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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."
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.
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.
I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
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.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
:) And I actually wear it sometimes.
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...
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).
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
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.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
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.
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)
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.
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.
It's like deja vu all over again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
... 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.