Slashdot Mirror
An Old Hacker Slaps Up Slackware
cdlu writes "What do you get when you mix an old hacker with an old distribution? A good old review of the recently released Slackware 10.2." Joe Barr over at Linux.com (owned by the same company as Slashdot) lays down his thoughts on everything from the install to reliability and user loyalty.
It was about 60 floppies. My first crash was several weeks later when I ran GnuChess under X on my 486DX2/66 w 8MB RAM, and made my second move...
...I also learned to hate BSD-style init. I have found memories of Slackware since that's what I cut my Linux teeth on. I was too noob to even know there were easier distros to start with, but in retrospect you learn a heck of a lot more when the OS installer isn't slathered in wizards and GUIs.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If this is the same Joe Barr who can't even install and use MPlayer, do I really give a shit about what he thinks about Slack? I mean if he can call the best video player ever "The Project From Hell", he's just proven himself to be entirely unreliable.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Strict glibc compliance and relatively few efforts to make it palatable to the desktop crowd is exactly what has made it perfect for a task specific server platform. Having stuck with it since 1994, when I first started down the road of discovering what Linux could do. I've never been disappointed (in terms of uptime, security and resource control) I will probably keep using it as long as it can be maintained. A learning curve isn't a bad thing. That's why I got into this in the first place. I'll leave Red Hat to the '1337'. This just works.
The one thing that really made me go "Ahhhh" when I was first exposed to Slackware was the fact that the packages included with Slackware are much closer (or almost identical) to what you would get if you downloaded them direct from the original maintainer (SSH, Apache, ect...).
Consequently you don't find stuff hand hacked and installed in strange places. If the man page says its in "X" location, that's where it is. Too many distros take a third party app, modify it so that the way they install it is different from what the original INSTALL file says, which makes it fustrating to troubleshoot.
Having using Slackware since its first release on a computer that dual booted OS/2, I can say for certain Slackware has staying power. DOS 6 was easy to install, Slack is too.
/etc files in vi right there before you boot into Linux.
Slack 10.2 makes it tons easier to boot from CD and even get the network up before you even boot into your installed OS, to be able to download any patches or setup NFS you need or copy special conf files down.
If you want to do a complex install like I have (setting up software RAID on a 2.6 kernel running an AMD64-Dualcore with a Shuttle ST20G5), you can setup the raid from the boot CD, install everything, and patch your
Without Slackware, I probably would have never been interested in Linux at all.