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Slackware Documentation Project Begins In Earnest
New submitter vtel57 writes "A recent thread at Jeremy's LinuxQuestions.org lit a fire of enthusiasm for a new Slackware documentation initiative. A new SlackDocs Wiki has been started on Alien Bob's (Eric Hameleers) server. There is also a new mailing list for discussion and coordination of the project. All interested parties are encouraged to visit and participate."
Who's Earnest?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Actually in three months, Slashdot headline: "Slackware Documentation Project Begins In Earnest"
The answer to all your problems
And lasted for 2 whole minutes of everyone keeping a straight face before a raucous chorus of laughter erupted.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
First distro I ever installed back in 1996 and still my favorite. It doesn't get much nerdier that Slackware (except perhaps OpenBSD). I am glad it has survived all this time.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Isn't documentation antithetical to the very nature of Slackware? It's a bit like Steve Jobs serving meals at a homeless shelter.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
It's important to be Earnest.
RTFM Noob!
What manual?
Oh, sorry.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Because:
- No public bug tracking is required. Closed development process is a myth - it merely packages plain source installs of everything it uses and pushes patches upstream. Actual patches above-and-beyond the version is states it uses of a particular app/library are virtually zero.
- A primitive character-mode installer that lets you install it on ANYTHING. Literally, anything. And not worry about whether it supports VESA even, let alone KMS.
-.All administration is done from the command line. So you don't NEED X. Perfect for server installs, in my experience, but perfectly serviceable as a desktop if you want (which one? Have them all!)
- No dependency tracking - true, but the base install contains everything you need for a pretty substantial install. And if you're installing servers and working machine rather than desktops, you probably don't need to touch anything.
- Minimal feature set? Same as every other distro, just maybe not as integrated and automatic as you would like. That's a plus to me - I can tell EXACTLY what's going to load when and can cut out the crap on the installer before it even gets off the disk. Oh, and it runs all the latest kernels just fine.
If you think of PC's as "things that need a GUI", it's probably not for you. If you think of PC's as "things that get a job done, reliably, every time, with the minimum of extraneous resources consumed", then it's fabulous.
Hell, it took about two-three days to get ArmedSlack (the ARM port) working on Raspberry Pi. Still the only thing I'd use on that device, given it's low footprint and having to boot off my 2Gb card. And when you intend the distro to do nothing more than track GPS, dial up 3G, integrate with external electronics, etc. then a 100Mb install that still can be SSH'd into without even having to go looking for what to install is a big plus. And no GUI required.
The thing that distinguishes Slackware is that it was the first EVER distro. And it hasn't changed much. Sweet, simple, small, stable. Hell, I have 10+ year old machines still running on Slack.
No dependency tracking - true, but the base install contains everything you need for a pretty substantial install. And if you're installing servers and working machine rather than desktops, you probably don't need to touch anything.
Until there's a vulnerability in something you installed and you then need to upgrade. Then you're pretty well fucked and are going to likely end up with a mess of broken dependenies and/or substantial downtime while you upgrade.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So you install an updated version? Slackware does release updates you know.
Or if I installed/compiled the file myself, then I should be building the updates.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
More briefly put, its apparent disadvantages are actually advantages when you have old or limited hardware. Fair enough.
Not if you know what you're doing. Your described PEBKAC.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
If you want dependency tracking, you can install pkgsrc for Linux, as I did.
To anyone who really digs the Slackware way, the concept of a distro-mandated packaging system simply doesn't make any sense.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
To all developer who devote themselves to open source and make it available to others for free. To all people who post on forums to help others. It takes a good person to do that. Thank you.
Slackware I've considered to be more "pure" in the sense you administer it the same way you administered a UNIX box - at the command line and all that. None of the fancy distro-specific administration tools or anything.
For me, it's a good way to learn the ins and outs of it but it's really a hacker's OS to play around with, screw things up and fix them, and have complete control. If that's your thing, great.
The other more popular distros which use tools are more for people who want to get stuff done with minimal fuss and call it a day. Sure you need some Linux knowledge, but most of your day-to-day stuff is taken care of for you so you can get your work done without having to mess with your system continually.
It's probably the closest to Linux from Scratch without having to compile and build everything yourself, or building it all yourself like Gentoo. Of course, this also means you can customize your system exactly the way you need to with just the libraries you need and not what the distro requires.
I really hope this is just a troll post. There were recent security issues discovered in BIND, which was patch right away. Oh you have to upgrade? slackpkg -upgrade BIND. Pretty straight forward.
I checked their page, and while w/ KDE, they are still w/ 3.5.10, in the case of GNOME, they are w/ GNOME 3.2.1 in fallback mode. I thought that they are real conservative about which software versions they tend to use.
Your described PEBKAC.
Indeed, but which K and which C?
Because if something breaks, then I really find the thing that broke. Not like you install Ubuntu and the NetworkManager causes havoc. And you need to disable the damn automagic thing. Better yet uninstall it completely. And then a write a /etc/network/interfaces file that nobody knows who actually reads it. If I want to see how is the IP address or broadcast is assigned in Slackware, then I really can find the ifconfig statement that sets that up and the watch where the parameters come from (pity, that Slackware did not yet move to iproute2 in the boot scripts). I don't need a package management program with parameters to find out when did I install a package XY. I can do that with ls. And to find out which package installed file AB, all I need is grep.
Perhaps it's difficult to convey ... in Slackware it is easy to understand how it works. Or find out. With "more modern distro" you treat it as a blackbox. Yes, you could dissect it to the level of source code. But almost nobody does that. You get advice for solving a problem from people that treat it as blackbox. They cross the fingers and hope that it works. They don't really understand why or how the problem was solved. Or whether it was really solved or just does not manifest so obviously anymore.
Here's one - do most of the modern distros run on ARM? I'm guessing that Slackware, like Tiny Core/Damn Small can run on a Raspberry Pi. Or any embedded box built w/ an ARM - something that will not run Windows or Wintel software, but will happily accommodate Slackware's requirements.
So anybody could build - like the MintBox - an inexpensive, embedded ARM based box, and put Slackware on it, and run it. Granted, there will be other options as well - Minix, Tiny Core and Damn Small Linux, Gentoo, and some others. But seems like Slackware might be more suited for it than the likes of Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, et al.
I had a "white box" server back in 2004 with slackware, a very puny 256mb pentium 4 with tailor made (compiled) kernel, and for around 5 years it kept going very well serving a small PHP app with MySQL and email, it runned like a champ, we tried to keep it up to date but then we forgot about it for a couple of years, then a few changes to the hosted app needed an upgrade again and there is where disaster struck, never upgrade more than 2 versions up, we screwed glibc update.
In the end we reinstalled debian to lower maintance overhead while keeping it updated, but once you configure slackware it runs smoothly until the end of the hardware itself.
C-x C-c
Me too. Slackware 96 CDROMS from Walnut Creek. (I still have them as a souvenir).
Been using linux since then; Debian, Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu in several flavors, and then LFS. (In terms of nerdiness, LFS is Slackware squared.)
I only recently installed FreeBSD. The learning process seemed similar to my early days with Slackware. It's dejavu all over again.
The nerdiest thing I have ever seen is Nerds hanging out on Slashdot discussing which Linux/BSD distro is the nerdiest. That's just Neil Goldman nerdy.
Oh, that's easy. He's visiting his invalid friend, Bunbury.
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