Slashdot Mirror
Slackware 13.0 Released
willy everlearn and several other readers let us know that Slackware 13.0 is out. "Wed Aug 26 10:00:38 CDT 2009: Slackware 13.0 x86_64 is released as stable! Thanks to everyone who helped make this release possible — see the RELEASE_NOTES for the credits. The ISOs are off to the replicator. This time it will be a 6 CD-ROM 32-bit set and a dual-sided 32-bit/64-bit x86/x86_64 DVD. We're taking pre-orders now at store.slackware.com. Please consider picking up a copy to help support the project. Once again, thanks to the entire Slackware community for all the help testing and fixing things and offering suggestions during this development cycle. As always, have fun and enjoy!"
Yes, Eris knows you don't even need to be a SubGenius to appreciate the benefits, one can never have too much Slack. Please excuse me, I just got run over by a Fnord.
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
> I've been trying to get into Slackware lately but I just can't seem to get
> use to it. Are there any realb benifits to tranfering to it.
It may or may not be for you. That's the beauty of Linux. Use what you feel
comfortable with.
> Right now I run Arch and I just came from Gentoo, and I like the speed
> aspects of both and the optimization ability. Would there be such option in
> Slackware
You can recompile every package to your specifications. See the Slackbuilds.
Whether there's any actual benefit to doing so remains to be seen.
Ditto for actual source you download. Optimizations are a CFLAGS away.
It's been a while since I used it, but I liked Slack when I did. It didn't use the SysV init system used on almost all other Linux distros, but instead opted for BSD-style startup scripts. At the time I liked that - after getting very used to SysV these days though I think I'd be more or less indifferent on the issue.
Also, Slack was a bit more "raw" of a distro - it's package management included no real dependency handling, making it for the most part just an easy way to install binaries. Usually rather than relying on the package manager (as I often do in other distros now) it was just easier in Slack to download the source tarball and manually compile and install it. That was nice in that I pretty much always had the latest version of any program that I cared about, but the downside was that sometimes as older versions of libraries and such lagged, it would eventually hit a point when upgrading something like Gnome manually became a very, very long task of tracking down all the packages that needed to be upgraded, and sometimes fixing them (as sometimes they'd have libraries in non-standard places and such - not a common occurence, but it did happen).
Slack also didn't ship with any of it's own GUI tools. What you got was basically whatever Gnome or KDE shipped for you to use.
All in all, it was a fast and lean system that lended itself well to a person who wants to tweak things to keep them working exactly how they want. These days though, I've just found that Ubuntu on servers and Mint on the desktop is 90% as good of a system to use while being 20% of the effort to maintain, so I just use them instead.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I loved Slackware for many years, from 1995 to 2008, when I had 4 Slack machines in the house. However, it was the upgrading itself that finally turned me. I found it nigh impossible to actually "upgrade" a pre-existing configured system in use without critically damaging libraries and needing to reinstall from scratch, and worse, reconfigure and fiddle for about 10 hours to get everything working again the way I liked it. In my 20s I had that kind of energy and enthusiasm. Not any longer.
Yes, I have switched to Ubuntu/Mythbuntu, but have brought all my Slackware knowledge with me. Debian package management is divine. The switch has turned out to be the best of both worlds, Ubuntu's polish with my Slackware config skills, with the result of a brilliantly tuned machine that's nigh hassle free.
Quite frankly, if you don't know what it is, then you're not ready for it, so it doesn't matter.
I've got mod points again, but they never get spent, because I consider it to be a sign of greater integrity, to refute posts I disagree with, rather than simply down modding them.
Slackware was my first Linux distribution, during the mid 1990s. At the time, I'd only previously had exposure to UNIX at all via an ISP's FreeBSD shell account, and so I barely knew what it was at all.
A newcomer who is willing to learn is actually going to be far better off with Slack than with Ubuntu or Debian.
There is a much greater degree of simplicity within Slackware's overall design. Less complexity means less potential opportunities for things to break due to random, uncontrolled interactions of the various parts, and even more importantly, it also means that when something does break, it's a lot easier to find the source of the problem and fix it.
Using a system like Slackware is also going to give a user good mental habits as well, and teach them how to recognise a genuinely sound distribution design when they see one. Debian's greatest problem isn't so much that it's a terrible design, but more that the people who design and use it actually think that it's great.
Mr. Fluxx, I just can't let that comment go by without challenge. We, lusers in general, mock Microsoft and it's monopoly. We mock the mindset of people who just use Windows because it's all they know, and they are unwilling to learn or to explore. We mock conformity, in general.
I change OS's from time to time, just to see what's happening in Suse-land, Debian-land, Ubuntu-land, Solaris-land - well, you get the idea. Each flavor of Linux has it's good points, and each flavor has something that I don't think highly of.
I could name a favorite, and do everything in my power to sell that favorite, while denigrating the other flavors of Linux. But, not only would that be petty - it may actually impede innovation!
Which of us is to say that one team or the other will NOT stumble over the best thing since sliced bread in the next year or ten? At the moment, Ubuntu seems to be leading the way toward "The year of Linux on the desktop". But, how can you read the future? Anything can happen. Most especially, anything can happen when we don't have all the facts. Computer science is still in it's infancy.
Linus and his associates could conceivably have a flash of inspiration tomorrow, and rewrite the kernel in a manner that turns the computer world on end tomorrow. Or, more likely, a bunch of hackers do the same, to spite Linus and his entrenched hierarchy. Soon after, ALL the flavors of Linux that we love today may be replaced by "The Next Big Thing".
What I'm trying to say is, don't be a dick. If slackware looks like a waste to you, that's cool. Keep it to yourself. The kind of crap you posted just gives ammo to the astroturfers who are pushing the MS agenda.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Sorry, no.
My philosophy is do it the long, hard, manual way once so you learn it, then automate it with the computer. The same reason I'm using network manager instead of writing WPA-supplicant rules by hand; or using IKE instead of writing IPSec SPAs and SPIs by hand.
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, now I want to be able to move on and do something else while having the computer handle the tedious details.
Nice rant, though.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.