Newly Released: Slackware Linux Essentials, 2d Ed.

VincenzoRomano writes to point out that as of a few days ago, "Slackware Linux has its second revision of the Slackware Linux Essentials book. It is a major revision of the the reference book for Slackware users and is now an official Slackware project. Slackware Linux is the oldest and yet pretty active Linux distribution born from an idea by Patrick Volkerding and that turned 12 a few months ago. It follows the KISS(Keep it Simple, Stupid!) philosophy, which seems to be one of the reasons of its long life. The book itself has been created by David Cantrell, Logan Johnson and Chris Lumens and is available both in printed (dead-tree) form and in electronic form (HTML/DocBook/PS/PDF). Whether your are a Slackware aficionado or not, the book deserves a look at least!"

Comments

Re:Who uses Slackware anyway?

[Reverend528]

Slackware is much easier to maintain than debian or fedora installations because it lacks package management, so you're not constantly pressured to upgrade the software. It's kind of like running windows used to be, before it harassed the user with monthly "updates" that require "reboots".

Re:Who uses Slackware anyway?

[ComputerSlicer23]

Did you just take 2 sentences, to say you feel more comfortable when the software doesn't bother to alert you when there are security flaws in the software you are running, and it lacks an easy way to upgrade it? From what I remember of slack (back in the 3.X days), it did have package management in some limit sense. The backed database seemed to be nothing more the an unindexed list files mapping to a list of packages. There was a "pkgadd" command (I forget the name of the command to remove packages).

That was back in the day, when you had to read the Makefiles and add and remove the appropriate "-D" options to get all sorts of fun stuff. Slack was lots of fun. I'm really happy I cut my teeth on it, but goodness, I don't have the time to track security flaws any more. I'll happily let RedHat, Fedora Foundation, or Debian tell me when there is a patch I need to be worried about. I still hand hack all my config files. Sometimes, I hand hack the RedHat specific config files, but I still read all the scripts and know all the commands to boot strap a machine from scratch if I really need to.

Kirby

Homage?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

It's sort of like forgetting to pay homage to GNU/RMS, boarders on sacrilegious, and they take away your "geek card", and ask you to leave. That sort of thing.

Re:Anyone have a link for a downloadable version?

[robw810]

You should try actually visiting the links in the summary - this one http://www.slackbook.org/ has the following visible without even scrolling:

The Book
* Split HTML
* Single-page HTML
* DocBook Source
* Post script
* PDF

I guess it's a bit much to ask for someone to do a little bit on their own - perhaps that's why Slackware isn't as popular as some other distros...

RW

Re:Who uses Slackware anyway?

[frank_abacus]

I think it would pay you to take a look at a more recent Slackware distibution. Quite a lot's happened since the 3.X days.

Once on the security mailing list you get advised whenever a new package has been updated to fix some security hole, and then you can just upgradepkg from the new package, if you need to.