options to configure the program more to my needs.

Re:It's Got A Package Manager!

[tzanger]

The package manager doesn't stop you from doing that:

# ls -l asteriskpacks
total 16660
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1923196 Jun 1 16:07 asterisk-20040601-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4941975 Jun 14 12:49 asterisk-20040614-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1968555 Jun 29 16:39 asterisk-20040629-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 110842 May 18 15:58 libpri-20040518-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 125363 Jun 29 16:39 libpri-20040629-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 156163 Jun 11 07:43 spandsp-0.0.1-i386-3.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 181294 Jun 29 16:39 zaptel-20040629-i386-1.tgz

# ls -l perlpacks
total 1168
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8197 Jun 9 15:25 Authen-SASL-2.07-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11088 Jun 9 15:25 Crypt-DES-2.03-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4174 Jun 9 15:25 Digest-HMAC-1.01-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 270 Jun 9 15:25 Digest-MD5-2.33-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14363 Jun 9 15:25 Digest-SHA1-2.10-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17690 Jun 9 15:25 Frontier-RPC-0.07b4-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 67602 Jun 9 15:25 HTML-Parser-3.36-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8033 Jun 9 15:25 HTML-Tagset-3.03-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 138472 Jun 9 15:25 Net-Jabber-1.30-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 76543 Jun 9 15:25 Net-SNMP-4.1.2-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 287181 Jun 9 15:26 RRDs-1.0.48-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 56910 Jun 9 15:25 URI-1.30-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 201243 Jun 9 15:25 XML-Parser-2.34-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46094 Jun 9 15:25 XML-Stream-1.21-i386-1.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 225149 Jun 9 15:25 libwww-perl-5.79-i386-1.tgz

You'll not find any of those on the slackware site (nor on any of the third-party slackware package sites I've found).

I dunno -- I can build packages any way I want, with any flags and options... AND I get the benefits of being able to easily upgrade/remove packages... Doing things from source does not preclude these benefits, and Slackware's unobtrusive package manager makes it a breeze. Checkinstall rocks, although it doesn't handle Perl modules nicely, so I have a custom script for that. Pretty much everything else works with it, though. :-)

Re:It's Got A Package Manager!

[Anonymous Coward]

You pay attention. Read the fucking post. He was right on the money.

Not so stable anymore

[Espectr0]

The kernel is buggy. I play some mp3's and sometimes the whole computer freezes for about 10 seconds.

Also, my usb flash drive gets detected as a UMSDOS or something filesystem. I had to manually mount it as vfat.

Still no postgresql, only mysql. The kde mix program keeps crashing when closing it.

screenshots?

[beattie]

What is the point of screenshots of a distro? The screenshots are of X and whatever WM/DE you use. Screenshots of KDE make sense. Those of Slackware dont.

Two reasons

[Shulai]

1) When you had no choice but editing the config files, you'll learn. Is not bad to have the choice, though.
2) When you edit configuration structure made to be understood by humans, and not by a GUI config tool, you won't refuse so easily to do it. The smaller amount of bell and wistles helps too.

Package Management Dependency Resolution

[reallocate]

Package management is not dependency resolution. Stop displaying your ignorance.

Some of us don't like letting a script we didn't write decide what gets on our machines.

It's My Machine; I'll Resolve The Dependencies

[reallocate]

If you use the tools it provides, Slackware tracks the packages you install and allows you to cleanly remove or upgrade each package. That's a long way from simply expanding a tar file and installing from source.

Slack doesn't do automatic dependency resolution, which is not at all related to package management. A lot of us are glad it doesn't.

Re:It's My Machine; I'll Resolve The Dependencies

[iive]

My favorit program for creating slackware packages is 'checkinstall'. You can find it in extra/ directory of Slackware10 CD3.
After you compile program from source, insted of writing `make install` you should write `checkinstall`. Few simple questions (yes,no) and you got a new package.
If you don't like the new program you can remove it with the good old 'removepkg' command. No need to browse all directories and hunt down files one by one.

Something more, the package file is saved and you can install it on another system!

There is another program for automatic package creating in the extra/ directory. It is the very same program Pat is using to build slack.

Happy Hacking

Be In Charge of Your Machine

[reallocate]

Slackware posts its changelog on the web. All you need to do is stop by every so often and see what's been updated. Then you download what you want and install it. I suppose if you really want it to flash at you like other distributions, you could jury rig one of those webpage trackers to go "beep" when the page is updated.

Seriously, this illustrates one of the attractive features of Slackware. I don't need to turn over control of my machine to some unknown update script on some unknown server. I install what I choose to install. For example, I compile my own Mozilla rather than installing the version that comes with Slackware. The last thing I want is for some whizbang tool to install its version of Mozilla on top of mine.

Re:Be In Charge of Your Machine

[jon3k]

All the Slack guys are trying to paint the up2date system like some evil, untrustable system hosting somewhere in eastern bolivia. The packages you manually download are just as likely to be tampered with as any of the mirror sites.

Look guys, you pick what to install, what to update, and it verifies it all with GPG keys.

And for the record, I like redcarpet personally. Very easily allows me to remotely manage a number of similiar redhat installations. Its quick, and its easy.

Re:Be In Charge of Your Machine

[reallocate]

Can't speak for anyone else, but it isn't the tampering issue that concerns me. Anything is subject to tampering, including source code.

I've had bad experiences with automatic dependency resolvers, so I don't trust them to always do the right thing.

Plus, they can be flippin' annoying: When a dependency resolver tells me I can't install XYZ because of dependency conflicts or other issues, and I turn around and install XYZ cleanly from source, I lose respect for that dependency resolver.

Re:My impression (correction)

[beakburke]

Really, I never heard Patrick explain this. Link?? What's the toolkit?

Finally a subscriber

[Harald Paulsen]

After using slackware for several years I've finally gotten around to cough up the money for a subscription.

After all, slackware has proven itself valuable again and again so it's about time I start contributing some money to the slackware team. If you use slackware regularly, I suggest you do the same. Patrik has to eat you know.

Re:Finally a subscriber

[nijk]

Patrik has to eat you know.

I read that as "Patrik has to eat you now". Jesus don't scare me like that.

+1 to Slackware

[jaaron]

I agree. I run slackware at home and just finished installing a GForge instance on Slackware 10 at work. So very nice.

why PAM is a good thing...

[Ayanami Rei]

Auditing (logging), and policy enforcement (lockouts, password lengths, etc.)

You set it in one place (/etc/pam.d)... configure any special rules for specific services, without having to patch binaries or modify multiple configuration files.

Re:why PAM is a good thing...

[kesuki]

damn, and i thought this was why pam was good.. ERR wrong pam sorry lol!!

pkgsrc and slack

[drxyzzy]

For another option, netbsd's pkgsrc system works very well with many Unix variants. I have used it with previous Slackware releases, not 10 yet. Pkgsrc has the advantage of giving you a single multiplatform packaging toolset for BSDs, Linuxes, Solaris, and others.

Re:pkgsrc and slack

[SteelX]

Was it easy to bootstrap pkgsrc with Slack? Also, can Slack packages and pkgsrc packages co-exist? Just curious.. ;-)

Re:pkgsrc and slack

[Anonymous Coward]

Search for "pkgsrc slackware linux" with google..

Re:pkgsrc and slack

[drxyzzy]

Yes, it was easy to bootstrap pkgsrc when I used it on Slackware. I do not remember any major problems. It helps to be comfortable with make and autoconf tools - the good and bad of open source is it's such a moving target.

Pkgsrc can coexist with other packaging systems. In one case, we had a couple aging Slackware 7 servers running. We did not want to take them out of service but needed to run a new program on them. By adding a pkgsrc tree, we got a whole new generation of compiler, autoconf tools, etc without affecting the legacy bits.

What would probably not work well would be mixing an interpreter from one packaging system (Perl, Python, Erlang, etc) with modules from another packaging system.

There may be more software available in the "native" packages for a given OS than with pkgsrc. OTOH we like that pkgsrc gives us a consistent interface for config management across several OSes. YMMV.

Re:pkgsrc and slack

[SteelX]

Thanks! I'll give it a spin sometime. I'm very used to the BSD ports... the idea of being able to use it for Linux really intrigues me. :-) Thanks for the note on mixing interpreters.

Re:My impression (correction)

[ChipMonk]

It seems to me that the toolkit was the GD library. It has to do with painting intersections, exclusions, and inclusions of image regions. However, it's listed at www.boutell.com as being Open Source.

A quick glance at the "external requirements" page at OO.o doesn't list GD. Maybe they've replaced it with their own "thing".

And on top of all this, I don't remember exactly where I saw Pat's explanation. Perhaps in a personal email *g* which I have no way of checking right now because I'm at work.

(If there were a "lame" rating, I know this posting would get it.)

Re:Looks great (is it 1996 still ?)

[poohsuntzu]

Looking good as in:

screenshot 1
screenshot 2
even more screenshots

Don't confuse what the article creator was using (default looking Gnome) with what you can make it look like, and how you can make it preform.

It's about time

[geekoid]

that slackware 2 came out... ;)

Re:Looks great (is it 1996 still ?)

[gunpowder]

A remark to screenshot 1:

Although I think transparency/translucency is a nice feature to have, a X terminal window is definitely is NOT an application where you want to use it. Do you really want to damage your eyesight?

The background picture is nice 'though ;)

Re:Looks great (is it 1996 still ?)

[poohsuntzu]

I think it really depends on the person. For example, like in screenshot 1 I have my X set to only 80% transparency therefore it doesn't bother my eyes in the least. I can understand at 60% or even 70%. But at 80% in combination with the right colors, you don't even notice a difference, in my humble opinion.

All comes down to personal preference and what bugs one person but not another I guess.

Thanks, took me a few hours to get that background just the way I like it!

Re:Looks great (is it 1996 still ?)

[gunpowder]

The problem is not the brightness contrast (which you can change by reducing the transparency level), but the colour contrast.
Choosing the right colours is more important than choosing the right brightness difference. Most PC user are not aware of this fact.

Equiluminant colors is only once think that comes to mind when I think what can go wrong ...

Re:Looks great (is it 1996 still ?)

[gunpowder]

arglll. I think I need some sleep. Typos all over the place. Please forgive me!

Oh, I forgot, this is /.

Blowfish passwords?

[JonMartin]

What a concidence, I'm in the middle of upgrading from Slack 9 to 10 as I type this. Maybe someone here can answer this question: is it possible to do Blowfish passwords on Slackware? I did find a few patches out there (glibc and shadow) and I'm building them now. Maybe it will work. Has anybody out there tried anything like this? Remember, Slackware doesn't use PAM.

Redhat 5.2 kicks Slackware 97's ass

[Anonymous Coward]

This was my experience circa 1997(1998?):

"I can't believe I wasted so much time trying to get slackware 97 to install. I had Redhat 5.2 up and running in no time flat. I will never go back to Slackware tarball dependency hell"

While your KDE point is spot on, slack was the last major distribution to get some kind of package management, and since slack packages are just tarballs, does it really do any dependency handling, anyone? But if you were going to slack, you really should have tried debian or gentoo first. Both handle dependencies and have been doing it for years now. Both have also been kinder to KDE than RedHat has been lately.

screenshots???

[nazsco]

screenshots? let me guess: you're new to slackware and made a red-hat like review

On a side note: support for internation keyboards is broken in slackware 10.0 (i just tested brazillian ABNT2) wich worked fine in 4, 7, 8, 9 and 9.1

Nice Distro, Shame about the Users

[vandan]

I've said it once and I'll say it again:

Slackware users are jerks.

I migrated to Gentoo in disgust after seeing one too many newbie being flamed by the self-appointed Gods of alt.os.linux.slackware in response to what were honestly not-too-bad questions. And for the record, no it was not me getting flamed - apart from when I told the resident dickheads to grow up or risk alienating all users - newbies or not.

I simply didn't want to associate with people with that sort of attitude.

The Gentoo forums were a very refreshing change. They have a real community 'feeling', and seeing any flames on any topic is a rare thing indeed.

I have nothing but the highest level of respect for Pat. How anyone can put together a distro of the calibre of Slackware, basically by themselves, is beyond me. If I were setting up a server for someone else in a hurry, I'd probably choose Slackware because of it's stability and simplicity. But keep me away from the users, please!

Re:Nice Distro, Shame about the Users

[ESD]

Hmm, that's not really my experience with Slackware users, but maybe that's because I'm not on the newsgroup. The attitude on the linuxpackages.net forums seems to be a lot better, although there still is the occasional angry remark (but then again, everybody gets irritated sometimes :-)

I've heard some bad stories about Gentoo user attitudes, but these were mostly from Debian users (who don't seem to be any better to me than what they make out Gentoo users for). From the few things I've seen from the Gentoo forums, they indeed seem to be a helpful and friendly community.

Gtnx
Marcel

Re:Nice Distro, Shame about the Users

[oneandoneis2]

Same goes for me - not really used the newsgroup, but have nothing but good things to say about the Slack crowd on linuxquestions.org With the possible exception of people who ask "How do I get the scrollwheel to work on my mouse", anyway... :o)

Re:Nice Distro, Shame about the Users

[reallocate]

Agree. The newsgroup is littered with obnoxious and arrogant bastards. Even when they deign to answer a question, they're often wrong.

But, then, the newsgroup is not connected in any way to the distribution.

Re:Nice Distro, Shame about the Users

[wellard1981]

I use Gentoo as my distro of choice, for both my desktop and web server.

I have used Slackware in the past, and yes.. I found it easy to set-up. However, ever since switching to Gentoo I found that I actually prefer building my system sources! (proper geek!)

Slackware is just like any other Linux distro, they all have their good and bad points, weather it be performance, stability, usability, etc. Slackware is not a bad thing, and i've wondered into the Slack forums, newsgroups, irc chat rooms, etc.. and they all seem helpful enough.

Anyway, at the end of the day, it's not what distro you use, it's how you use it! ;)

Re:Nice Distro, Shame about the Users

[Anonymous Coward]

I found that I actually prefer building my system sources! (proper geek!)

Translation: I have no job, live in mum's basement, and have the time to screw with my distro instead of doing real work.

Re:Nice Distro, Shame about the Users

[wellard1981]

You would like to be correct wouldn't you? ..

1. I have a job (full-time)
2. I live at home because it's too expensive to live in my own home
3. I don't have time, thats why I let it build when I sleep
4. Previous post by Anonymous Coward?

Slackware website

[FatTux]

Yeah, I use Slackware since 1998 and currently have version 10, that's great. Now a question: it's just me, or Slack's website really sucks with ancient FAQs ("Is Slackware Linux "Year 2000" compliant?") and broken links to Alpha and Sparc ports?

IMHO, these website flaws could be quite intimidating to new users interested in Slackware...

Re:Package Management Dependency Resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, even the Solaris package manager has dependency resolution. Get with it slack.

OT Your sig.

[Ohcanada2010]

It should be pointed out that the "things" referred to by Hillary Clinton in your signature are tax dollars. She was addressing a group of rich Democratic fundraisers and telling them that she would stop the Bush tax cut and that doing so would cost them money. Then she would use that money to fix some of the problems that face this country and the deficit. It's the difference between a rich Democrat and a rich Republican; rich Democrats don't mind paying the tax man because they recognize the debt they owe to society, and so opposed Bush's attempt to move the tax burden to the working class. Knowing Republicans as I do I can tell you are trying to spread that quote to make it sound like she's for confiscating Bibles and firearms to those too stupid to look it up. It's your right I suppose, but it seems awfully disingenuous to me.

Re:OT Your sig.

[Lord Kano]

Knowing Republicans as I do I can tell you are trying to spread that quote to make it sound like she's for confiscating Bibles and firearms to those too stupid to look it up.

You kind of picked a loser of an example, let me provide you with a couple more quotes from Hillary.

?I also believe that every new handgun sale or transfer should be registered in a national registry, such as Chuck is proposing.?

Why? The only useful purpose that a registration database serves is to aid with confiscation.

If you own a gun... make sure it?s locked up and stored without the ammunition. In fact, make it stored where the ammunition is stored separately. We?ve made some progress in the last several years with the Brady Bill and some of the bans on assault weapons, but we have a lot of work to do.

And what work is that?

I don't see my sig as a news outlet, I included the Hillary quote so that people would google for it and get the whole story.

It is indicative of the liberal world view that she possesses. SHE knows better what to do with our money than we do. If you're rich or poor, you know better where your money needs to be spent than anyone else.

LK

Win95 floppy count (Re:Yay!)

[salimma]

I still have a stack of Windows 95 installation floppies (which I'm not going to dig out and count)

13. There was an amusing incident whereby some of the disks were shipped from Microsoft infected by a virus, which was why when some Mandrake ISOs triggered anti-viral false alarms a few years down the road it gave me quite a déja vù.

The corresponding count of diskettes for Office 4.3 (Win16) is.. 33, I believe.

Re:Win95 floppy count (Re:Yay!)

[smoker2]

13 ? or 14... I can't remember now, but my first set wouldn't complete the install, so I telephoned M$ and complained, so they sent me another set free.

Thats when I discovered that my floppy drive was knackered !

Thanks Bill !

BTW, my 850 MB hard disk cost me 350 UKP back then , to go with my pentium 75 cpu and 32 MB edo RAM :)

Re:Win95 floppy count (Re:Yay!)

[salimma]

Haha, EDO RAM. Yes, I remember getting excited when 850MB HDDs go down below the magical Rp 1 million in price. (about 300 GBP.. is it called UKP now?)

There were some weird systems being sold with Pentium-on-VESA bus too back then. Ah, the old days :)

Trillian

[vafada]

Anyone knows how he was able to run trillian in his Slack box?

Re:Trillian

[Anonymous Coward]

She just run a newer version of Wine.

Slack is good

[mrselfdestrukt]

I can see lots of flamewars starting because of this article , but the old rule remains. Use whatever works best for you. My opinion: I believe real men compile everything they want from source. And what Slack doesn't have in the distro, I compile. One thing that I don't understand though: Screenshots is good for a review on the latest X drivers or themes or Windows, but screenshots for a Linux distro? Redundant. Anyway, keep up the good work Slack. Still my favourite after 10 years.

Re:Slack is good

[oogoliegoogolie]

I believe real men compile everything they want from source.

Yeah, we all know men who compile from source get more women than men with a fancy car, money, muscles, or being good with kids.

obvious choice

[Qrlx]

I don't even use Linux and I've always known that Slackware is the best.

Does this thing even have ISOs yet? gotta love software they deliberately make hard to install. It's the "I'd walk a mile for a camel" of Linux distributions.

Re:obvious choice

[fataugie]

Does this thing even have ISOs yet?

No, you have to do a capture of the datastream (1's and 0's) and then feed them back into your machine via serial cable. Kind of looks like the Matrix computer readouts of the grid itself....

It beats the old way of installing (actually flipping the switches on and off to generate the 1's and 0's). Then along came those pussy punch cards and it was all down hill after that.

But why did it slow me down???

[oneandoneis2]

I installed Slack 9.1 and loved it. Blisteringly fast, all the applications I fondly remembered from my University's Unix system, and no annoying "Let me do that for you!" software. And then I uprgaded it to 10, as per the instructions. And it's suddenly slowed down. It takes way longer to boot, and longer to load applications when they're opened for the first time. After that first time, it's fine, as Slack only uses about 30MB of RAM and I have 500 for it to use for buffering & caching. I've checked the hdparm settings, they're all fine. I'm not running any services I wasn't before. Why has it become so slow? And the other niggle is, Firefox doesn't work properly any more either - when I open it, it shows multiple copies of the process running in a ps, and I can't make it go Back or Forward from the command line any more. I even tried upgrading firefox without success. Any suggestions on fixing these..?

Re:But why did it slow me down???

[reallocate]

I'd guess you botched the update.

Re: Firefox -- If you'd been looking at your processes before you would have noticed multiple entries for Firefox (or Mozilla, or whatver) all along. They don't indicated that you are runing multiple instances of the app.

And, anyway, Firefox is not distributed with Slackware.

Re:But why did it slow me down???

[oneandoneis2]

I'd guess you botched the update.

Well, that narrows it right down. I should have no trouble fixing it now. Thanks for your help.

If you'd been looking at your processes before you would have noticed multiple entries for Firefox (or Mozilla, or whatver) all along

I had been. There weren't. It's a brand new problem. So is the loss of ability to control it from the CLI. Worked fine with 9.1, doesn't want to know with 10.

And, anyway, Firefox is not distributed with Slackware.

Yeah... I know. That's why I had to downlaod it myself. And the relevance of this is..?

Re:But why did it slow me down???

[reallocate]

I'm not trying to help you.

The Firefox issue is relevant because you're assuming Slackware is to blame for your problems using it. Maybe, maybe not.

Sometimes Firefox wants to be run as root prior to normal use.

OK have to say it

[Zephaniah]

"The article also sports 14 screenshots."

What sort of shit is this? Does slackware have access to some special software that other distrubtions don't have? Stupid. Everyone talks about package management.. well if you like to compile your own source.. checkinstall (you can use make install if you really want... ) If you don't like that then I think there is some debian style thing called swaret. Don't like either style and/or don't like the commandline? Then you won't like slackware much. There's probably some other stuff... Gnome/KDE (and screenshots?!) etc are not specials things you can only get on slackware. buh/.

Slackware9, startx, run levels

[solprovider]

I installed Slackware9 for a user. They always want the GUI, so I changed the run level so it would boot to the GUI without typing startx; it also uses the GUI logon. Then Mozilla could not find the internet. I had to fix the startup script to regain the working settings. I was surprised the startup scripts did not use a common file for loading the network settings for different run levels.

I read the article, but it focuses on server installs and does not mention this issue. Was this fixed in Slackware10?

Re:Slackware9, startx, run levels

[schemanista]

AFAIK, Slack does not use "run levels" per se.

What you want is provided by xdm, kdm or gdm, depending on your configuration.

I hate it when a system defaults to a graphical boot, but that's me. The CLI gives my spouse the creeping willies. Our compromise: her .bashrc tests if it is being called from a login shell and then invokes startx automatically. I like the fact that Slack gives me the opportunity to set this up for myself instead of making a decision for me which I later have to undo.

Re:Slackware9, startx, run levels

[solprovider]

Slack does not use "run levels" per se.

Maybe that was my problem. I thought Slackware was Linux, so I changed the runlevel. I was surprised that the network settings disappeared since I expected all runlevels that connect to the network to use the same config (unless extra work is done.) I think the problem was that the runlevel I chose did not start the network. Does noone using Slackware like to boot directly to a GUI and still have network access?

This may have been my fault. I may have changed the runlevel from 3 to 4, when it should have been 5. I'll check later and post back. (It may be about 14 hours before I can.)

[This was last year, and I am currently configuring a RedHat7.2 server for production.]

=== Appendix
Linux runlevels
0 - halt
1 - Single user mode
2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you don't have networking)
3 - Full multiuser mode
4 - unused
5 - X11
6 - Reboot

Re:Slackware9, startx, run levels

[schemanista]

I thought Slackware was Linux

Slackware is a Linux distro. But it uses BSD-style initialization, hence no runlevels. You seem to be more familiar with SysV Unix-style distros such as Red Hat/Fedora, SuSe, Mandrake or Debian(?). Slack is a different beast.

The excellent online guide does have a section which discusses how to set up window managers and desktop environments using both the startx/.xinitrc and gdm/kdm/xdm methods. Try running xwmconfig as root and your users will be greeted by a graphical login.

HTH

Re:Slackware9, startx, run levels

[trocade]

When you change the runlevel to 4 instead of 3 in inittab that should not affect how rc.inet1 is run. I think something else is wrong with your setup, check /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf

a winning combination

[Anonymous Coward]

having recently been scanning the horizon for a new distribution to use to update RH7.0 on my workstation, slackware 10 caught my eye, and last weekend it went on my pc.

it's very, very good! for anyone unfamiliar with slack, it's unique spin is:

1. *very* up to date software - as far as i can see i have pretty much the very latest version of everything on here
2. applications not butchered - kde looks like the kde folks intended because it's not been hacked about
3. highly stable. i guess 2. helps with this in the light of 1.
4. very lean and bloat-free. the basic os fires up in 1/2 the time RH7 did, the disk layout is intuitive and highly straight forward
5. PROPAGANDA FREE! this one is a big one for me, this distro has a complete lack of corporate branding and marketing blag. when it boots up it doesn't even mention slackware (just "Linux 2.4.26\nLogin: ")

to be honest, to go from redhat to this feels to me rather how it did to go from microsoft to redhat. thanks patrick! #:-)

incedentally the reason for my defection from redhat has nothing to do with money issues, but from the appearence of the phrases "mission-critical", "enterprise ready" and "deployment" on their corporate web site. when people start using language like that i think it's time to question their agenda?

Like fine wine...

[WareW01f]

... Slackware ages well. I have to admit that I'm in the 'old fart' camp and love the chance to 'karma whore' whenever a good Slackware story comes up. Slackware 10 is not different. (And we can all thank Patrick for *NOT* calling it 'Slackware X' :)

Seriously. I keep looking at new distros, but when it comes to my box, I'll never stray. I keep coming back to it for the same reasons. Slackware people know their boxes and know their software. (generalization, yes, but you try watching the screen as you're doing a floppy install and *NOT* know everything thats on your box.)

Slackware 9.1 was a breeze to install, and I'm sure 10 will be no different. Keep up the good work Patrick. Let the wipper snappers have their new fangled distros. I'll keep mine, thank you.

Re:My impression (correction)

[13Echo]

I seriously doubt this. I've never seen any evidence that Patrick is a "GPL zealot" in such an extreme that he would refuse to include OO.o.

In fact, he was including XF86 4.4 for a while, in current, until people the majority of users opted for X.org instead, so he changed it. He also has frequently included Netscape, which is not GPL compatible, and does not have the same license as Mozilla. Even Java is included, and it definitely is not GPL compatible.

I suspect that Pat doesn't include OO.o for other reasons - like the fact that there are already some fantastic word processors that come with Gnome and KDE. It wasn't until recently that Slackware started using two CDs. Pat's always been about making Slackware as thin as possible, but flexible and powerful as well.

Is Hillary gonna take your car?

[Ohcanada2010]

They make you register that too, and for good reason. To ensure legal use of the road ways and that your car is up to standards. There is also a good reason to register firearms; the same reasons states across the country already do register firearms. If you break the law with a registered gun, it can more easily be traced back to you. As a result of this, registration helps police distinguish between law abiding gun owners and those who wish to commit crimes with their weapons, as a citizen who didn't intend to break the law should have no reason to not register their gun, aside from paranoia about future acts of the government. And it is paranoia, as half the country owns firearms and only an extremely small fringe support confiscation. I'm not sure why they want you to keep the weapons and ammo separate, it seems frivolous and I hope it gets overturned but it's not gun confiscation, either. Now, as for assault weapons, you're getting into a murky area. When I talk about gun confiscation I mean rifles and handguns, not military scale weaponry. I'm sure she does support a ban on that, as the vast majority of Americans do, although for the record I don't. Of course, the NRA also makes exceptions for powerful weapons, they scoff at the idea that a person should be allowed to own nuclear weapons under the 2nd amendment. So they obviously agree with Hillary that there is a line between weapons that should be owned by the people and those that should be restricted to the government even if none is explicitly stated in the Constitution. Obviously they disagree on where that line is but the idea than none should exist is an extreme one to say the least.

I, of course, disagree with your voluntary based system of government. No modern system of government works on like this, and I highly doubt it's even remotely feasible. No public education, military, police, firemen, or social safety net of any sort? Thanks, but no thanks, I hate some of the stupid laws we pass but I'd rather live here than a place that wouldn't do a thing to help me if I needed it.

Re:Is Hillary gonna take your car?

[Lord Kano]

There is also a good reason to register firearms; the same reasons states across the country already do register firearms. If you break the law with a registered gun, it can more easily be traced back to you.

Through minimal work, the legal owner of a firearm can be found in a couple of days. Because time and effort are involved it prevents abuse. A federal database would make it so quick and easy, abuse would be easy as well.

as a citizen who didn't intend to break the law should have no reason to not register their gun, aside from paranoia about future acts of the government. And it is paranoia, as half the country owns firearms and only an extremely small fringe support confiscation.

It is not paranoia, every country that has confiscated guns began with registration. History teaches us this.

Now, as for assault weapons, you?re getting into a murky area. When I talk about gun confiscation I mean rifles and handguns, not military scale weaponry.

The guns that were banned 10 years ago by the Clinton Administration's "assault weapons" ban were not military weapons. They were guns that LOOKED LIKE military weapons.

Gun banners are constantly trying to exploit the population's lack of knowledge in that department.

I?m sure she does support a ban on that, as the vast majority of Americans do, although for the record I don?t.

The fact that you made this statement, bolsters my previous point. Military grade battle rifles have been strictly controlled since the gun control act of 1934. Since before my grandfather was born it has been expensive, and difficult to legally purchase a machine gun. Seems like that should be common knowledge, but for whatever reason it isn't.

LK

tsk...

[Ayanami Rei]

what a frigid bitch.

Oh, and btw, I changed my URL. ::sticks tounge out::

(WAY OT) Re:Good for small servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Billy Watt? How the hell are ya? Haven't seen many posts from you lately. Then again, I haven't had occasion to post much either. Did Alan Connor finally take up residence under another bridge? Is there any hope of rm doing the same? *grin*

jlanthripp, posting anon coz this is way offtopic by now and I don't feel like giving up karma