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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.
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..."
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)
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.
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.