The Stealth Desktop: Sight and Sound With Slackware

sombragris writes "Many people think of Slackware as a distribution oriented to servers and experienced users. However, here's an article that shows how to configure sound and the X Window System in Slack, in a newbie-friendly way and oriented towards desktop usage. The article is a follow-up to Part I of the series, where the author introduced his vision of Slackware as a desktop. Enjoy!"

Comments

The Stealth First Post

[Fecal Troll Matter]

Nothing to see here. Please move along.

Re:The Stealth First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

help! ut2003 is too slow when i run it under vwware in wine?

how cna i compyle the nvideo driverz into the kernal?

Re:The Stealth First Post

[TheGavster]

Right, upgrade to UT2K4, run it natively under Linux. Solved.

Re:The Stealth First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be cheaper just to run UT2K3 natively under Linux.

hmm

[LiMikeTnux]

id like to dive back into linux, maybe slack is right for me. i just got some kickass new hardware :D

Re:hmm

[Tr0mBoNe-]

Slack is a great distro... last year my university used it as the distro on our laptops for the computer science peeps for their programming. I found that it was a good system that was easily configured, but somewhat lacks in the port department. My suggestion: Install slack 10, then get either Gentoo's portage, or Debian's apt-get and install them. I am sure portage works in other distros and even in FreeBSD... not too sure about apt-get (allthough there should be no reason why it won't work).

Also, don't use KDE... I know you have a slick setup, but that WM is annoyingly simular to windows. Try one of the Window maker clones or if you don't like the minimulist approach, try Gnome... stable and sleek... and easy to install.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

if you don't like the minimulist approach, try Gnome... stable and sleek... and easy to install.

Dear God...

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Just what I thought.

try Gnome... stable and sleek... and easy to install

YOU FAIL IT - never has this phrase been more appropriate.

Re:hmm

[Tr0mBoNe-]

At this point, all programs are easy to install for me... Linux has been on my computers at home for years now. I hate KDE, and do disike Gnome a bit... but if I were to choose, I would take gnome.

Fluxbox is my primary Window Manager though

Re:hmm

[Bob The Cowboy]

On what planet is KDE 'simular' to Windows? Oh... its probably the IOSlaves that let you transparently save files to different networks via ftp, ssh, etc. Oh, wait, no thats not it. Maybe its that you can get an mp3 or an ogg from a music track on a CD simply by putting the cd in, and typing in audiocd:/ and picking the files you want. Oh, windows doesn't have that either? Seriously. The similarity begins and ends with the fact that they both have a taskbar, a cursor, and windows.

And how is Gnome not?? And they're both easy to install, because they come with the freaking distro!

Re:hmm

[LiMikeTnux]

thanks alot for the advice :) im dling slack right now

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

just ignore him - look at his website link - he's a java programmer for god's sake.

Re:hmm

[sp0rk173]

Dude, this is an easy one. The default location of the little Gear do-dad to bring up the menu is the same as the start button in windows. With gnome, it's on the mirror opposite side of the screen. Duh.

But seriously, KDE gives me a headache. It does have a lot of really really nice features...but there are almost too many...it's just not for me. I do, however, think people should try both, along with XFCE, and see what they like best. Personally, gnome gives me what I need out of a desktop environment.

Are you sure?

[erick99]

I don't know a lot about Slackware but after reading the article, this still seem likes a stretch.

Cheers!

Erick

Re:Are you sure?

[Slack3r78]

Two words: Dropline Gnome.

Dropline's a meta-distribution that sits on top of Slackware that's very desktop oriented. It even has a helpful little applet that checks to see if there've been updates and a simple menu based program for upgrading the system. This means you get all the latest packages with a pretty nice amount of ease.

When it comes down to it, Slack is actually one of the simplest distributions out there. Everything is very logical, and nothing is made more complex than it needs to be. Thrown in with the nice admin tools Dropline provides for those that aren't really comfortable hand editing config files, and I feel like it makes for an excellent desktop distribution.

Re:Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure. I've been using Slackware as a desktop since 1997. That was like Slackware 3.2 or something with kernel 2.0.29. XFree86 worked out of the box. The laptop I'm using at this moment has been Slack 9.0 for over a year.

Here's a thought - has anybody here actually experienced problems using Slackware as a desktop? That would be much more interesting to read about than a hundred halfassed predictions that you will have problems using Slackware as a desktop.

Re:Are you sure?

[Slayk]

Yep, aside from changing permissions on halt and reboot to allow regular users to use them (*glare*), Dropline-GNOME is the best thing since sliced bread. It's made me enjoy GNOME, which I really didn't like before I installed Dropline.

Re:Are you sure?

[boudie]

The problem with Dropline from my experience is that it changes so much of your system, including glibc that it makes compiling other non-dropline packages very difficult or impossible. So, if you want to use just the Dropline stuff and nothing else, it is worth a try. If you want to compile a lot of your own stuff, then you're better off without it. And, like gonnorhea, it's a lot easier to get than it is to get rid of (pam?).

Re:Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you be a dullard?

Re:Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

not only that, but Dropline Gnome weighs 200 MB, what a waste of resources, Fluxbox is for me.

As to Slack, no OOo, and no firewall apps like Guarddog or Firestarter, you are supposed to use iptables. Sheesh!

Re:Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. I didn't have a good experience with dropline gnome. Besides being so intrusive it just kept crashing--granted most poeple have no problems with DG stability. My machine was stable before, and it is stable after.

Anyway, I'm using ion now.

Not just slack

[vivekg]

Not just slackware but all linux distro can work as good workstation (X windows). Especially if you are developer or system network administrator (which chatting on IRC or yahoo) you can do lot of work. I really enjoy this stuff man!

X Slack??

[PeterPumpkin]

Installing X is already covered in the guide. Slackware was my first distro, I don't remember having any trouble getting X to run :D

Re:X Slack??

[Alan Hicks]

Throwing in a shameless plug here. Myself and some of the other BOZOs on alt.os.linux.slackware have been sort on-again off-again working on an updated release of that book. You can find that project here.

Re:X Slack??

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me, but there a few key chapters unfinished, and the last time anybody made a recorded addition to this project was August, 2003. Maybe the book should be finished before it's already obsolete (even a rough draft would be welcome), and then you could plug it.

And please don't respond that "if you want it done, you should help out with the writing," This book is precisely for those people who couldn't help write it.

Documentation (lack of) is still a key weakness of Slackware.

Re:X Slack??

[sp0rk173]

Same here. I had a friend on AIM to help me, but i think i asked a total of three questions...he just said, "Look at the config file...i think it's /etc/X11/XF86Config or something." And I did...and I got it to work. It really wasn't all that difficult. That was back in the good ol' days, though. Back when I was still in high school. Ahh, memories. Then I went to college and discovered FreeBSD. Then Gentoo.. Then DragonFly. And now? Sex. It's better than all of them put together.

G-mail invite. Get it quick.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&btnI=&q=http://goat.cx

Uhh

[toetagger1]

Any OS that I have to configure sound myself, I don't consider newbie-friendly!

just my 2 cents

Re:Uhh

[PitaBred]

So, when Windows doesn't work with sound or video out of the box, it's not newbie friendly?
Nice troll.

Re:Uhh

[Tr0mBoNe-]

True, but getting the sound working isn't hard.

Compile in sound drivers into the kernel, add the sound module to the startup scripts, and then find some easy to use interface... I used some obsure little program that was a series of command line statements like cvol 100 or cvol -r 100 for full or full right channel respectivly.

Slack however is one of the most compatable distros out there... I have not had many problems installing programs with it.

A thought just crossed my mind... Since when is Slackware... or any distro other than Fedora, Suse, or Linspire User-Friendly??? Oh well... One more setup guide helps us all... cudos to the author... we need more peeps like him.

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Any car that I have to fuel myself, I don't consider newbie-friendly!

just my 2 eurocents

- Seth

Re:Uhh

[13Echo]

Sound works out of the box on Slackware 10 (through ALSA). You will simply need to turn the volume levels up with the mixer.

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFP. The article explains things in a newbie-friendly way, not the OS itself is newbie-friendly.

Though I've found that if the newb is willing to read and learn a lot about Linux, Slackware is extremely friendly.

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Newbies,
You install Slack and you learn. If you don't want to learn, stick to Windoze then.
I myself like Slackware since it I like BSD unixes too

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

X also works out of the box on Slackware 10. However, it's set up for VESA by default, so you'll have to run X -config in order for it auto-detect your video card if you want better performance.

Seriously, what kind of article is this? Q: How do you get sound and X working on Slackware 10? A: Do absolutely nothing.

Re:Uhh

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Not that I blame you for the mistake, but I don't think he is a troll. Nor do I see that he is denying your conclusion.

That said, follow the statement to its logical conclusion!

Re:Uhh

[toetagger1]

Yes,

if ANY OS needs sound configured when it comes out of the box, it is not newbie friendly. That is exacly what I said.

Re:Uhh

[mattyrobinson69]

for some reason, X didn't work out the box on slackware 10. it worked with 9.1. Probably something to do with xorg rather than XF86.

simple to fix though - xorgxonf (i think, the command line wizard anyway) then set up the binary nvidia drivers.

Re:Uhh

[baywulf]

"Any car that I have to fuel myself, I don't consider newbie-friendly!"

And that would be true too if most of the cars around can add fuel by itself. Most operating systems (including many Linux distributions) can auto-detect sound cards themselves.

Re:Uhh

[nwbvt]

I disagree. Being a newbie isn't the same thing as being an incompetent moron. In fact, newbies generally refers to a class of people who have very little experience in something but are interested in learning. What better learning experience than something that has you do the configuration yourself rather than having some script do it hidden away in the background?

Saying Slackware is newbie-friendly does not mean it is right for grandma, merely that it is a good choice for someone interested in learning about Linux/Unix but who currently has little experience.

Re:Uhh

[Erik Hensema]

Why on earth would you want to learn to do something as uninteresting as installing sound drivers into your OS?

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, how about newbie-who-actually-would-like-to-learn-something- friendly?

Call me (-1 Elitist), but people who actively don't want to understand how their OS works should stick with MSwinblows or a Mac.

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe some people find it interesting. I learned loads about digital audio processing mucking about with my emu10k1 (SBLive) card - you can do some really odd stuff if you can be bothered fiddling with the DSP on it.

And really, why would anyone want to learn how to do anything as uninteresting as configuring bind 9??? Other name servers are far less pointlessly obscure. Bind is the "sendmail" of DNS programs.

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

> So, when Windows doesn't work with sound or video out of the box, it's not newbie friendly?

That is correct. The main difference is: it usually does, or if you upgraded it yourself, it's a matter of sticking in a CD from the sound card maker.

On the other hand, I don't think slack ever claimed to be newbie friendly...

Re:Uhh

[nwbvt]

News for Nerds, remember? Some of us don't mind getting down and dirty with our computers.

Re:Uhh

[toetagger1]

Remember, he says this is for desktip USE not for "OS compilation fun"

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know what a troll is? Hint: it doesn't mean "a post that disagrees with me."

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, i have an Audigy 2 sound card, bulk. Now, the windows drivers are a real pain to find on the web. However linux drivers i just compile in emu10k support, and voila, it works. No need to reboot even, if i compile as a module and modprobe it.

Let me tell you one thing, userfriendlyness has nothing to do with the OS. It has to do with vendors. Creative screws their windows customers, i was just lucky a few good and talented Linux hackers included support for my card so that it was a no brainer to get it working (ofcourse the average joe sixpack ppl like to bring up, would need to follow a rather SIMPLE guide.).

Please, dont blame it on FOSS, they just try to do their best with the means available.

Re:Uhh

[geekoid]

yes, the best way to teach someone to swim is to throw them into shark infested waters, cause you wouldn't want them to learn in an enviroment thats easy.

Re:Uhh

[nwbvt]

And dancing naked through the forest isn't a good way to teach someone calculus.

See, I too can make irrelevant analogies that in no way benefit the conversation.

Re:Uhh

[Toby_Tyke]

So, when Windows doesn't work with sound or video out of the box, it's not newbie friendly?

Disclaimer: I am running Slackware on my box as I type this. Also, when I installed it, my sound card worked perfectly without my touching anything.

Now to answer the above. To configure more or less any hardware in windows you, follow these steps.

1) Insert driver cd-rom
2) Next-Next-Next-Next-Finish.

No need to think, no need to know anything
That is what Joe Six Pack thinks of as newbie friendly.

Sounds good...better go grab a torrent...

[Zen Punk]

I just wired up Comcast cable broadband to my home network, and I was thinking of adding a small Linux-based file server. I think Slack might be a good choice.

But....

[gfxguy]

why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie friendly installations out of the box?

Re:But....

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Nice troll.

Getting sound to work amounts to uncommenting the correct chipset in rc.modules. Getting X to work, if it doesn't by default, amounts to running xf86config and picking the correct options (of which there are few) out of menus.

It doesn't get any easier or friendlier, but it can treat you like a retard with all sorts of fancy auto-config wizards that may or may not work. And when things get more complicated, you'll be up a creek. Kudzu refusing to see that second ethernet card? Oops. On slackware, you'd already have learned how to do it manually with modprobe and ifconfig, and you'd have had no trouble adding those few lines to rc.inet1.

Re:But....

[gfxguy]

Not a troll... sorry. How many newbies care to deal with two ethernet cards? More often than not, Mandrake (and other distributions) work flawlessly. The question still stands... if you want a distribution to learn how things work, slackware is fine, if you want a distribution where things just work (usually), you get something else.

Re:But....

[Anonymous Coward]

And the newbie reads your post as...

"Nice troll.

[random rocket science]. Hook up your modem to your BLT drive and run your emacs through your serial port to configure Free X configuration files to start the server and run your display through your fourth parallel BBQ port."

Jeez. Think realistically, buddy. You honestly think a newbie is going to pick up on your process?

Oh well. Rock on.
-js

Re:But....

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Open up 1 text file that will always be in the same place, that will never pop up the "this is C:\Program Files, do you really want to see the files?". Find the line in this text file marked "This is for the blahblah sound card". Delete the # in front of that line, and only the #.

Type startx, hit enter. If that doesn't work, type xf86config, hit enter. Answer all the questions it asks, and if unsure of the answer, it will usually tell you about a good generic answer. If you think you need to configure a video card, but you don't know the name of it, go shoot yourself.

Those *do not* look like rocket science instructions to me, but maybe I'm biased. It's all intimidating if you haven't learned anything yet, right? Except this isn't all that much to learn, is incredibly valuable (at least in my own unimportant opinion), and can't be faked with some asshat GUI wizard.

What's the alternative, mandrake with some GUI installer, which has a 45% of making it work auto-magically if its a stock Dell or IBM, and a 10% chance if you've installed even one PCI card on your own? There will be 4 or 5 different screens of the wizard, often worded ambiguously, that if you click on the wrong one, it may ot may not allow you to go back and fix it? And it is at least as many steps, isn't easily reversed, and provides a false sense of security.

I just don't see that as an improvement.

Re:But....

[GoofyBoy]

>There will be 4 or 5 different screens of the wizard, often worded ambiguously, that if you click on the wrong one, it may ot may not allow you to go back and fix it?

Why is a wizard a bad thing, yet the instructions you gave are not "rocket science"? Couldn't you get the same amount of clarity and easy in a wizard as you could with your instructions?

Take a look at Apple UI. Lots of "wizard-like" UI. No command line interface. No guessing the video card. No guessing typing in startx or xf86config and making sure your path is correct.

Re:But....

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the alternative, mandrake with some GUI installer, which has a 45% of making it work auto-magically if its a stock Dell or IBM, and a 10% chance if you've installed even one PCI card on your own?

You must be living in an alternate universe.
Mandrake and SuSe (not RedHat, Fedora, Debian,
not even Knoppix) are the ONLY distros which
install and work 100% on all of my computers.
All of which are generic white boxes (not Dell
or IBM). The ONLY "confusing choice" I had to
make was to select the correct monitor, mine's
old and doesn't id itself.

Re:But....

[Anonymous Coward]

because the day he wants to learn how to compile a program he doesn't want to have to mess with all kinds of non-standard folders.

Re:But....

[Anonymous Coward]

why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie friendly installations out of the box?

Cause slackware is the only distro you can learn Linux with ask any slckware user, GUI tools even if not installed have a psychological effect that disables your brain from using text files, thus, you can't learn Linux.
That is sarcasim, but trust me, you'll read alot of threads today that support that claim.

Re:But....

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're either asking me if all the wizards I've seen are bad (they are) or if wizards *could be* good, if done right by the right people (*shrug* yeh, I suppose they could).

Re:But....

[phek]

Actually it does get easier, with XFree86 (haven't tried with x.org yet) all you have to do is type X -configure (or is that captial C i always forget) as root and it will configure your XF86Config file for you. Then all you have to do is mv ~/X86Config.new /etc/X11/XF86Config. This is much easier than running the outdated xf86config script.

Re:But....

[phek]

wizards are bad because they rely on other libraries in order to work which is one of the major problems windows has. Even the most basic stuff with windows and with these wizards in other distro's requires some other libraries to be correct. Now if those libraries are bad you cant install your new . So now you need to go reinstall those libraries, but wait, the wizard to install those libraries are broken, so now you have to go and install those libraries without a wizard, but you have no idea how to do that because you've never had to learn that, oh well better call someone to come fix it and pay them $200. Hey I thought linux was supposed to be free (thats what 50% of the people would say at that point), I might as well go back to windows or try out a new operating system.

Thing is though, if the user had of been taught the basics of installing programs in linux (./configure, make, make install, or even through a slackware, rh, or suse), then they could have easily fixed the problem at any step of the way.

Re:But....

[munpfazy]

>why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie
>friendly installations out of the box?

At the risk of being sucked into a religious war, I'll assume this is a serious question.

The first response must be, what do you mean by a newbie?

If you mean someone who have never touched anything but windows and has no experience with a unix shell or a text editor, and who doesn't have any close linux-head friends to turn to for help and advice, then I agree with you. Slackware may not be the best way to take a first step into linux.

If you mean someone who doesn't *want* to ever have to edit a text file because they have some philosophical objection to it, then slackware is not the distribution for them. I realize there are actually a lot of these people in the world, and that there's probably no point in trying to change their minds. I'm all in favor of creating distributions for them to use, but Slack really isn't one of them.

On the other hand, if you mean someone who's got a couple of basic shell commands under their belt and has spent a dozen hours in some kind of *nix and is looking to put together a useful system, then I'd argue slackware is actually a great way to start out administering linux.

First of all, the skills one acquires living in slackware for a while are easily transported to just about any other *nix out there. If you start out relying entirely on distribution specific config tools, you end up having to start over from scratch every time you switch to something else.

Second, the problem with nifty auto-configurators is that they have a habbit of failing. In slack, if your something doesn't work, it's easy to find out what's actually broken and how to fix it, 'cause in the process of setting it up you've already met all the relevant files. On more "friendly" systems, you merely get a cryptic error message that the fancy wizard failed; or more often than not, a message that everything is set up and working fine even though it's not.

As someone who followed the path windows+sun->debian->mandrake->slackware+openbs d (and a bunch of quickly discarded experiments with other distros along the way), I'm sorry I didn't start out with slack sooner. I'm fond of both debian and mandrake, but I wasted a whole lot of time struggling to solve problems that were distro specific rather than actually using the system. Slack may take a little while longer to set up if everything goes right, but if anything goes wrong it's a hell of a lot easier to solve.

Re:But....

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha! Your post complaining about a "troll" (which wasn't even a troll, btw) got you a troll rating! That's perfect! Finally some justice around here.

Hint: learn what the word "troll" means. Use it properly next time.

Secondhand news

[destach]

I saw this on OSNews, yesterday. Does Slashdot always get secondhand information?

Re:Secondhand news

[gfxguy]

You have a low enough ID number to have learned by now the answer to your question is YES, that's exactly how slashdot has always worked. The difference here is in the discussion.

Re:Secondhand news

[Bryan_W]

Yes.

Slackware is pretty easy

[demon_2k]

Im only new to linux. I've started off using Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Caldera and some other minor linux distros and i found that Slackware was the easiest to install, setup and maintain out off all of the above. I also like how the packages are not modified.

thanks but..

[arieswind]

call me back when it can handle my wireless card flawlessly, only then will i consider using it

Re:thanks but..

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Which wireless card? Having struggled to get my own working just recently (I certainly can't imagine it being easier with mandrake), I feel qualified to at least point you in the right direction.

I would also like to point out that this isn't a slackware issue, it's usually a linux kernel issue. Finding the right driver, having a kernel version that driver accepts, these are problems most will face. Will it be any easier on redhat? Sure, if the cute little gui wizard handles this, and happens to work for you correctly the first time.

Re:thanks but..

[PitaBred]

I had to configure how to access my WAP, but other than that, wireless worked out of the box for me.

Re:thanks but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Feh, When it can get my wireless card, both my firewire drives (instead of just one at a time), AND my canon A75 working with sound... call me

Re:thanks but..

[Anonymous Coward]

you're a pussy faggot. How do you know if its done right if you dont do it yourself.

Re:thanks but..

[Ludoo]

Mine has worked out of the box in Slack 9.0, 9.1, 10 and various "current" upgrades. All it took was insert it into a PCMCIA slot :)

Re:thanks but..

[Anonymous Coward]

its WMP54G linksys pci card, and ive spent a lot of time trying to get it to work, with out any luck

Re:thanks but..

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

What little I've been able to dig up suggests that there aren't linux drivers for this card. However, many people seem to have no trouble with ndiswrapper, which is what I use. It's a simple "configure; make; make install" sort of package, but I'm sure there are RPMs and debian packages for those that prefer those distros.

Installing ndiswrapper will mean you need a newer 2.4 kernel or 2.6. No kernel patches are necessary, and it may throw a few warnings, but should still compile. After installing, do "ndiswrapper -i /path/to/inf-file", the .inf file being the windows driver for this card. What I've read suggests that you use the driver that comes on the CD with the card, and not the driver dowloaded from broadcom's site.

Then, "modprobe ndiswrapper". At this point, the activity light on my own shitty card starts blinking, I would expect yours to do so also. Then comes the iwconfig setup, which I imagine varies quite a bit. Others have told me that "iwconfig wlan0 essid MyWAP" should be enough, but my machine just acts goofy without getting a link. I always have to do "iwconfig wlan0 channel 10" first.

Also, a caveat. As soon as the ndiswrapper module is loaded, my machine will be slow to respond, taking as much as 15 seconds to see a keystroke. It behaves like this until I get my link, after which it starts acting normally again. So that it doesn't take forever (did I just fatfinger wlan0 again?), I usually type it in as one big command line, like so:

modprobe ndiswrapper; iwconfig wlan0 channel 10; iwconfig wlan0 essid Ansible; dhcpcd wlan0

I was so worried, at first, that my shitty walmart clearance bin ($15) iBlitzz card was never going to work. Just took a little patience.

Off-topic: Another thing I'd like to point out. If you are like me, you have a dedicated linux server that has acted as your home router for years. Adding wifi to your house should be as simple as a few lines in rc.ipmasq to do NAT for a new segment, and maybe a 3rd ethernet card (ok, so maybe you already have that quad port, I did!). Well, access points cost $70-100... far more expensive than those shitty wifi routers that are always on sale and rebate. But you don't want switch over to the hardware router, or worse, daisy-chain this thing behind the linux router, where it will try to double NAT every single packet. It's also almost impossible to find specs on the things, if it can be turned off in the config. And don't even bother asking that salesmen at Circuit City (*cowlike stare* "Uh, yeh, they can all be turned off"). If the cheap router offers a 4 port switch (though I'm sure it routes/NATs these too) it's been my luck that using one of these ports to plug into the linux server does the trick. Plugging the linux server into the WAN port did some crazy shit, but on the LAN ports, it just assumed it was connecting 2 local machines, exactly like I wanted it. While I can only say this with certainly about the iBlittz router turd that I have, I'm pretty sure it would be the case with all such routers that have a builtin 4port switch. Hope I've helped someone.

Re:thanks but..

[Anonymous Coward]

well, we actually have a linksys router WRT54G, and it doesnt even blink when i modprobe, so i am just goin to wait till i get back an dhave plain ethernet to use

Re:thanks but..

[kryptkpr]

Having struggled to get my own working just recently (I certainly can't imagine it being easier with mandrake)

I've just setup a Linksys/Broadcom 802.11g PCMCIA card on a fresh installation of Mandrake 10.0 Official and no, it's not particulary easy. The version of ndiswrapper included in Mandrake is quite old (v0.4, the newest release is v0.8) and doesn't have the ndiswrapper command at all.. so I couldn't figure out how to load an .inf file.

First thing I did was removed the ndiswrapper package, and installed the kernel source package. Downloaded ndiswrapper from the site, and looked on their page of supported chipsets (checking lspci for which card I really had) for which driver I should get, in my case it was the Dell driver.

Compiled, installed ndiswrapper no problem.
Tried to install .inf file, the thing borked. Look in the .inf file, it's in unicode. Remebered seeing something in the FAQ about converting .inf files from unicode to ascii .. went back to the page, and there it was. Typed in the command, my .inf file shrunk in half (but still over 500k! holy inf file), and successfully installed.

Upon a modprobe, the driver loaded! I didn't have to iwconfig, it found my access point and essid automagically. After a quick ipconfig (I use static IPs, DHCP isn't for me), a creation of an ipup-wlan0 script to do this automatically for me next time, and one line added to modprobe.conf and modules.conf, my network now magically comes up whenever I start up my laptop. Total time taken, about 2 hours (mostly figuring out how to get my urpmi in a workable state).

My only complaint is that when I come back from a suspend, I have to open a root shell and "ipup wlan0".. but windows had the exact same problem, so I figure the card looses it's config when it powers down.. I'll have to look for a way to automatically run the ipup when I come back from a suspend.

I don't know where this guy comes from

[xutopia]

I've been using Slack 9.1 now since it came out and honestly I can't remember having as many problems as he brings up. Aside from having to run alsactl to lower the volume a bit I had no problem whatsoever with sound and video. X ran out of the box too. I also used dropline gnome which is IMHO a great DE package.

Re:I don't know where this guy comes from

[nazsco]

no dropline gnome here, instaled 9.1 in the desktop and sound/video/bells and whistles were all there.

BUT, with slackware 10.0... i had to manualy configure sound... Slack 10 is all broken!

Vision?

[Aeiri]

Vision of Slackware as a desktop?

I've been using Slackware for my desktop for quite awhile now, and almost everyone in irc.freenode.net#slackware has been, too...

I don't know what people mean when they are complaining about X, every single time I've installed Slackware, I just login and type "startx" and it works fine.

Re:Vision?

[Xoder]

I concurr. Sound worked correctly out of the box (the volume levels were zeroed, but that's nothing that aumix can't fix). X started up with my window manager of choice no problem at all. Happened in slack 9 on my laptop, happened with slack 10 on the desktop.

Verdict: Article is a troll. =)

Re:Vision?

[deathazre]

Mostly the same here. When I put slackware 9.0 on this (first time using something besides windows), X worked with KDE flawlessly, sound worked perfectly on my NF2 IGP/MCP-T board after a (easy enough for me) upgrade to kernel 2.4.22, and getting things to work dual-booting with win2k wasn't a problem.

Re:Vision?

[clymere]

agreed. I use Slackware for all of my workstations because I find it is most suited to that role for me. I'm a CS student, so I'm trying to learn all that I can...and I have learned a great deal more sicne switching from Red Hat to Slackware. I never really understood what was going on in the background before, because i latched onto the same GUI tools that I was used to using in Windows. That said, I found no shortage of throughough how-to's on how to configure things in Slackware, and once I learned how things were setup, I have consistently found Slackware EASIER to maintain then many other systems.

A full Slackware install still only takes 2-3GB, much more compact then other distros which are forced to distrute themselves on sets of DVD's. Again, I'm a student, so most of the hardware i've got is hand-me-downs...Slackware runs very well on my old p1's, p2's and p3's, without leaving out any of the features that I want. Heck I even use KDE as my window manager! :)

Must be wearing the wrong shades...

[Kjella]

I would say "Here's an entire article on just how to get sound and X Window system working, to reaffirm the belief that this is not what it was designed to do, and that Slackware is meant for servers."

That you can, with considerable tweaking, make something function as something else is not new. Yes, you can mod almost any car into making it a race car. Doesn't mean the original is a race car, not by a long shot.

Kjella

Re:Must be wearing the wrong shades...

[Slack3r78]

The funny thing is, getting X working on Slackware isn't that hard. The most it's taken on any of the machines I've installed it on is a quick xf86config, or now with 10.0, an xorgconfig. It defaults to a basic Gnome desktop, which I happen to rather like myself. And as I've pointed out in another post, adding in Dropline Gnome makes it a top notch desktop platform.

Yes, Slackware makes an excellent server system, but that doesn't mean that it's difficult to make it an equally excellent desktop system. Just because the underlying system is intentionally kept simplistic (read: easily manageable) does not mean that it takes any obscene amount of tweaking to turn it into a rather nice to use desktop environment.

FACT: Slackware is deader than BSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this, 1994?

Seriously, people: Slackware is defunct.

There is no crippling bombshell; there is no river of red ink. There can be no Netcraft confirmation of lost market share because THERE IS NO MARKET FOR SLACKWARE.

First post.

Configuration is not the major problem

[Via_Patrino]

Initial configuration may be a problem, but you have to do it only one time, I still think slackware major problem is its bad binaries support.

I'm ok in promoting slackware for small office desktop (very limited applications, like a word processor and browser), but in such ocassions will not be the end user who will install/configure, but the support guy.

Re:Configuration is not the major problem

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

As it always should be. If you think that software installation isn't something that any user but the most clueful should ever be allowed to do, you're begging for trouble. The receptionist up front, who is always installing shareware games, elf-bowling and shit, check out her computer sometime. Norton has probably nailed most of the actual viruses, but there is almost certainly dozens of spyware applets installed.

My favorite is "I thought we switched to Mozilla to get rid of popups". Walk over, and as she surfs, little IE windows keep popping up. It was amazing. The damn spyware app was intercepting Mozillas browser traffic, and opening up IE popunders. I wanted to cry.

Re:Configuration is not the major problem

[Zen Punk]

This has happened to me several times. There was no question as to the malicious origin of the windows, since I haven't used IE in years. Even worse, the problem was intermittent(seemed to go away then come back.) Like many other spy/mal/ad/@#%$ware, I had to google around for help on manually removing the junk, since none of my spyware scanners could find the culprit. This crap is insidious and pernicious.

Gentoo

[jb.hl.com]

I know it's kinda offtopic (Mods don't hurt me) but Gentoo has some of the best documentation I've seen for Linux so far. It walks you through system setup, setting up SAMBA, getting ALSA and X to work and using Portage.

I seriously wouldn't worry about letting a noob loose on Gentoo.

I applaud these guys efforts, anyway: every distro needs good docs, but it seems Gentoo has them first :)

Re:Gentoo

[GreyWolf3000]

I would worry if they expect to be working on their computer in any less than a week (two if they're either really clueless, or in need of finding an internet connection elsewhere while they install).

Re:Gentoo

[jb.hl.com]

Uh, no.

My Gentoo install, KDE and all, took a day. A DAY.

Beat that.

Re:Gentoo

[Too Much Noise]

I would worry if they expect to be working on their computer in any less than a week

bah, so many people in need of a clue!

You can have gentoo up and running in several hours (plus download time) if you install the precompiled versions of the big packages. Then you can start updating at your leisure. You'll need the 'several days' timeframe to get up to date, but you don't need to be up to date to start working.

Re:Gentoo

[GreyWolf3000]

I'm not saying Gentoo can't be installed quickly. I'm saying for a complete newbie who will need to read and reread documentation, and probably get help from forums, a week or two is more appropriate.

I wasn't saying that Gentoo always takes a long time to install.

Re:Gentoo

[GreyWolf3000]

It's not that I don't have a clue, it's that I wasn't saying what you think I said.

For a newbie (your average Fedora or Mandrake user) to install Gentoo, they're going to have to read and reread documentation and possibly consult forums for help, and the whole process will take a week or two most likely.

I'm not saying that Gentoo always takes this long.

Please make an effort to try and understand my post without getting defensive and thinking that your beloved OS is being attacked when it isn't.

Re:Gentoo

[Too Much Noise]

well, then you need to define what you mean by 'working' My point was that you can have a working Gentoo fairly quickly - you still need to read the installing docs beforehand, what a big surprise! but the steps are really straightforward. This was the OP's point - Gentoo docs don't assume you're a Linux guru. Simple things are well documented and enough to get one working.[*]

If you want to understand and tweak the system, that will take more than weeks - and docs, forums, etc. Still, if you define 'work' by 'learning about the os'[**], then you're still getting a 'working system' rather quickly.

In the end it all depends on what you use your computer for, as usual - and why you'd be choosing Gentoo instead of something else. Or not choosing Gentoo, as the case might be.

Anyway, this has gone off the wrong tangent already. I'm not going to push it more by commenting on who has been defensive here ^_^ This article is about Slack, not Gentoo or silly flame wars, and for a good reason too.

[*] this being one of the best things about the distro imho. for the worst ... well, let's say your sig would be on topic ^_^

[**] or the distro; you seem to be mixing distro with os, but that was probably a slip ^_^

Re:Gentoo

[jb.hl.com]

However, they'll probably learn more in that week than they would have done in a year using Fedora.

Re:Gentoo

[clymere]

Gentoo has hands-down the least intuitive install process I've ever seen.

Anything that doesn't autoboot into an install process of one sort or another, and instead gives you cryptic messages of how exactly one might conceivably achieve an installation. I actually finished downloading Slackware CD's in the time it took me to figure out the Gentoo install.

As a newbie I found Slackware to be far easier to install than Gentoo...and for that matter, so -called "user-friendly" distros like SuSE and Red Hat.

Re:Gentoo

[GreyWolf3000]

Absolutely. However, I've done Linux from Scratch many times (which is imho more educational than Gentoo), and the first time was actually the least educational. It isn't till you start tweaking that you really learn.

User since 8.1

[brendanoconnor]

A while back (whenever 8.1 came out) I decided to try linux. I read a few reviews, and what not. I first tested out mandrake. I had bought it at the store for a couple of dollars (less then $40, maybe less). I played with it for a while, but it just did not feel right.

I tried Debian next, but apparently thats above my head cause when I got to the dselect area I was overwhelmed. Decided, perhaps not for me.

Finally I tried slackware. What I really liked from the start was they had an entire book, for free, on their website that I could read for help. Although when I started the installation, I did not really need any help. Slackware has a great menu-driven installer. With some previous computer experience, and a little network know how, installation was a breeze.

At the time the kernel supported my sound card, but did not compile in the drive automatically. Before I realized I could of just built the module and used it that way, I decided to recompile the kernel. Also a very easy task in slackware.

Ultimately, I love the distribution, and have been using it since. I have a subscription so I get the latest distro in the mail a few days after it is released. Although truth be known I have no reason to even break the plastic on 10 because I have kept myself patched up and just do not need anything new. It does feel good to support Patrick and the slackware team. They deserve that, and much more.

I will say you have to be willing to read and learn (which means 99% of the world just won't like it) to use slackware. But, once you have learned how, you realize just how great Slackware is.

Brendan

p.s. www.linuxquestions.com has distro specific forums. If you need help, try their first.

Re:User since 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

> I will say you have to be willing to read and learn (which means 99% of the world just won't like it) to use slackware. But, once you have learned how, you realize just how great Slackware is.

Yeah yeah, terrific. Could someone please post specifics? About the only thing I know about it is that it has no dependency tracking at all, and it uses a BSD init script. The first is like using rpm with --nodeps all the time, except you don't get the luxury of knowing what version dependencies you needed. The latter I can't defend at all .. if you want all your startup in one file, go edit edit rc.local in a sysvinit based box.

Re:User since 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not completely and utterly wrong, almost but not quite! =) Now that I've said that, lets get into some specifics:

1. No, not everything is in 1 file, but all the startup scripts are in one directory, with names like rc.sshd etc... These are excellently written and they are trivial to edit, once you understand what they do.

2. The spirit of Slackware is if you want to do something, the system will not stop you. There are no dependancies (which cause more trouble than they are worth, in my honest opinion) checking, because quite frankly, you should RTFM.

3. I would not say that Slackware is for everybody, but if you know enough linux, and you're sick of conforming to other people's systems Slackware is definetly for you. If you like hacking config files to get your system running optimally, Slackware is definetly for you. At the same time if you just don't give a damn and want it to Just Work (TM), drop a slackware CD in and you're fine.

4. Slackware is all about speed and usability on older machines. There are no thousands of start up programs like in RedHat or other distributions of Linux. If there was a proper distribution-wide benchmark, I have no doubt in my mind that slackware would come second, first being Gentoo. (reason is obvious)

5. If you think you know Linux, give Slackware a shot anyway, you wont regret it. It's one step away from BSD.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Slayk]

Article is toast, so this is just a guess, but here's what I'd do to get my desktop up (seeing as I've been using Slack on the desktop for 6 months now, I'm still pretty inexperienced).

1. startx
If that doesn't work, use the CLI configuration tool to write an xorg.conf to fit what you need on your system, and all it requires is a limited knowledge of what your monitor supports and what video card you have.

2. alsamixer, and unmute sound.
I have no damn idea *why* that defaults to muted, but it does. Then, if that doesn't work, it's time to poke around in the kernel to find what you need as a module. Same as just about any other distro I've tried, really. Not too many of them tend to have a module for my nForce2 chipset handy.

3. Go get a well deserved victory sandwich. Enjoy.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Eudial]

How'bout

alsamixer
alsactl store
echo "alsactl restore" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local

That way it automatically restores the sund at every reboot.

RTFM

[InodoroPereyra]

Typical desktop users are not willing and not interested in reading a webpage to get the basics of their OS working. We can't keep telling them "Read the Freaking Manual".

I recently installed Mandrake in a White Box Machine that I got on the mail with no OS. It took less than half an hour to even get my cable connection working. Most everything was auto configured.That I call a desktop distro.

I have a sweet spot for Slack 'cause I started my Linux experience with Slackware almost 10 years ago. And I think there is a certain market niche for Slack, mostly in the server side of things. Some people want a mostly vanilla distro with binary packaging. These people want a stable, standard distro that you can install if you know the business.

That's that. But pointing to a webpage that tells you how to configure things that sould be automatically configured, does not make a distro newbie or desktop friendly. I am not critizing the original webpage, I am critical of the way this news bit has been posted to /.

Re:RTFM

[Anonymous Coward]

1/2 ah hour to get the cable connection working? Damn it takes less than 2 minutes on a Mac, and that's if you are really unlucky. And no I am not trying to evangelise Macs and slam Linux. I am just thinking that if this can be done in less than 2 mins on a Mac, then it should also be able to done in less than 2 mins under Linux.

Re:RTFM

[InodoroPereyra]

I meant 1/2 hour the whole installation from the Mandrake 10 CDs. The cable connection was just a matter of starting DHCP on the network card interface :-)

Re:RTFM

[willCode4Beer.com]

You bring up an excellent point.

To expand, too many people answer RTFM with "what FM?". They might have a little booklet with their distro that tells them nothing. To them its the only FM they have.
The can't do a google lookup because they can't get networking/video/etc working.

In my experience, these are the things that most fustrate new users.

First distro

[naitro]

I'm glad the first Linux distro I ran was Slackware. It has a steep learning curve (compared to Red Hat, etc.), but the knowledge I gained while running Slack has been of great use to me later. I wouldn't know half of the things I know about how a *nix system (Linux in particular) works if it wasn't for all the sleepless nights I've spent configuring everything from soundcards to qmail on Slackware. Especially learning how to compile applications instead of just downloading a package has proven very useful.

I now run Debian (mainly because of APT and the great community), but Slackware is what I recommend to my (techie) friends who want to learn how to use a Linux based system.

Yeah, blizzards and uphill both ways. Everyone has their way of learning, I guess.

First release to have some troubles with

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using Slackware since version 8.0 and 10.0 is the first version to give me some hassles. Mind you these hassles are minor compared to what you get with other distroes. I don't know what's wrong as I have used 9.1 on the same comp without these problems:

1 - Xine, noatun, kaboodle don't play MPEGs without dropping most frames (mplayer works OK, though not as well as with 9.1). Likewise xine has troubles with DVDs

2 - I had a really tough time getting sound to work (though not with KDE components). It's not an issue with permissions, but something to do with hotplug, udev, or something like that, which I think is also to blame for the next problem below.

3 - Could not get my USB thumb drive to work (this worked flawlessly under 9.1 with hotplug)

As I said, these are minor, though annoying. Still, Slackware is the least annoying distro out there, which is why I will continue to stick with it. Patrick does a wonderful job.

Re:First release to have some troubles with

[trocade]

I think the first problem is because of Xorg, since I upgraded to Xorg I can no longer use mplayer with -vo xv, something which worked fine with XFree86. I get some error message that says: The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec.

Is it 1993?

[nineinchnatey]

asdf

New hardware, Works "out of the box"

[respite]

Where is the author coming getting these ideas? The Slackware 10 install set up my sound and video without any feedback whatsoever from myself, and on fairly recent hardware too: onboard sound from an Intel motherboard and a Radeon 9000.

All I had to do was turn up the volume when I logged into the gnome desktop, which I agree should be done for the user in the first place, but it is hardly worth whining about.

3.141

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do better than that. We can see the redirect right there.

You suck at this game.

Dropline Gnome

[AnomalyConcept]

I decided to stop using Dropline Gnome when I stopped liking the eye candy. I currently use the Milk 2.0 rounded theme with some other add-ons, and it's just fine for me.

I agree, though, that DLG makes the Linux desktop really easy and configurable. It's just that it's not my type and I can do without it.

The DLG update manager only manages the actual Dropline packages. Although it covers other system level packages, it's not a complete package management tool. Then again, the desktop is mainly what's being used, so I guess it suffices.

I haven't had any problems using Slackware on my laptop. It Just Works (TM).

Not my impression.

[edunbar93]

I'm a unix sysadmin, and though I've never used slackware and have little use for Linux in general, my impression of this distro has always been that it's built by slackers (thus, the name), and as such I wouldn't want to put it on *any* server.

Although the article says it's supposed to be a distribution for servers, I think that this article reaffirms my opinion, since it's pretty clear that its toolset is pretty limited. Installing stuff is awkward and lacking any automation at all, a clear sign of laziness on the behalf of the programmers and designers. When you're actually being paid to spend time doing something, it's in the best interests of those paying you to do it faster, which is why I insist on such shortcuts. Sorry guys, I'm not interested.

Re:Not my impression.

[Anonymous Coward]

The name comes from the church of the subgenius... Not due to slacking off.

Re:Not my impression.

[Welsh Dwarf]

First of all, it isn't made _by_ slackers, but _for_ slackers, and second the 'programmers and designers' are actually one man.

On a more serious note, I've had slackware on application servers (serving thin clients) and have never had any hassle. The 'lack of automation' is basically sticking to the KISS philosophy, and to be perfectly honest, personally I find that it's the other distro's who's toolsets are bloated, not slackware's limited. Then again, it's probably a matter of taste...

Re:Not my impression.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a unix sysadmin, and though I've never used slackware and have little use for Linux in general, my impression of this distro has always been that it's built by slackers (thus, the name), and as such I wouldn't want to put it on *any* server.

In other words, "I have no fucking idea what this even is, but the name sounds highly suspect so it must suck. QED."

The name has nothing to do with "slackers", it's a reference to Slack. As a distribution, it is simple to install, straightforward to administer, and has a very broad set of tools and applications available as installable packages.

You accuse the maintainers of laziness, when in fact Pat Volkerding and crew have consistently turned out the most stable, full-featured, and robust Linux distributions available for over ten years now. I wouldn't use anything else on a production server. I hope for your employer's sake that you don't leap to such ignorant conclusions while administering AIX, or Slolaris, or whatever "real" Unix you work with.

Slack rocks

[Chewbacon]

I never thought for myself when I got into linux. Someone told me 6 years ago 'Redhat is the way! Slackware sucks!' The recent versions of Redhat give me such a headache because the installations appear to make decisions for me. Slack doesn't. Not only that, but configuring slack is so much easier than Redhat. As corporate as Redhat gets, they come off as a microsoft of linux. Slack reaches back to the roots of linux.

Re:Slack rocks

[BigBanana]

configuring slack is so much easier than Redhat

ROTFL, that must be the funniest joke I've heard in weeks! The installer "making decisions for you" is called auto-detecting and auto-configuring and these functions are nowadays available in almost every other distro, Slackware being the shining exception. Slack reaches back to the stone age of Linux.

Re:Slack rocks

[geminidomino]

Slack reaches back to the stone age of Linux.

A stone mountain is infinitely more stable than one of sand.

well..

[diitante]

I dont advocate or promote any distro over another. Linux is too personal for that. However, I will say that I have been using Slackware for quite some time and I use it daily on an IBM laptop as my main workstation. Like others have said, it all worked out of the box. And my wireless net cards worked too. As far as a learning curve goes, yeah it has one. But, it is much shorter than learning equal skills in Red Hat, Mandrake or SuSE. m

Slackware/Fedora

[matgorb]

In the past week I installed consecutively, Slackware 10 (cause I want to do a live cd and slax is awesome but I like gnome...) Yoper V2 and went back to Fedora Core 2 for now. Slackware is easy to install and all but it behave not that good on my hardware (nforce2 A7N8X) the good thing for me was that (compare to fc2) it reads mp3 and movies out of the box, the bad thing was that it didn't read them that well. I also had an issue with mozilla not accepting any submit in any pages (buttons or enter, think google search) so it was really really confusing. I then tried Yoper, which is very very good, but lacks an extensive package collection...and nobody took care of my dependencies...! For me right now FC2 is the way to go, I love gnome and the red hat theme, I love evolution ready to go, and I love Yum; the only "ennoying" part to get a working environment being to add the livna depository to yum (through a downloadable yum.conf) then yum update, and yum install xmms-mp3 xine flash. the last bit is to get my ntfs drive to be read and it is a simple as downloading and installing a rpm. It takes me less than an hour to get a fully configured workstation with all I expect from an PC. People might not like redhat, but if you don't want to go through debian or gentoo and want a good looking, reliable desktop fast, well FC2 is the way to go.

Stating the obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon me for stating the obvious, but a little rant is in order. Every linux machine can be turned into a desktop machine no matter what normal distribution you install on it. The normal in the previous sentence refers to linux distributions that aren't modified to be used as real-time operating systems, or have undergone serious modifications to suit some particular combination of hardware for embedded devices and even then, I'm quite sure it's still possible if you take into account the limitations these modifications imply.

I'm growing tired of the glowing reviews of distribution X and company Y providing the best desktop environment available. People can run Gnome or KDE on any distribution as long as they know their favourite package management system, and if not then ./configure; make; make install has always done the trick. Oh, I'm not saying that it isn't a good thing that distributions are trying to provide desktop environments, in fact I think it's a great idea. But at the heart of the matter of it all lies that whatever distribution you run, you can ALWAYS run windowmanager X or desktop environment Y, usually without too much hassle.

I've used slackware for years, and it was the first distribution I ever installed. I've used Redhat and Linux From Scratch, and lately I use Debian. But I've grown so tired of the endless debates of geeks preferring one distribution to another. It's all the same, just a little different, and even then you can still do whatever you want. Can we please stop our little holy wars, because the rest of the world doesn't care. If a person who is not a technophobe asks me what linux distribution to use, my answer always is "Pick one of the better known ones, and you'll be fine."

Maybe this is a smug attitude of mine, but I don't care. If someone wants to run fedora, fine by me. Someone chooses debian, fine by me. Someone chooses windows, be my guest. But please stop being such zaelots, as it's hurting the community.

Re:Stating the obvious?

[JonMartin]

Mod parent up.

This whole "this is a good desktop distro" thing is crap. I admin a couple hundred *nix boxes (Slackware, Solaris, OpenBSD) I can tell you that it takes very little work to get a nice desktop running across all the platforms. The idea that RedHat is a desktop OS and Solaris (or OpenBSD) are for servers only is nonsense. You just need to take the time to install the shiny software. Anyone with a little skill can take a Slack box and get it to match or beat any other distro in the eye-candy department.

As an admin the main issue for me is ease of administration. It takes me a few days to get an OS up to scratch eye-candy-wise, but I have to maintain it for the rest of the year. In those terms OpenBSD and Solaris top Slack, with the other Linux distros following.

Slack does make a good desktop

[eris_crow]

Slack does make a good desktop, but I won't say it makes a good desktop for everyone.

The first distro I ever installed was Slackware 3.1 and used it and the other 3.x releases for about 3 years. Then I got tired of doing everything by hand and I switched to RedHat 6.2. I stuck with RedHat for several years after that, and now at work I deal with mostly RHE3, so the experience of using it paid off, but it was Slack that actually taught me how to do everything.

When it came time to upgrade my system at home, though, I ran into trouble. I'd been using RH7.1 for a long time and thought that I would go to RH9, but the installer frequently crashed during installation and I'd have to start over. Then when I finally got it installed and working, I managed to bork it while trying to get audio and video codecs and software installed. I could have tried repairing by hand, I suppose, but it being a fresh install anyway, I figured it would take less time to just start over from scratch and reinstall one more time. No dice. The installer crashed again.

I like RedHat, and I still run RH8 on a small print/mail/firewall server at home, but after the repeated installation trouble, I decided to go with Slackware. It is nice and conservative and I knew that it would at least install correctly, even if it needed a bit more hand holding to set up.

So I got out my Slack 9.0 CDs a friend had burned for me and loaded it up. No problems. Not a single glitch during the entire installation. Everything was smooth as could be. Sound worked out of the box, and X configuration was easy with xfree86config. I compiled Window Maker and KDE 3.1 from source, and had no problems at all with them.

Now I've got a clean, fast system with a low memory footprint, and it gives me no headaches. If there is anything I want to do, some program is already installed to do it, so even if I don't have the program I prefer, I've at least got a program I can use, and that is what counts. Downloading other programs is no big deal for me.

I'm not the only one who uses this box, either. My wife uses it sometimes and she knows nothing about computers. But Gnome, Mozilla, and OpenOffice handle 99% of her needs, and she can deal with them without trouble. She still needs me to do updates, and configure things, though.

So my judgement of Slackware today is this: it makes a great desktop for people who already know how to use Linux and already know how to customize things the way they want. For newbies it's probably too intimidating unless they are really interested in learning, but it can still work for them if a knowledgeable person is around to take care of details.

Gentoo and n00bs: True Story

[SoTuA]

In my experience, last time a noob got loose on gentoo, the computer got hosed.

I asked a friend with a ton of bandwidth to download the gentoo CDs for me, and out of curiosity he tried it. Hosed computer. (yes, he has succesfully installed other distros)

I seriously would worry about letting a noob loose on something that has you play with fdisk, mkfs et al.

Re:Gentoo and n00bs: True Story

[aardvarkjoe]

Hosed computer. ... I seriously would worry about letting a noob loose on something that has you play with fdisk, mkfs et al.

Although I've never installed Gentoo, every Linux distro I have installed warns you to back up important data before starting. A newbie who could follow instructions would have had no problems. (And perhaps your friend learned a valuable lesson about following instructions next time.)

Re:Gentoo and n00bs: True Story

[SoTuA]

Although I've never installed Gentoo

The installer that most closely resembles it is the one that comes with LFS.

Re:Wow!

[Axeus]

While we're comparing Gentoo and Slackware, I might as well add my 2 cents.
I've been using Gentoo for a couple of years now, and even after going through several fresh installs, it always seems to get cluttered up when different ebuilds decide to install, say, games in different directories. They could be in /opt/ or /usr/local/ or whatever else is fashionable at the time. I'm guessing that Slackware has a lot more consistency across the entire install. Gentoo is, in theory, great, but you can't tell me it's fully mature and ready for everyone. I am actually going to try out Slackware as soon as I get my new laptop.

Besides, editing a few config files by hand is fine for me if I at least know where they are.

OMFG - It's Multimedia!

[qwasty]

Wow sound!!!!111oneone - I think Strong Bad's Compy 386 is going to be tough to beat

Re:Wow!

[B1ackDragon]

I've wondered about that myself, though its usually as easy as if its not in /usr/bin or /usr/local its /opt. Weird, and annoying.

The only other thing that's annoyed me with gentoo is when etc-update hoses my fstab (and half a dozen other important files.) Maybe I just don't know how to use it properly. That and waiting for a new program to get into portage, but that is the price you pay for reliability in dep. handling.

Re:Wow!

[Quattro Vezina]

The only other thing that's annoyed me with gentoo is when etc-update hoses my fstab (and half a dozen other important files.) Maybe I just don't know how to use it properly.

1) Don't just hit -5 everytime you use etc-update. Look at the list. If there's a file you want to keep, exit with -1 and either remove the ._cfg0000 file or move it somewhere else (I used /root/cfgblackhole/). After that, run etc-update and -5.

2) You might want to use dispatch-conf instead of etc-update (it's part of portage, no need to emerge it separarely) -- it's much smarter, allows you to compare diffs, and has better options for keeping the old file. Also, you'll to edit /etc/dispatch-conf.conf -- set every yes/no option to yes, and make sure the archive-dir exists (create it yourself if you have to). Oh, and emerge rcs if you've not done so already, dispatch-conf needs it to do version control. After I switched to dispatch-conf, updating config files stopped being a pain.

Sound is lacking

[dalutong]

I am still sort of disappointed with GNU/Linux sound. (Saying GNU/Linux to show I'm not a penguin-hating man. Just trying to tell the truth.)

ALSA was supposed to fix everything. Having two cards and switching between them easily. Configuring new hardware easily. It's easier than it was with regular OSS, but it isn't super simple. Or maybe it's just my config (debian unstable.)

Anyone else have complains/solutions/great tools that I am stupid not to have?

Thanks.

BIG fonts...

[Skiron]

Funnily enough, I installed Slack on my laptop 3 days ago. All went hunky dory... sort of.

I use Fluxbox as desktopWM, and it all worked great - unless I fired up a KDE/Gnome app - then fonts went HUGE (Mozilla here)

Buit, having a few years ;) experience with Linux, I re-ran /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config and sorted.

BTW, pre-compiled Slackware is soooooo fast - nearly as fast as Gentoo built on box.

Nick

Re:BIG fonts...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a really foolproof way to get a screenshot...

Re:BIG fonts...

[blkmajik]

Try adding -dpi 75 to you X startup.

startx -- -dpi 75

or in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers make it read: :0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X -dpi 75

This is a good hack around hi res monitors and xft screwing with font sizes.

My slackware story

[praedictus]

I've been using Slackware for over 2 years in a dual-boot situation (Win 98). It started off pretty simple with a Zipslack install to a dos directory, using loadlin to switch to Linux. Shortly thereafter I used part2.4.3 to create a true linux partition and swapspace, manually copied the installation from the DOS partition to the linux partition, ran LILO and got lucky on the first try.
Still no X or sound, so first I downloaded an updated kernel (2.4.19 IIRC), then began filling in the required libraries. Got X working, but KDE crashed and burned due to a dependency problem while loading. After much trial and error worked around that with an older version of XFREE86 and some symlinks. Then switched from default SVGA to NVidia drivers. Still works but no sound yet.
Next "discovered" swaret and upgraded the whole kit and kaboodle to Slackware 9.1 (very slowly- I'm on dialup in the middle of Brazil). Got the ALSA drivers working somewhat, so now have sound.
Of course at this time the mX440 decided to die and take the AGP on the motherboard along with it, so the system gets a brain transplant. With no hope of getting back home where good hardware is reasonable, I opt for whats available - a somewhat crappy ASUS a7v266 motherboard.
The Windows part went without a too much trouble, boot to safe mode, uninstall the old hardware, do a quick search and destroy mission in the registry, reboot and let it grab the needed files off the motherboard CD. Now for Slack - BORF-kernel panic on boot.
About this time I get a good deal on a 120 gig HD, and as the hd in the kid's machine is dying, another transplant in order. Of course I'm a lazy fuck and will do anything to avoid a reinstall even if it takes longer. Windows - no problem at all, used part243 to clone the partition off the 40 gig drive, finished that part in 30mins with formatting and all. Decided my linux partition deserved to be somewhat larger, so I couldn't clone. Formatted the partition. Now what?
Remembered I STILL had the old ZIPSLACK installed on the windows partition i had cloned, ran loadlin and now had access to the old linux partition. Used the old linux to copy the files over to the new partition. Ran lilo & to boot the new linux partition. Kernel panic. Boot to DOS, run loadlin, fixed the references causing the kernel panic in rc.d (old NVIDIA cruft) reboot.
Boots fine, no X, sound drivers still not right. Oops! Install cd only has linux drivers for old version of RH. Try to install manually anyway, kernel mismatch so give up. Change to plain old SVGA in XFree86Config, finally get X working, and lo and behold KDE is working too. Upgrade my moz to Waterfrog and start browsing in search of solutions. Which is where I am now.

Re:My slackware story

[RangerElf]

Damn cool story :-)

Keep up the good work. :-)

-gustavo

Come on!

[oogoliegoogolie]

Since when does sound not work on Win2k/xp/2k3? This is 2004. Hardware probems you had eight years ago with win 3.1/95 don't count anymore.

That being said, if sound doesn't work, then yes, it's not newbie friedly.

The original poster doesn't seem like the real troll here.

Re:Come on!

[Shulai]

I just installed XP on a brand new computer for a customer.
Video worked with a generic driver, and sound doesn't works at all, I need to install the drivers that comes with the hardware.

On the other hand, Slackware also comes with a generic (VESA) X configuration, and (using hotplug) sound drivers are automatically loaded if it comes with the standard Linux kernel.

Linux is not perfect, but I'm getting tired of people claiming that Windows is.

but LOL!

[rokka]

They said "Slackware", "X-Windows" and "friendly" in the same sentence. LOL!
Just kidding, you know we love you :)

Tells You How To Configure Sound Every Boot

[reallocate]

Slackware makes no pretension of being "newbie-friendly".

That said, it tells you how to configure your soundcard at every reboot and it keeps telling you until you do exactly that.

Why?

[CrkHead]

I started a slow change from Windows to Linux in late '98 and tried out many different distributions and settled on Slackware pretty quickly.

I have had installation nightmares with Mandrake, Suse, Redhat, Yellow Dog, and I'm sure there have been more. I have less trouble configuring Slack and keeping it updated. I did have to learn Linux in the process, but that was what I set out to do when moving from Windows.

As updated versions of other distros come around, I give them a test drive on my laptop and always end up moving back to Slack. It just works and you don't have any little utilities trying to take over your config files.

...IN JAPAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware is dead...in japan.

But why?

[Scud]

Okay, this is going to sound like a troll, but what does Slack have that makes it better than a more "polished" distro? With the one that I use, I slap the DVD in and it starts chugging away (after I do my own partitions manually of course, and select what software I want first).

Configuration is not too much more than clicky here and clicky there.

Before I get lambasted for running a "dumbed-down" distro (or being dumbed-down myself), once installed I do everything else with my favorite tools -- the command line & mc. And don't get me wrong, Slack was my very first :) I started with Slack v3.0 and couldn't get it going, tried again with 3.1 and "many" things started to work :)

And who could forget copying all those damn floppies :)

So what's new with Slackware?

John

What are you talking about?

[kespoosh]

Slackware runs perfectly out of the box...Or rather, CD. Pop it in, follow the simple menus, the only part that could be hard at all for a newbie is setting up LILO/networking, and anyway the default choices usually work fine. I was able to install it back when I knew absolutely nothing about *nix at all. I didn't even know what ls did at the time, and I managed alright. So I can't see how you justify it "being thought by many as a distribution oriented to servers and experienced users."

Re:What are you talking about?

[fferreres]

Correlation != Cause ...

I think Slackware is regarded as such, because you bypass all the "User Friendliness" from day 1, and realize it's just straightforward. You become more confortable and less limited. You don't lern where the buttons are, but what needs be done.

Knowing all this translated into beign able to do fancy things, like remote administration easily, solving unexpected problems. It's not about Slackware, it's about getting to know the tools. And seeing how you do not need to keep updating everything like mad.

So in the end, the call you "nerd", or you end up setting up servers and maintaining servers. But you will probably want a tutor (friend) with Slackware, it makes help you so much, Slackwareites usually have a tendency to tell you what to learn, or what tool is right for the job, not exact commands lines or "downloads".

A colleague introduced me to Linux, we bought a VA Linux server from my home country, and have it shipped to a USA hosting company. Then they configured the network in minutes. After an hour everything was fine and working. After a year, the machine would crash, and crash (run out of swap, leaking...).

So my friend suggested an "emergency" reinstall, 20000 miles away from the computer, without any remote assistance, unless he screwed. He did not...that slackware reinstall is still running mostly unchanged since 2001 without problems, uptimes in the years.

I then used Slackware at the notebook, but got a bit tired of babysitting it (have less time now, or so I think). So I installed Gentoo. Gentoo is also nice, but not as straighforward (it's the magic!). The best thing about Gentoo, I found later, is that cool stuff other people use gets an entry under portage. It helps you find all kind of usefull stuff that other appreciate.

But if it needed to be 100% in control again, I'd go back to Slackware anytime.

glibc?

[BrokenHalo]

is that it changes so much of your system, including glibc

No it doesn't. There was an issue a while back where the native Slack iconv.so library was replaced with libiconv by Dropline, but that was resolved months ago.

It does, however, replace X11 with one optimised for i686 (as opposed to the native i486 code). None of this, however, raises any problem with building your own stuff. I compile stuff all the time, and DLG has never caused any problems I didn't have with Pat's generic version of Gnome.

As for pam, I guess if you don't like it, you don't have to use it; but DLG uses it simply because it improves the overall desktop experience.

Re:glibc?

[boudie]

I like their wallpaper! And as for pam, it's not really needed on a single user system - it's purpose would be for authenticating multiple users, as in lots. Tell me how you'd remove it once installed (in 50 words or less).

Re:glibc?

[BrokenHalo]

Ok, here's much less than 50 words (assuming you still want to use Gnome):

cd /var/adm/packages
removepkg *dl
installpkg /mnt/cdrom/slackware/g/*tgz

... and you're in business. Oops, nearly forgot, you'll also have to installpkg *tgz from the "X" directory of disk #1. Not exactly hard.

Re:glibc?

[boudie]

Have you actually tried doing that? From previous experience, I would say if you removed all the dl packages including pam, it would leave you unable to log in. Why don't you try it and see what happens. And I don't remember having to cd into /var/adm/ packages to remove anything. And what about pkgs like python, libogg, xscreensaver, xine and mad which aren't in g or x. It can get very ugly.

This is silly.

[BrokenHalo]

Newbie-friendliness seems silly in the context of Linux distros. If your grandma buys a computer, she, like most people will get one with Windows pre-installed on it, and has probably never heard of Linux.

Consciously installing Linux presupposes that you have at least some idea what you are doing, and why, so you will presumably have some idea where to look to get things set up properly.

Setting up Windows can also be a bear of a job if/when things don't work out properly the first time, which is why it is usual for people to get the dealer to do it.

what else when it must be secure, stable and easy?

[sycotic]

why, OpenBSD of course :-)