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Pre-Beta Slackware 4.0
Langston01 writes "According to
LinuxToday, a pre-beta of Slackware 4.0 is out. "
I remember Slackware. Wow, its been years since I used
it. I still need a Debian 2.1 CD. Or a T1.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I asked a Linuxworld and was told that he just got a G3 and a Alpha so ports for those will appear as soon as he gets a chance.
David Lang
dlang@diginsite.com
(AC as I don't want to take the time to login)
My X server is using 48 MB of virtual memory,
of which 20 MB is currently resident.
My web browser is using 53 MB of virtual memory,
of which 19 MB is currently resident.
Even my shell takes over a MB, and an xterm
needs about 2 MB. These are partly caused by
our monolithic C library.
Looks like weve /.ed cdrom.com...
FTP Error
Could not login to FTP server
Sorry, the current limit of 3600 users has been reached.
Please try again in a few minutes.
Most of the files on wcarchive are also available on CDROM. Please
send email to info@cdrom.com or visit our web site for more information.
Online ordering is available at http://www.cdrom.com. You may also
order over the phone by calling us at 1-800-786-9907 (toll-free) or
+1-925-674-0783.
User anonymous access denied.
Damn straight Jordy.
Right now (at home, anyway, I have to run Solaris here at work, boo-hoo... uh, I mean, dammit!) I'm running Slackware 3.5, and I think maybe 40 megs out of 500 are from the distro. Basically it's all *hand-rolled*, and I know where every file on the HD sits. All my RH buddies are still trying to figure out how many resource files they need for fvwm! (the correct answer is, of course, 1).
Phil
> (the correct answer is, of course, 1)
:)
Or 0, depending on who you ask
I don't understand what the big deal about slackware not being glibc2 yet. Most people who harp about this probably don't even know what the differences are. Furthermore between installing linuxthreads, thread-safe xlibs, etc... there's been no program I havn't been able to compile/run (including eMusic, x11amp, mysql, etc..). The only ones i get stuck not being able to run are some precompiled binaries (i.e. my civilization for linux beta ! not even hte slack runtime support would work for this ;( )
-Brian
Does anyone know if 4.0 will be glibc based or lic5 based?
Well, it certainly isn't 12, all dependent on each other in a vicious circle, which is the RH answer!
And I really can't understand why ANYONE would use another wm!
Flame on, Garth. Flame on, Wayne.
Phil
You are looking over the main point though. RedHat and Debian have 1 page where they list all security errors and have links to download fixed rpm and debs of the program. As far as I'm aware of, Slackware doesnt. This tremendously eases the administration process. In addition upgrading software via packages is much simpler than having to recompile every package with ap roblem.
You mean people still use it? I thought everyone was using current stuff like Debian, Red Hat, or Suse. I didn't think Slackware was still around they had fall so far behind and out of date. Why would anyone switch or use them at this point? Not me. NEXT!
slackware 4.0 is still based on libc5. duh! i was a loyal slackware user, but i think i'll move to redhat or debian, since libc5 is kinda obsolete...
-Me.
Oh... You mean this out of date distribution *Points to his Slackware 3.5 CD*
Hold on a sec... (types startx, watches Gnome load) (types netscape &, watches Netscape load localhost/index.html, running Apache)
Hm.. Works fine for me. Mind explaining what's out of date on it?
Slackware is a one person project. The maintainer already has a hard time to keep slackware up to date even on PCs. However, big companies like RedHat or projects like Debian can and already produce Linux distributions for various non i386 computers.
Show me just one user who had problems with glibc on Debian 2.0 which was released last summer. And don't mention redhat 5.0 glibc nightmares.. it was broken by Definition.
It's good to see the Slackware people out in force. Now i give the Redhat desktops we've been tinkering with a rest and update the boxes that do the heavy lifting.
it's pretty easy - stability and compability. libc5 has been much more thoroughly tested than _ANY_ libc6. moreover, one can compile things from source.
and another thing? your binary only distros are real pain as for some package u need exactly this and that package etc. - stupid and unnecessary pain. compile the source, luke!
Yeah I remember how screwed I felt when RedHat got rid of their ftp search. What the hell was up with that! I used that at least 3 times/day to find RPMs and it took me no more than a few seconds to find/grab/install any package I wanted. Now I have to resort to grepping metalab or using one of those glacially slow RPM2HTML sites.
But now they have a google search which appears to be sufficient again. But I'm definitely not an "official RedHat" guy any more.. their boxed sets are way too conservative, and their out-of-the-box window manager setup is so very stale. I've been running Linux-Mandrake for a month or so and I just went to a 2.2.3 kernel -- easy as pie!
Source RPMs are really nice, especially since I have a Qube2 and I can simply rpm --rebuild the stuff from my CD for the mips platform and now it is just like my Intel boxes. Sweet..
Slackware is for people who know what they're doing...
If you can't compile a package from the source, you shouldn't be using a free Unix...
I have been wondering about this too, ever since moving to Linux from my trusty but out of date Amiga. Coming from that environment I was used to being able to run a simple GUI, word processing, non-graphical web browsing, playing games, muddingm etc (and many times all at once) with only 4 megs of RAM on my machine (and the Amiga didn't have virtual mem). X windows certainly isn't as bad as windows but it still requires tons of RAM. I am currently running a happy little machine with 128MB RAM but I still like to keep things as efficient as possible. Anyways, my question is what are the future plans for X (if any) and what is the status of those other projects I have very briefly heard about (Berlin, etc)? What is everyone's thoughts on the future of Un*x GUIs (and not just the window managers either)?
I use slackware 3.6 on a 386 with 4 megs of ram and two 50megs hds. Everything runs to it's full extent, even apache. I must admit, it is a bit slow.
I'v been using slackware since I began using linux in 93, it was slackware 2.something with the 1.2.13 kernel. It was fast and stable and I learned everything from there. I have once tried to install redhat, never been able to, i had a real old cdrom and the fuckin' install programm did not let me mount it by hand. It tries to do everything for itself just like Wincrap. Isn't linux supposed to be against this...
So they've waited long enough to skimp out on an
upgrade. A bit longer and they can just make the jump straight to glibc2.2 or whatever. I'd like to see it and give it a spin, but it had better be
elf (sorry little joke) and it had better be glibc2
Did he not say he got it to work? Lay off man, you look lame on this one.
... and you can load a getty, a shell and a few
really basic daemons in 8meg, if you try - more
if you're willing to put up with swap lag. It
would suck if even slackware couldn't do this type
of installation anymore, as it would have to be
one of the easiest things to ask of a
distribution.
You know, it's a shame that morons like you will blame their fundamental inability to type ./configure && make && make install on their distribution, rather than the fact that they're really a pretty piss-poor sysadmin.
how did you get Gnome on Slackware?!? I got Glibc 2.06 on Slackware 3.3 but I have yet to get Gnome. I can't even get Gnome 1.0 to compile on SuSE. I hate Gnome! KDE compiled great on Slackware no problemo. Please someone tell me how. I get as far as libgtop and that won't compile, therefore can't go any further. :~( I miss you Slackware, but I had to go for something a little more modern
Amen! Slackware was my first, and I would die before switching to something else. I've tried RedHat and just about everything else, and none of them can compare to Slackware's greatness! (allthough I must say SuSE comes close). I can't wait for Slackware 4.0
I started with Slackware 3.1 a.k.a. "Slackware 96". I've never "upgraded" to a new distribution. Whenever something doesn't work because it needs newer utilities or libraries, I just upgrade the needed portions. I have recent utilities, compilers, glibc6 etc.
The neat thing with Slackware is that its more of a build-it-yourself system. In the process you find out more about your system. You don't need to spend much money on upgrades nor do you need to totally replace a working system when something doesn't work.
RPMS are for windoze.. gota have that installshield... I have been using slack for 4 years. It runs the servers of my webhosting business.
www.soluserve.com
Slackware forever
Because I didn't like RPM's, as a developer I don't like to make 'em, as an admin I don't like to install them. They give me too much trouble with missing symbols etc. And not all software was available as .rpm anyway, so I might as well not use it at all.
test
Here's an idea for redhat or any other package manager:
Have an option to manually check for required files/libraries, rather than rely on a list. Sure this list is faster and is nice for de-install and all, but it's no good if you manually compiled and installed an app (like if there was no rpm available). It can run through your lib directories and manually check versions of required packages and tell you what you are really missing rather than what it thinks you are missing due to an incorrect dependency list. Just include a text file with a small list of required files (path if necessary) and maybe a short command to determine version. The package manager could parse it and do the rest.
I think I started with something like :-) ;-)
Slackware 1.0 and a 0.96 kernel back i '92-'93
and I have upgraded everything myself
eversince. Just the other day I found
binaries dated '92
One of the best things about Slackware, besides
its simplicity, is the big amount of different
boot disks. I have, on more than one occation,
had to get a set of disks to get my system
back
If your managing many machines - you're probably using NFSfor most of them anyways.
You only have to upgrade one machine.
Too True!!
I'd say a distribution such as RedHat is for a easy transition between windows and Linux. (You have to admit it.. look at the installer for freaks sake!) Slackware is for the people who like to tinker more than most. It rox!
I am female and I am admining 15 slackware boxes..
manly, bah!
I recently installed apache 1.3.4 on a slackware box, and the directory that Apache used as default for htdocs was the following:
/var/lib/apache/htdocs/.
/var/lib/apache/htdocs/.directory was chosen for htdocs in the new slackware?
:)
/usr/local/apache/htdocs
I noted in the changelog for the new slackware that the htdocs directory has been moved:
Mon Mar 15 15:38:10 CST 1999
slakware/n1/apache.tgz: Upgraded to apache_1.3.4. Moved htdocs directory to
This made me wonder...
How come the directory
Sorry for bothering with this silly question, I just thought someone out there might have a perfectly logical explenation for me on this
Thanks!
The stable Sparc port already is glibc 2.1.
I had problems compiling libgtop as well (it appears to be a multi-platform problem) but it's not *essential* to get GNOME up and running. I was using GNOME without libgtop sucessfully for quite a while on my slackware 3.6 based system until I realized that I didn't like GNOME much anyway... (give me plain-old WindowMaker anyday).
;-)
As far as I know, you only need libgtop for CPU-wasting, eye-candy system monitoring apps... to hell with 'em. Original top works just fine for me
I installed onto a 486 33 with 8 meg and 200Meg HD
this weekend. I had no problems. I think your
problem lies elsewhere.
Joseph Chandler
chandler@cs.mtsu.edu
Yes, I too did this. I had a 386 25 4Meg and two :) UNIX @ home..... It was unbelieveable.
40 Megabyte MFM HDs. Man those things were loud.
It was so great. Instead of dialing up on a 2400
baud connect to edit files in vi, I could now edit
and compile at home. Granted the compile took
long than on our HP 9000s with 16 meg of RAM, but
at least I didn't have to wait for vi to catch up
with my keystrokes over that dreadfully slow modem.
Joseph Chandler
chandler@cs.mtsu.edu
So you think M$ products are girly then?! While all linux distros are manly?!
Slackware is indeed run in production environments. In fact, people who have half a clue about UNIX and Linux prefer Slackware over other Linux distributions because it is geared towards a back-end system rather than an end user system. I run an ISP with 10 slackware boxes. I have never had problems with any of them. Uptimes of 150+ days and still going strong...
./configure, make, make install. As for nightmare to maintain, how do you figure? My
You cannot beat the stability of Slackware over any other distribution. Thank god for libc5. Face it, glibc2 is crap. I have never come across a package that did not run on libc5. Even
the binary only version of MySQL runs just fine.
What is the point of RPMs? Why do people love them? Because they are downright lazy. Its not very difficult to download a tarball of source and type
boxes pretty much maintain themselves. There is not much to be done at all, unless you are one of those drooling GUI people who just has to have the latest version of this window manager and that window manager.
I loved umsdos and used it on quite a few systems.
But it would be better to have a uvfat and uvfat32 to make the long filenames shareable between the two systems.
Obviously, I don't need it badly enough to implement it!
Mark
I don't know what the word "buggy" specifically means to you, but to the rest of the world, it means "programming error causing unintended operation."
libc5 doesn't have thread support.
If this is YOUR definition of a bug, then you must also think that Linux is buggy because it doesn't have support for Xircom parallel port ethernet adaptors, (or a host of other hardware;) or that X-Windows is buggy because it doesn't have a DE built-in.
>As for glibc2 .. well.. is it even under the GPL?
:o)
>Is it not?
Yes it is under the GPL (I think that's what the 'g' at the beginning signifies
Seriously though, I love Slackware... I manage over a dozen boxes in various locations, all running Slackware.
Because it is the right place to put it. The /var directory is used for files which get changed a lot, like spools and such. The htdocs directory can theoretically get changed a LOT. Especially if you giving or selling web pressence. /var can be on its own partition and filesystem, if it is you will notice it gets fragmented a lot faster then the other filesystems. You can also place that partition in the middle of the disk for quicker access.
/var/lib/apache/share/htdocs and before that it was something like /var/lib/httpd/htdocs
/home because I use the web server to view local html documentation and creating my webpages before I post them. My htdocs directory doesn't get the load that server systems would.
I gotta say though, I wish they would pick a place and keep it there. On 3.6 it is in
Personally, when I use multipartitioned disks I like to put htdocs in
slack has had glibc2 in its system since 3.6, doesn't mean its glibc2 based yet
If you want to USE your computer, and get things done, then Redhat is more suitable. RPM is nice when you just want
to use something...
I USE Slackware, I am not a serious hacker I just do some programming and shit. RedHat is crap, Debian is worse, no way in hell are they easier to use.
Course maybe RedHat is easier for idiots to get working, hell they email the XFree86 support list asking for pppd help often enough to get you wondering.
But the init config is just fucked on most Linux systems, I have tried many and Slackware is the only setup I can stand.
Out of all the non-slackware distributions, SuSE is the best. I considered keeping it but I absolutely HATE that init structure, if it wasn't for that I may have kept the system more then 2 hours :P
I've been itching to upgrade my system to ELF and the 1.2 kernel, but I'm starting to get tired of waiting. I might just have to download gcc 2.0.3 and compile them myself.
You can put Slackware packages under RPM's control with a program I wrote, slackrpm. It's handy when you want to start installing RPM packages (which are much easier to find) on a Slackware system. I haven't tried it on the most recent Slackware releases, however. Here's the info page.
I wish all slackware users stopped the FUD that glibc2 is a beta lib, that supposedly it sucks, etc. There are several linux distributins that use it. I have been using Debian 2.0 (glibc2 based) since last summer. It just works. There is also RH 5.2. And don't give RH 5.0 as a bad example, it was broken by definition. Stop the FUD just because glibc2 does not work on your particular distribution.
> ..with support for libc5...just like the other > distros.
Frankly, I do not trust glibc 2.x. This owing to the state of flux it is in as has been described by others. I would not mind the ability to drop in a glibc2 compiler and compile-time environment, but my production servers are still libc5. And honestly, I have no real reason to go to a later version. My systems are stable.
And honestly, I do not want to go Debian because I do not like the packaging system/dependencies. Plus there's one phrase I have coined to describe the whole Debian thing:
Debian: Not just a distribution of Linux, but a political mindset.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm sticking with Slackware and libc5, tried, true, and unfettered by commercialism (Red Hat) and politics (Debian).
Only regular consumers prefer automatic shift
(with a girlfriend who can't drive stick).
Sports car with automatic shift? no way..
RPM - Automatic
./configure;make;makeinstall - manual
.tgz - autostick!!!
SEan
The problem is that there are two almost-compatible glibs out there, and some programs such as rvplayer and staroffice breaks apart under glibc2.1 system (unless edited by hexeditor on both cases).
I'm using RedHat 5.9(Starbuck) based on glibc2.1. What a ride - hex editing brought me back the joy of machine code editing with pctools.
If Slackware 4.0 is going to use glibc2.1, the users will have to suffer from issues like this. version # means nothing - only field test proves how stable they are.
SEan
moving from apache/share/htdocs to apache/htdocs doesn't have anything to do with slackware. Apache changed this in its distribution between the two versions of slackware you're using.
Hehe... I'm still on (a heavily upgraded) 2.2.
The system include both libc5 and glibc. most of the utilities are still libc5 compiled, but you can use software designed for either. From what I hear plans are to move to glibc in the next release. (I actully understoof there was to be a 3.7 release with the 2.2 kernel and the 4.0 release would be glibc based, apparently the decision was made to go to 4.0 now)
David Lang
dlang@digisnite.com
But I would not run it in a production environment. 1) It lacks real package manager (ok, do slackware packages ever get updated after the distribution has been released or can I find "slackware packages" from freshmeat.net somewehere), 2) 0% support (on Debian I am sure everything is up to date thanks to apt, on redhat there is at least an erratas webpage that lists fixes and updates) 3) It cannot be upgraded without trashing your system (when it is a 30 minute process on other distributions) 4) Never up to date (glibc2 ?) 5) It is a nightmare to maintain compared to other distributions.
..
..
If you have lots of time to waste go ahead and use slackware but many people have better things to do instead of trying to figure which programs have security problems and how to upgrade them or how to install new libs
In fact if you can't stand rpm based distributions or debian, FreeBSD might even be a better choice
1) it has a fairly nice install procedure (I have seen some that are much worse)
2) it has disksets for those people *downloading* it as opposed to those with a cd
3) packages are ordinary gzipped tape archive so they can be tested with say winzip
4) doesn't have dependencies (this is usually a bad thing)
NetBSD can run with 2 MB and I do it myself on several frequently used machines. Im not going to rant on and cause a linux/bsd war, but I personally find netbsd whips anything when it comes to low end system performance.
I'm very grateful to Slackware for offering a fairly complete umsdos distro. This was a great way for me to try out Linux on a Win 95 box. Actually Debian was the first distro I installed on an old 486 using floppies, and it worked fine, but I found myself wanting to use the newer computer and it just sat there.
Currently I'm using Stampede (which really is just
a current version of Slack regardless of what its promoters say.) Its packging system is a non-packing system. And, I find myself doing too much by hand so I'm considering Debian, again, this time on my 586. Many of the Stampede libs are not in synch. The important ones are, but enough aren't to be very aggravating and the documentation at the Stampede site is not current with what's there, the bug tracking system is often non-functional, etc. I'm very impressed with the Debian package directory at their site - it looks well maintained.
Getting back to Slack, Pat Volkerding is missing a golden opportunity by not including more current applications with ZipSlack, and including X. Sure, X can be downloaded separately and installed one piece at a time, but it also could be in one zip package for people coming from Windows. Forget glibc, what I mean is that the X applications Pat has included are absolutely the worst ones - some must be 10 years old and haven't been worked on for 10 years. Mostly motif and athena and ugly as sin. Sure, an experienced Linux user can find the newer, spiffy looking apps (and libraries needed to run them) elsewhere, but not a newbie with a non-technical background. Almost all the newer apps will work fine with libc5 if you will only make them available!
The way to really help Linux take off with Joe and Jane user is umsdos. It's so, so easy to install, and the performance is not significantly degraded except for some very file-intensive operations. I doubt they'd even notice with the hardware most pc users now have.
Anyway, I will always respect Slackware. And, the web site looks good. It suits what Slackware could be at its best, minimalistic and "cool" in the true sense of the word.
Pat, get some advice from whoever did your web page design about some current apps that will show off Linux to include in your distro and at your ftp site.
I will bet big money that is the zipslack package is upgraded (to include zipXslack with current apps as a separate download) and advertised a little it will be the largest installed distro of Linux in the world. The only thing keeping more "average" users from trying Linux is fear of disk
partitioning. If they can install and use Linux a little without taking that risk, then there is plenty of time for them to partition their hard drive or buy a second hard drive later, when they have more experience and confidence from using Linux.
Get Slack!
This distro appears to still be libc5 based (according to comments I saw elsewhere on the Web).
If so, I've really got to wonder why the latest-and-greatest kernel (2.2.3) is being shipped with such antiquated libraries.
Debian is the most actively maintained, you should give it a try.
I run a severely hacked up version of RedHat 4.2, and if I were starting from scratch again I think I'd use Slackware. Ever since I started using Linux, I have always found it more "natural" to grab the source tarball and compile myself whenever I want to install a new program. This way it's easy to ensure I'm running the latest (or close to the latest) code, and leaves the source sitting ina convenient location so that I can easily hack around with it should I need to. Whenever I've tried to do stuff with RPM's, I've run into failed dependencies, an outdated RPM database, etc. My system is almost fully glibc2 now, and very little remains from that original RH4.2 installation.
I have a 386Sx-16 with 4 megs, and an old slackware distribution that I still use quite often for various things. (network analysis, backup nameserver (once), controler for various weird projects...)
You can do a lot in 4 megs, you just can't do it all at once...
Is there eventually going to be Slack for other platforms such as alpha and sparc? everyone else is doing that
I just built some new systems at work based on Debian 2.1 and got my first taste of apt ... what a piece of cake to keep the system up to date.
apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
There your system is now right up to date. I did it at home as well; installed apt, and upgraded from Debian 2.0 to Debian 2.1 ... all automatic, no reboots, no problems, just a lot of time (60 MB and a 56k modem don't mix too well).
I haven't installed a Slackware system since the Slack 3.1 days and just took my last one out of operation (thank goodness ... it was so full of holes it was silly). From what I remember you just cannot keep a Slackware system up to date ... perhaps I was missing something. I'd hear about an exploit and try to find an upgraded slack .tgz ... they might be there but in slack 3.4 ... would that work in 3.1 ... do I want to guess, or chance it, on a production web server? Basically it seemed to me that once installed everything on a slack system had to be hand installed/configured and compiled or you'd never be sure things would work. Has slack added any maintenance / package management features??? With 10 servers running Linux who can afford to be compiling and installing by hand?
Slack certainly had it's place - without it where would Linux be today - however it has been far surpassed by many other distributions now ... time to let go!!!
Glancing at the ChangeLog.txt for the Pre-4.0, this appears to no longer be true. Also now, finger is still enabled by default but it won't allow finger @host. Sysstat and netstat were disabled. Though you are quite correct, having that enabled by default was a very bad thing. :)
It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
Real men use Slackware, eat worms, and like it!
Seriously though, I've always liked Slackware. If it wasn't for a particular project I'm working on having certain dependancies for Debian, I'd move back to Slackware.
Slackware lends itself to the tinkerer more than anyone else. If you like compiling your own packages, don't wanna screw up your fancy smancy dependancy list deal, Slackware is your best friend.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
---
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Well, I started out with Slackware way back when, and migrated to Red Hat with RH3.0.3 (anybody remember that one?).
.tgz files, just make sure to do "rpm -e" to remove the .rpm version first. Install stuff you compile yourself under /usr/local, just as in Slackware.
:-).
.deb file to be the latest greatest version you download the tarball of the latest greatest version from and then download the spec file and patch file from the Debian FTP site. Then you edit the spec file to reflect the new version number, make sure the patch still works/still needed (and you will probably end up recompiling a few times until you get the patch situation figured out), then just do the build.
.rpm files, and it is a pain in the piles. Because the .spec file and patches are lumped together with the (obsolete) source into the .srpm file, you can't just download the .spec and patch file... you have to download the old obsolete source too. Compiling a tarball to stuff into /usr/local is a lot easier :-(. On the other hand, once you've done the .rpm file, you can upload it to contribnet and make a lot of other people very happy. That makes many people smile. But once you've compiled your tarball, well, you make yourself happy, but nobody else.
Some things to think about:
1) Every config file in Red Hat Linux can be edited by hand if you so desire. It's not like in SuSE Linux, where the config files are auto-generated and you don't touch (you use YAST).
2) Nothing stops you from compiling stuff as
3) Today's computers are so fast that it don't matter what your binaries are compiled for
But if you like Slackware, you'd probably like Debian over Red Hat. With Debian, if you want to update a
I have created updated versions of several Red Hat
-- Eric
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Posted by stu vanderhoffenstoffen:
They've made provisions to mirror the new slackware! metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/slackware has two directories, one 3.6/ and one current/. current/ is empty right now, but I'm sure in the morning there'll be some files. Rock on SunSite/Metalab! I love those guys!
Posted by AndyRew:
Ummm, debian is a non-profit organization, ran by voluteers.
-Andrew
Posted by MattSullivan:
It would appear as though you can still install Slackware 4.0 beta on a 4 meg machine. All you need is the lowmem.i. And for those who wonder about Slack being glibc based I quote from the www.slackware.com FAQ.
Q: Will the next version be based on glibc2 or libc5?
Slackware-current is still based on libc-5.4.46, and there may well be one more official Slackware release based on libc5. A glibc-2.1 based version of Slackware is in the works, but getting a stable version out with the 2.2.x kernel and KDE-1.1 may end up taking priority. Slackware 3.6(and -current) do contain runtime support for glibc2.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm sticking with Slackware and libc5, tried, true, and unfettered by commercialism (Red Hat) and politics (Debian).
:)
No kidding, I can't agree more. While I would *LIKE* all software to be free, asking that is nothing more than spouting pipe dreams at this time.
Slackware, all distro, no political or commercial fat. And it's 10x easier to setup a server that works properly under slack than any other distro that I can think of, especially redhat, IME.
Not to mention, rpm2tgz, my favorite tool in the world.
-Erik-
Um, is it just me, or have any of you heard of the "swapon" command? It's rather useful for doing stuff like this, dunno if you can do it in redhat or debian, but if you're put in front of a shell before you setup off of floppy/cdrom, try it! Heaven forbid you might enable swap space.
-Erik-
Blaming one's incompetence as a system administrator on the distribution you run is lame. If you can't keep your own systems up to date, you have only yourself to blame. In any case, how hard is it for someone to type ./configure --help and/or ./configure && make && make install?
No kidding. This is like the guy on IRC that bitches because he installed a script with a backdoor in it, and someone exploited it.
You should always double-check places like bugtraq as soon as you put a full-time server on the net. I've only had one root compromise under slack, and it was related to a NFS bug (due to my own ignorance of not disabling NFS in the first place) that wasn't even posted on bugtraq until 2 days later.
Slack is just as stable as the rest of 'em when properly configured, and I've found that those people that are ranting about deps and automatic upgrades and whatnot generally have less secure boxes than the slack machines that I've seen, because they rely on the program to do the work for them, instead of double-checking the work that was actually done.
Whether this is actual dependence on the upgrade program, laziness, or ignorance on the part of the user, it still comes down to one thing:
Unix machines are about openness, and the fact that the machine is doing what it's told is obviously not the problem, it's the fault of the user not doublechecking what hte machine is doing.
-Erik-
Oh Dear. Not SLS. Installing on 5.25inch floppies. God that takes me back. Slackware was soooooo much better, I switched straight away. And then, RedHat was soooo much better than Slackware when it came out in '94. I don't care how manly people say it is to run slackware, I think they're deluding themselves. Especially since I've recently had the chance to install Slackware 3.0 on an old laptop...
I 've only gotten Debian to install in 8 meg successfully when it was installing from a local harddrive.
I have installed Debian 1.2 and 2.0 in four MB successfully. You did use the low-memory boot disk, I hope?
He's mentioned it a few times now...
:-)
Been running it myself since a couple days after the release
-- Mike Greaves
I wish that Slackware were developed by a *team* rather than one person. I love slack, but just try to get a relatively new distro ready for something like GNOME or KDE. (Come to think of it, KDE is *much* easier to shoehorn into a Slack distro ;^)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Slackware is indeed the ONLY truly cross-platform linux distribution that I'm aware of. The scripts go where they belong. They utter sensible things. Tarballs compile painlessly.
Heaven!
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Preach on!
I'm using 3.1 also. No real need to upgrade when you keep everything up to date.
"In true sound..." -Agents of Good Root
Disksets aren't as nice anymore; last I checked, A and N were the only sets actually installable from floppies (bitch for installing on an old laptop).
Just as I headed over to check /. one last time before heading home I got mail from C*B saying that my 2.1 CD's (along w/a few more RH5.2 CDs) have shipped. Deb 2.0 was cool, but not enough to get me to switch all my RH machines. Wondering how 2.1 will stack up. Sounds good so far...guess I'll know this weekend!
--
"First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
..with support for libc5...just like the other distros.
So glibc2.1 was the first official release of glibc2. 'til now, all the "glibc2-based" distros have been built on pre-release C libraries.
Does that make sense to you?
A glibc2-based version of Slack is next, after 4.0. (Based on an actual, honest-to-god release of glibc2. Go figure.)
I started on Red Hat. I'm co-webmaster of slackware.com.
:)
Clearly, I switched.
Perhaps redhat should run a cron job on the ftp server that extracts the spec file from a .src.rpm and put it in it's own directory. That would add a significant amount of convenience i think.
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
Try Slackware-Current. Comes with KDE 1.1 as an option (in the main distrib, not contribs)...
Damn it people, Slackware DOES have a package system. Unless pkgtool is a figment of the imagination of Slackware users everywhere. I get so tired of hearing people say there isn't package management for Slackware, when there most certainly is...
I just don't care to use it, myself...
I don't know about 4.0, but it shouldn't be any harder than 3.6, which I managed to get installed on a 386 (and a 486 as well) with 4 megs of RAM. Just be sure to setup your swap space first, and follow the low memory install documentation Patrick includes. (Using /slakware/rootdsks/obsolete is probably best, since it's much nicer on memory). And this was over a LAN. With a CD drive things should be a bit easier.
Installing in 8 should be quite easy. 12 is flawless.
Its not that RedHat is bad, IMHO, its just that RedHat strangely requires you to run through their partitioning/mounting system before you can mount the swap. A significant upgrade where memory is concerned with RedHat is if they'd give the user in "Advanced" mode the ability to scan the drives on the local system for swap partitions and mount them BEFORE anything else happens during the install.
The RedHat installer seems to load itself into a ramdisk, and then load any additional modules into a second ramdisk mounted into the filesystem. That plus the kernel tends to eat 5-6 meg of RAM, and with the libraries and such their Disk Druid program and fdisk both can't load, which are prerequisites for mounting the swap space.
As an alternative, documenting how it can be done from the command line in the shells thats opened would help. As I said in another post, I wasn't able to find what program it was using, since the usual utilities don't seem to be there.
Going back to the topic of this whole posting, maybe that's a good machine to try out Slackware 4.0 on. :)
/. readers who've done it and are doing it. I've got it on three, one of them that doesn't even have a floppy drive... (yes, it did have one the *first* time I installed Linux on it three years ago, but I've since had to remove it because it broke...)
I don't have any experience with that model, but Debian is probably easier to get installed, it seems to give a lot more flexibility in the install process.
Another option you might have is to boot the system off something else -- if the kernel loads (I assume it does, since that's a BIOS thing, not a Linux thing), then you could always boot the kernel off the floppy and provide some other device to boot from. I assume the system doesn't have a CD-Rom, but if you can boot to DOS on it, you could install the packages you need on a DOS/umsdos partition and try booting it from loadlin.
I'm very impressed with the way the LinuxPPC demo thats in MacWorld works -- it contains all the filesystems and stuff in a single MacOS file, and the system can boot and run from that file itself. That strikes me as a good installation method that is not supported by most (all?) distributions... Put the install system (3-5 meg probably) into a file, and boot linux using loadlin and mounting that file as root. It'd run fine obviously off a CD, and in cases of wierd installs you could in a worst case scenario, split the root file into 1.44 meg chunks, copy them into a small DOS partition on the harddrive, cat them back together and boot from the harddrive into it.
But the idea that RedHat can't install onto laptops is just silly. I'm sure there are thousands of
Yes, and the low memory boot disk copies itself to the harddrive, and boots from there, hense getting it to work when installing from a local harddrive. :)
Unfortunately that doesn't help with RedHat. RedHat doesn't give you the ability to mount a swap partition until after you have partitioned the drive -- regardless whether or not the drive is already partitioned. The real problem in the RedHat install with 8 meg seems to be the amount of memory it takes to fork Disk Druid or even fdisk. The very next step is mounting the swap space, but in one attempt I made to install it onto a 486/80 (AMD) with 8 meg ram, I let it run swapping for two hours just to see if it'd ever actually manage to get fdisk or Disk Druid to load up. It never happened.
Debian is better -- it lets you mount a swap parition if you've already created one. In the previously mentioned install, I was able to boot off a RedHat install disk, load no drivers for anything, and just squeak by after killing the installer to be able to load fdisk and partition the drive. My hope had been to mount the swap before getting to the partitioning step, but I was unable to find the program that's actually mounting the swap space. I'm assuming RedHat isn't using swapon / mkswap for it, but I might've just missed it.
I ended up ordering Debian CD's and got it installed on that system with no troubles. I remember I had to install the barest minimum I could, then reboot to get it to handle the full install. I never did figure out why that was the case.
Part of the autoLinux stuff I've been working on is getting a good mid-size distribution together. (Bigger than the various router projects out there, but smaller than what I remember the Slackware "A" series being...)
Anyone know what the requirements for a system are going to be for Slackware 4? I've been disappointed lately to see they keep growing with Redhat (in particular) and to some extent with Debian.
I know Linux on a 4 meg system may not be reasonable any more, but it seems 8 should be doable, but 8's too small to install RedHat, and I 've only gotten Debian to install in 8 meg successfully when it was installing from a local harddrive.
Is the minimum (A) set still fairly small? It'd be nice to have a standard distribution that can get a core system installed in 15-20 meg.
I have 176 meg of ram in my system at work, and those applications do tend to swell in size (particularly Netscape). I actually try to close Netscape once every hour or two (figuring it doesn't crash on its own) to keep memory bloat down. I don't know if its a "feature" or just a bad memory leak, but it is bad.
Now, where 8 meg is concerned, 8 meg most certainly isn't a joke. Back in the days of the pre-1.0 kernel, I ran a rather useful system for several years in 8 meg of RAM. When I was in school, virtually all of my papers were written on that with vi and nroff/groff. It handled e-mail serving and reading, usenet reading and posting, and I was running a mailing list getting almost 30 postings a day to 200 people on it. I also gave user accounts to friends who needed a machine to work on from terminals around the campus.
Never had a problem with it, at one point had nearly 9 months uptime on it.
I currently have three systems here with only 8 meg RAM. One's being used as a development platform for embedded linux POS applications. One handles my internet dialup, masquerading, routing, firewalling, fax sending and receiving, and voicemail. The third is the system I mentioned above, which is an old notebook computer. Slow, low in RAM, small screen, but the battery lasts almost five hours, and its great for writing when I want to be outside. The router box used to handle printing too, but ghostscript eats too much RAM, so I moved it off to the system I've been experimenting with Oracle on.
All three of those applications don't need more than eight meg of RAM. They're providing important functions for me without costing me any excessive amount of money, using old parts I've scraped up.
Its a lot of functionality in not a lot of hardware. If you want to know why the ability to run in 8 meg is important, that's the exact reason. There's lots of very inexpensive hardware that people can buy or have laying around that can be made useful as print servers, or any of a dozen other functions, and 8 meg is enough for many of them.
I was a diehard slackware user, too, once. I think I made the transition gracefully enough. I now consider Slackware counter-productive, since it has fallen so out of date, and lacks a modern package system.
.tar.gz package in its place. And if you are concerned about losing the performance you gain from compiling your own binaries, you can download SRPMs, which are Source RPMs. It is very flexible, once you get the hang of the concept. I suggest reading the Using-RPM HOWTO if you still have cold feet.
I was skeptical, too, of the whole RPM thing at first. Coming from a windows background, this is not surprising. Let me assure you that RPM may not be perfect, but it kicks the pants off of InstallShield or any other windows equivalent.
You can always manually remove a package and install the corrosponding
I'm sure you would get similar functionality from Debian's package manager as well. And you still can't beat Slackware if you want to get down and dirty (and repetitive.)
Binary RPMs contain the binaries (like tgz packages of binaries), plus information about what versions of which libraries and what other stuff is required (e.g. Perl, /bin/sh etc). When you install the RPM, /usr/bin/rpm checks you have all the prerequisites, and then installs the package. It updates its records to indicate what package these files belong to.
This means that to delete the stuff in the "cheops" package, you just rpm -e cheops. This is quote a bit easier than figuring out where alll the files got put in the first place. It also makes it harder to break your system by deleting something that another package relies on. However, this is Linux, so if you want to do that, you just use the --force option.
If you have an RPM of "foo" installed and want to upgrade it from a binary tgz file, just uninstall the old package (rpm -e foo) and unpack the tgz as usual. No problem.
No, Red Hat keeps the rc scripts which start suff separate from the config scripts. Each rc script will read a config script and the start a daemon or whatever. This means that when an upgrade occurs, the rc script is upgraded, but your configuration information is not lost because it lives in a separate file.
All the normal Unix config files live in /etc, as usual. /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf and so on, just like on all other Unix systems. The config files that are specially for use by the /etc/rc.d startup scripts are all held in /etc/sysconfig.
All those various config files can be edited with Linuxconf, but you can still edit them by hand. You can change something with Linuxconf, and then tweak stuff by hand. Back to Linuxconf, and then back to vi if you feel like it. The two methods are completely compatible.
Personally, although I have used Red Hat for years now, I still edit the config files by hand, because that is what I am used to (I started with MCC Interim Linux after being an HPUX administrator for a bit). Red Hat is every bit as vi-configuration-friendly as Slackware and MCC, but the difference is that it also has optional configuration tools.
Eh? Red Hat is not a binary-only distro. It comes with the source for everything, the kernel, X, the /usr/bin/* stuff, the installation program, everything.
Slackware can't be *that* manly. I mean, it doesn't run on Alphas yet, does it?
...)
(Let's see if Sparc/Linux NS4.5 screws up the Subject: again
-- Rick
I've made it a good habit to always install twice on any machine that has to do serious duties: one small 'emergency' root and another normal 'production' root. For lilo I make a small third partition with the kernels (old, current and new) and lilo.conf in it. symlink lilo.conf to both /etc dirs, the kernel dir to both root fs's.
Now when you've compiled a new kernel, first time you call it 'new.z' or something, only after a successful boot and some testing you cp it to current.
Whenever your production file system is seriously fsck'd up (power failure maybe), boot from the emergency partition, fsck it or otherwise fix your stuff and reboot into your newly fixed production fs.
Obviously you still need a rescue disk when the boot record is really ill so lilo won't boot, but at that time chances are your disk has crashed.
BTW I always use Slackware - for tinkering and out of habit. I dislike RedHat for the encapsulation of everything, have yet to give Debian a go. On 'production systems' one seldom needs to upgrade libs, and if really necessary one can mostly find a suitable binary tarball (doesn't need to be slack tgz - just do a 'tar -tzf' and see if it's what you want). Thank Linus Torvalds, big distributions and Patrick Volkerding for Choice - Just my $.02
There are no reasons whatsoever for changing to 4.0 pre-beta, better wait for the real 4.0, then maybe. It isn't really difficult to upgrade to kernel 2.2 if you want to, besides 3.6 has most 2.2 support tools in it.
I think that must have been the main reason for Patrick to bring out 3.6, other changes were not so important, like you mentioned.
8 MB is no joke, I used to have a 386 SX 16 with 5 MB and a 30 MB hard disk, with Slackware 3.x on it and a 2.0.x kernel, as a router between two ethernet segments. Sure, it would swap something out when you logged in, but that's what virtual memory is for.
Also, Netscape is a memory hog if there ever was one (but that obviously doesn't concern the above machine).
Yes. Debian unstable (aka potato) uses glibc 2.1. I upgraded from v2.0 just the other day. Painless upgrade. I didn't even have to reboot. :)
Best way to install Debian is through ftp or http. Install a few files to get started, select the packages you want and let debian take care of the rest. :-)
As much as I hate to have to agree with you, it definate sums up many of my feelings for slackware as well. I first started using Slackware back in the days of it being SLS, I'll never forget sneaking into a college computer lab and downloading 30 or so 1.44mb flopyy disks so I could go home and install the latest stuff.
/usr/lib/netscape, and where in the world they came up with their netscape scripts in the /usr/bin directory, I guess someone somewhere had really good reasons for it. Too bad they don't take the time to tell anyone.
But times change, now instead of having plenty of free time like I did when I was just getting started in the industry I have actual work to get done and it always seems to be more than I have time for. Playing around with stuff is fun, but not if I want to actually prove my point that I can be productive with Linux instead of Windows.
I still have my complaints with RedHat 5.2 though, it installs and discovers everything nicely, but I don't understand how come they've decided to put things in non-standard places and create dedicated files that aren't supposed to be edited. I still wonder why Netscape is in
I have to agree. libc5 is old but solid. And all the other distributions have libc5 runtime support anyway. The biggest things using glibc right now are star office 5 and oracle. Mozilla is still egcs and gcc 2.7.2.x based (libc5 if I am correct). All you really need is the runtime support because not everyone has converted to glibc. God, how many non Linux systems are still using Xwindows 5 :)
And that's what I think.
ftp.cdrom.com is frequently that way. Some cynical part of my mind claims they must inflate the user number, but I have no evidence for that, nor do I really believe that.
looking at PACKAGES.TXT, glibc2 is installed. Whether this means that everything uses it or not, I dunno.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
The Bin was imapd, I read the release about pop3 and dutifully upgraded it, but missed imapd was also susceptible, With debian I would of never missed it, much less not upgraded it.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
hehhe a moron! Thats me, tell me somthing though, are your boxes on the net? :> Are they true multi-user systems? (I mean you have more then two users) did you read my post? what I said was I learned at first, but after it was a pain. If it take 20 minutes to find the src and compile it. and it takes me 3 minutes to down load and install it as a package. I learn nothing by compiling; why whould I take 17 minutes more? Glib is stable on my system, IT is the future, lib5 is no longer supported. Why whould I use it at all?
"Think of it as evolution in action."
Who said I was not using them?
"Think of it as evolution in action."
Hehe another person that probable does not admin more then one machine with more then one user, or has more time on his hands then a professional does. Jesus the point is not that it's hard making a slackware system that works, it's more time consuming, less documented, and less supported. I started with slack, now I use Debian. My systems are FAIRLY secure, more secure then if they where slack, certainly more up to date if they where slack, and less time consuming. I will tell you what; list the 10 mosted used utilitys on your system and I bet I have a newer less buggy version on my system. Then if they are older and I bet they will be; time the amount it takes to upgrade them.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
It makes me kinda nostalgic for about three minutes, then I remeber the fools that almost rooted me because of a old bin, or the hours it took to upgrade fairly simple stuff, and the realization that the first time I upgraded a lib I learned somthing... the second time I did not... The third I resented that it took as long as it did, and I had 10 other things to do.
Slackware is at best a teaching tool, at worst time consuming and insecure. It allways seemed to me the people who had lots of time where the loudest proponents.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
Red Hat is nice but man it can be a pain. For instance, sym linking everything is really a bad idea. RedHat sym links EVERYTHING, even the KERNEL! I use RedHat almost all the time, but I dont use it for development. S.u.S.E is looking very nice these days, I just might have to switch. BTW, http://www.wholelinux.com will set you up with whatever Linux distro you want, AND guarantee the install. Very cool site, ya gotta check it out.
My first linux was also from Slackware (popular distribution 2.7? with "the stable kernel" 1.2.13)
It was included in PCW november 1996 (I guess)
I fidled with it for two days until I got it somewhat working (it didn't want to support my 1.6G WD hard disk) I ended up with booting from floppy. I was a 14 years old boy back then who just wanted to look at something different.
I guess I was one of the first latvians to use it.
Now I'm using Linux for server purposes in my dad's office and getting paid for it.
Well, I as well as many others here started out with Slackware and moved to something else. Someone who posted earlier also liked the idea of RPMS for keeping track of the binaries on a system.
I love the "Keep it simple, stupid" philosophy but I really like they way RPM works. I really dislike the fact that everything in RedHat comes with everything preconfigured the way they want it. It's great for those that want to have a server up and running in minimal time but sucks to learn on.
I like the way Debian asks questions for settings during the package install so that it can configure your system.
Redhat also has this problem with it's kernel; setup. The first time I compiled a kernel under it I went nuts. I'd rather not have to go read through a ton of shell scripts and checking symlinks in order to get the kernel set up "the way redhat likes it" True I can change the scripts, but it's really a pain.
If this is true, it may be what finally moves me away from Slackware and towards something else (leaning toward Debian at the moment, for no particular reason).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I will say this again.
Blaming one's incompetence as a system administrator on the distribution you run is lame. If you can't keep your own systems up to date, you have only yourself to blame. In any case, how hard is it for someone to type ./configure --help and/or ./configure && make && make install?
These things and several more were fixed in Slackware 3.6... Where have you been?
Furthermore, RH 5.2 still attempts to install everything under the sun fully open and accessible by the Internet from it's default installation. People who live in glass houses should not be throwing stones.
Why did you have these services turned on in the first place if you were not using them?
Right on brother! ;)
;)
I installed Slackware about over 2 years ago (3.0 I think it was, not sure now) and have never looked back. I too am pretty much bleeding edge, lastest kernel, glibc 2.1, XFree86 3.3.3 and so on. I have no problems at all, and its pretty fast (as fast as a P120 gets I guess). It's taught me a great deal about Linux and Unix in general. If I wanted a OS that I could just install and leave alone, I'd use Winders. I don't. I want an environment in which I can tinker, break things, complain to my friends that I broke something, fix it, lather, rinse, repeat
Yes... isn't that lame? I got an old 486SX20 laptop with 4 megs, upgraded it to 8 megs. Installed windoze 95 on it first, because I had the disk handy, and it installed no problemo.
Then I go to install Red Hat. It hung. I tweaked. It hung. I cursed. It hung. I found it very depressing that the Red Hat install wanted more hardware than the windoze 95 install.
(I *finally* got it installed, with much tinkering, and it runs just fine. Now why should the install take more memory than actually *running* the OS?)
Now I've done it... bring on the RH flames. (sigh)
Actually, I closed the shell that opened - the install had used so much memory by that point that it was already grinding to a halt, and I figured that exiting out of that shell would save me some memory.
You're exactly right - if there was a way to enable swap early on, I would have been fine. I had already created swap space with a rescue disk, hoping that it would help, but the install doesn't even look for swap until after the whole disk druid thingy, and the ramdisk they load up doesn't include swapon (at least I couldn't find it...) so I couldn't enable it myself.
Wow, if there ever was a wrong side of a bed, you found it! Maybe you have 2 wrong sides?
:-)
I'm curious about those versions of redhat that don't install on laptops - that's very interesting. I'll have to look for them. Would that be version 5.1? Hm, no - a friend of mine did that one. 5.2? Well, not that one either - because I have a laptop with 5.2 humming along. I'll have to look at the site a bit more closely to find those "desktop-only" versions.
As far as trying to get things to work - all I did was get updated boot/supp images, try backpack CDroms, HD installs, network installs via smb, nfs, and ftp, create a swap partition prior to the install, make a custom ramdisk, exit the provided shell to save memory, and finally contemplated modifying the source for the install program.
Thank you for your valuable information, next time I'll *try* to get it to work - perhaps things will get done.
(This one's ripe for the picking, moderators!)
I've been using slackware for what seems like forever now. Its almost gotten to a point where I can't remember a time NOT having Linux installed on my computer. If it wasn't for slackware's stubborn way of doing things (you know, not doing them for you) I would have never gotten this far with linux. I have installed RedHat on my Laptop, mostly to see why its so well liked... I do have to say, if you want POWER, and you want control, then slackware is your distro. To me, its the hacker's distribution. When I think of Linux, I think of Slackware.
If you want to USE your computer, and get things done, then Redhat is more suitable. RPM is nice when you just want to use something...
Call me crazy (go ahead, I think I am too) but I still enjoy the headaches of compling stuff on my own. I think going bald at 21 can be 75% contributed to Slackware, but its worth it.
If slackware never came out with another release, I'd still be happy with 3.6 (okay, if they would come out with a glibc2 first, then quit... i'd be REALLY happy).
Anyways, that my 2 shinny pennies (do you take credit cards) on Slackware.
---
"I couldn't even get PPP working in Debian or Red Hat"
hrmmmm.... how strange. My first time with Linux was last September with Debian 2.0 . I got PPP to work before I knew what a shell script was...
.
Here's a good How-To for glibc, might come in handy for those of you deciding to try slackware 4.0, and wanting to setup glibc.
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
I'm a bigtime fan of slackware, and I was a little dissapointed when I downloaded the latest slackware 3.6 to find it had old versions of the x server, kernel, and many other little programs. I can't get into cdrom.com, it's packed, has anyone downloaded it? If so do you know if it comes with the latest x server, along with various other utilities? I'm sure it has, but I'd just like to be sure before I invest my 56K modem to a day long downloading adventure.
Also, are there any major changes, considering it's moved to 4.x series?
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
Good to see that Slackware is still pulling their weight.. :) :) :) :) ).. :) :)
I've got many fond memories back in my Uni days of slaving over an old 386 in my flat, shoehorning the floppies into the drive, drooling over the fact that I could now code all my coursework at home, and dammit, I had _UNIX_ at home..
I cut my teeth on Linux using Slackware, and look forward to seeing what they've got coming out now..
*Blush* But I must have to admit to using Red Hat, 'cos it seems to be the easiest way to get new people into it, and I tend to use it a lot in places I go out on contract to (whenever I can persuade 'em to drop an NT box in it's favour, which is becoming increasingly easier..
I think it's time to go back to my roots for a while tho, and see what gives with this release..
Whatever else gets said about the distribution competition, It's still Linux, and at core, it beats the pants off just about everything else..
Malk..
Thats funny...I saw two at my college.
This sig is false.
<DRAWL>You can take my Slack box from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, buster.</DRAWL> :)
The oldest machine I own is based on Slackware 3.0, and is now upgraded (after toil and sweat and much cursing) to the latest glibc, kernel, X, and so on. I couldn't have learned how to do any of that from scratch on Debian. (Well, maybe the kernel. Most of the kernel, at least.) I wouldn't have once deleted /lib/ld-linux.so.1 because I thought I didn't need it anymore (yeah, that was a while ago... sheesh), but I also wouldn't have learned what ld-linux.so did. (Did anybody get through a libc5->glibc or a.out->ELF transition without resorting to rescue disks? There's gotta be somebody!) Slackware takes you by the balls (or whatever) and drags you down into the guts of the machine; it's a hell of a ride, and if you want to learn you gotta go there anyway...
I think the ideal distribution for the geek with N computers is one Slack machine, and N-1 Debian/SUSE/RH/Caldera boxes. I can't imagine the time it would take to upgrade plural Slack boxes, so my other machines run Slink. I get work done with the N-1 boxes, I learn stuff on the Slack box, and I can try the latest tarball-only apps on any distribution. Hey, works for me... :)
--
--
#define private public
About two, maybe three years ago I met this guy on the old html chats on geocities. He got me started on Linux with Slackware 3.3. Ever since then, I have always used Slackware. I've used other distros but Slackware seems to have something that keeps me going back to it. Long live Slackware!!!
~centurion
As for the libc question, I talked to Patrick himself at LinuxWorld, who predicted sometime around fall for a 2.1 Slack.
And as far as kernels are concerned, I've kept right with the pace of development, and have yet to have anything go buggy on me with this Slack 3.5 system.
Nice to see this show of force from the Slackware community btw!
I am very happy to see all the comments talking about how they remember slack, use slack, etc. I too still use slackware. I have for years. I like running a nice fast system. There are a few things that bug me about slack (lack of glibc2, some out of date libs ie. libdb hint hint) but other than that it is still the best. Now for those of you who think slack is old and is going to limit what you can run, check this out.
I run an older version of slack, many updated libs, etc. The system is fully functional. For those of you who like eye candy, I am running XFree 3.3.3.1, Enlighenment as the window manager, GNOME (YES GNOME) 1.0, Gimp 1.1, and many other "bleeding edge version" applications.
You can run anything on it. So nuts to you people who are surprised that slackware can run GNOME, etc. It is fast, compiled myself, and has a small memory footprint. Keep your dependecies and default installs. I'll be in the corner with the rest of the loons scaring the rest of ya.
Ni who lilly fa ling ling cha!
I doubt it. There's only one Patrick Volkerding to go around, unfortunately.
I still find the idea of one person putting out an entire Linux distribution to be a rather frightening thought. Brrr...
One problem that I really hope Patrick takes care of is a formal upgrade procedure. Last time I checked, the READMEs still recommend whiping the machine, and loading Slack on an empty disk. Yes, I suppose you can try reinstalling on top a previous version, but that's going to be messy.
RPM is definitely a timesaver from a sysadmin's point of view. One constant pain sysadmins have is upgrading a package - remembering where all the config files are - what needs to be changed. God forbid if a directory or a file that belongs to a package has moved from one place to another.
When you upgrade with RPM, your old version is cleanly deinstalled, and a new one installed, all automatically. A few intelligent things are done with configuration files, and you have a complete record of which file came with a package.
You can certainly compile and install stuff yourself, by hand, on Red Hat. But, over time, that tends to break things. If you install a later version of something that was already installed as an RPM, when you later upgrade to a newer Red Hat version, you will find that Red Hat's installer will automatically scribble a newer RPM your installed app. Perhaps that's not such a bad idea anyway, but you may not've wanted to do that, for some reason. Plus you're likely to lose any changes to the configuration file that you've made.
It's also quite easy to stay up to date with the latest versions of everything you have installed. There are scripts out there that can automatically poll the updates directory on a Red Hat FTP site, and notify you when updates become available. I don't think that there's anything similar to that for Slackware.
Here's a real good example of what kind of a benefit you get from RPM.
I needed to repartition my main box. I dumped everything to tape, and I put together a boot disk that comes up with a bare kernel, the kernel tape drive module, and the minimum of tools that I need to load the system back from a tape. I go ahead, rewipe the hard disk, format it, partition it, then go ahead and reload everything back from tape.
I reboot, the system comes up fine, but after logging in, it's acting kinda funky. I normally have a button to run Pine within xterm. Pine comes up briefly, something flashes on the screen, and it exits. I'm getting some real weird messages from "su" that I have never seen before in my life. All sorts of things suddenly give me real strange error messages, out of nowhere.
I did some digging around. Hoo-boy -- looks like tar doesn't know how to properly restore the permission and ownership of device files. My entire /dev is completely fubared.
No problem.
rpm --setperms dev
Back to normal. Carry on.
If you intend to work heavily with a Red Hat system, I strongly recommend that you buy the book "Maximum RPM". The entire Red Hat distribution is based around their package manager. That book gives you all you need to know about creating your own RPMs, and is an invaluable source of information.
Background: I have been running Slackware, since 1994. So everyone has been clamoring over how cool RedHat is, so I tried it, kinda. Before I go on, let me qualify that I am a full time Java developer, using Java 1.2, and have thus since I graduated a couple years ago, and until recently been forced to use Windoze (which I hate) most all of the time. I still keep a Linux partition, and am now going to attempt to move my system primarily back to Linux, and get all my fancy new hardware running. So, last year I did an FTP install of RedHat 5.1 which really impressed me, as it autodetected everything, DHCP'd and FTP'd and was up and running (with X, wow) without me doing anything, no dot clocks, no rc files, nothin. Not that I minded Slackware, after about 50 installs, you get the nack for it (don't touch _anything_ while it's installing, and if anything goes wrong (even blinks), start over). I have, since then, not actually touched a thing on the RedHat partition, due to lack of time, and waiting for 2.2 before investing any time. I haven't even updgraded a single RPM, I'm not even sure I remember how. However...I am one with gzip, tar, and make.
:-) I don't have the time to build and tweak much anymore, so RedHat sounds like it is for me. It's just that...well...rules scare me. I'm scared that when I get down to actually using RedHat, all the rc files and stuff is going to be a bunch of auto generated stuff I shouldn't touch, or that will get written over when I upgrade something. I guess I imagine a RedHat config file like a Microsoft Visual C++ source file, compared to Slackware's Linux C++ file..."Don't touch this...or that...or edit this". It's the people that keep warning about how they have to edit dependency files and stuff, and it is a pain.
:-) The only reason I even run X, is cuz I can't see Rob's cute Icons using Lynx :-) Hmm...someone should port Mozilla and thus GTK to GGI...then I woulnd't need X at all....mmmm....fast.
Question: So what's the deal with RPM's? I understand that they are binary only and have dependency tracking. Does that mean if something is installed via RPM I can't manually download a tgz and build over it, I have to use RPM's? Do I really care? I always thought I was getting better performance by compiling myself, in that the compiler would optimize for newer P2 instructions rather than being 486 compatible
Is RedHat scary for Slackware people?
I guess I could live with a binary only distro. With GNU/Linux, it just seems wrong though. But the thought of quick upgrades and fixes is to much to pass over. I mean...there never used to be binaries at all...and you get used to one thing for so long.
And the only reason I say RedHat (not Debian, Suse, etc) is because it seems to be the most actively maintained in terms of current stuff. I'm thinking about Starbuck/6.0 here. It also seems easy to find RPM's for everything now.
I guess after this I have to sort out all this Gnome/KDE stuff. I think I will stick with good old FVWM. Who needs all the fancy schmancy themes and crap...just bloat anyhow
Not to mention the default Slackware install is much less secure than any other distributions.. For example, systat enabled in inetd.. huh??? Most unixes don't have stupid stuff like this enabled by default.
Debian has glibc 2.1 in their unstable branch (the next release). I think.
A lot like 2.0 actually. More packages, but installing packages is easier with apt.
What are you using--HP-UX? Or perhaps OpenWindows? I haven't seen paging requirements like that since five minutes ago when I was fiddling with WebSphere. (Now that's a resource pig--I was using it on OS/2, it it took up 2 GIGABYTES of address space, had about 500 megabytes of that committed, and had around 100MB resident!)
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
I was drug kicking and screaming to the eternal judgment La-`Z'-Boy of `Bob', and he told me to install Debian! I could hear Mike Enlow's voice in my head! But I did as `Bob' commanded, and am indeed happier now. (Fear potatoes.)
Still, if Slackware 4.0 doesn't have modern compiles of everything, I won't use it. I just had too many bad experiences with Slackware 3.6 (Slackware 98) of horribly old, crusty, buggy, and vulnerable executables. (Don't even get me started of when I had my Slackware machine connected directly to the Internet and was using it to gab on IRC.)
OTOH, Slackware, along with OS/2's kernel debugger and DEBUG.COM has made me what I am today, and I am grateful.
I just want to see a revival of SLS Linux! Now those were the days! (Geesh. I was 10 years old then. Youngstuff. I didn't know what I was doing--gosh, I wish I could go back in time and help myself out!)
Cheers--Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
I hate to agree, but I agree. Like many others here, I cut my teeth on slackware....a kindly little geek at a previous job took me under his wing and coached me though the rough spots. But I recently switched to Red Hat....I like the feel of Slackware better, and it seems to make more logical sense overall, but it was simply too hard to maintain. I don't have hours to futz around with the system....I barely have time to play with the civ beta. While manually loading and compialing everything is "purer" and more preferable in many ways, it is simply too clumsy. Pkgtool is great, but no files are relased using its format, so its next to useless. I had nightmares simply thinking about having to compile and install everything required for Gnome. Makes me sad though....Slackware has the right "feel" to it....I sorting out Red Hat, but....theres nothing like the real thing. Would it be possible for someone to grab slackware, update all the necessary librarys, add support for debs and rpm, and rerelease it, kindof like how Mandrake did with redhats distro....have a slackware release, and then a slackware for slackers...maybe. Dont know.
Brian
I run a Redhat 5.1 box which has been used heavily over the past few months. The funny thing is, after all this use, it's hard to stay on the bleeding edge if I depend completely on RPMS. So I use tar.gz. And guess what? After months of tweaking and customizing, my box looks closer and closer to good 'ol Slackware. It just evolved that way I guess.
/etc/hosts.deny is set to ALL:ALL and /etc/inetd.conf is all commented out.
I can see where RPMS/DEBs would be useful for system administrators or those running a heavily visited server. However, I'm just a joe linux user who connects via PPP and checks his email. I really have no need to worry about most of my binaries being secure when
I may switch back to slackware this fall then, if they are glibc2.1.. thsi rpm stuff should stand for Real Painful Management.. --nodeps this.rpm tar.gz has been around and packages stil come in this flavor, and many of the rpm binaries are compiled 'stupidly'. I got imlib/imagemagick from SuSE and they were missing the imlib-config and there were dep problems.... I'l go back to slack when it is glibc2.1.. I hope I can get a cheap cdrom....
Only 'flamers' flame!
so does this make it not a project?
ArsonSmith
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Other folks have already said, but I might as well put my two cents in, too.
.tar.gz'd source, plus a .spec file that contains the instructions for compiling and installing it. You can do an rpm --rebuild (or is it --recompile?) .SRPM and just watch it go. This has the double benefit of both compiling it on your machine (and thus customizing it to your specific installation) and adding it to the RPM database.
I've never adminned any Linux box except for my personal one; I've run RH5.0 and 5.2 on it, and plan to upgrade to 5.9 in a week or so once Cheapbytes gets it on CD.
There are, essentially, three ways to upgrade any package with a Red Hat system.
1) Compile from scratch. You can tar -zxvf and make just like with any other Linux distro. I do it from time to time myself if what I want isn't around in RPM form yet. The only thing about doing this is that it doesn't tell your RPM database that it's installed.
2) Install from RPM. This is what most people in a hurry or who don't know how to patch or deal with odd compile errors will do. When you do this, it installs the binaries, the documentation, and puts a note in your RPM database that the package is there.
The one problem with this is that if you use compile to install some packages and RPM to install others, RPM won't realize the compiled packages are installed. But there are RPM options to override dependancy failures, so if you know that you've got that package installed, you can tell it to install anyway.
3) Build from SRPM. The SRPM, or source RPM, contains the
This also suggests
3a) "Roll your own" RPMs. You can do it; it's as easy as putting a script together that tells how to compile, and what files go where. I've tried it myself, for a simple program. This has the same benefits as 3) above...
Anyway...good luck with it!
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
No, slackware is for people who want to find stuff out. Slackware is Linux without somone encapsulateing it, like RedHat. When my computer fucks up, I want it to be MY fault. Not like in windoze where it is some wered assed kernel bug. that's why I run linux. That's also why I program in str8 C without any stupid IDE's. I installed RedHat, once, and got some wiered assed errors when I installed add on programs. (I was like 16 at the time, and didnt know half what I do now) Anyways later that evening, I formatted and went back to slackware.
I started with slackware, 'bout 3 years ago, when I got my first 386- a 25 mhz box with 12 megs of ram, and a 30 meg RLL hard drive. I still run slack, (the name even seems natural to me... 18 yr old guy still liveing at home... flunking outta jr. collage cause I'd rather hack my new CGI functions than write my english paper-can not or will not spell english properly)
If you cant compile a package from the source, you should figure out how. It's really not that hard, I figured it out back when i was a freakin basic programmer.
I cut my teeth on slackware with my 386 (when it was new out of the box). I have gone through several machines since then..all M$ free I say proudly. Slackware has proven itself to me over and over again. I have used RedHat, Caldera, several BSD variants, and Debian (on my powerpc).
.. well.. is it even under the GPL? Is it not? I have gone this long without it..why change now...to break things? Nooooo.....
The only factor I see a bit lacking in Slackware is a decent packaging system, but I LIKE compiling from tarballs. Call me crazy..but do that on your redhat or debian system and the package managers are lost. What happens when you want the newset release of ???....do you wait for someone else to make it for you? Or do you go out and get it yourself?
No decision there for me.
As for glibc2
Keep it up Patrick.
That's just the nature of the install procedure, upgrading is easy, just download the package you want to upgrade from the slackware-current directory and run installpkg from /, rather simple method if you ask me (much better than going rpm -puke -thissucks -microsoftstyle whatiswrongwithtar.rpm :)
I don't think I have ever figured out how to use the "rescue" disks that come/are downloadable with RedHat. Glad it is easy to re-install.
-AP
I know Linux on a 4 meg system may not be reasonable any more,
:-) ).
I've installed Slackware 3.4 on a 386SX-25 with 4M from a local CD-ROM drive (1X no less). I haven't tried any more recent versions yet, as I rarely use that machine (for obvious reasons
but it seems 8 should be doable, but 8's too small to install RedHat,
That is not necessarily true. I have successfully installed Red Hat 5.2 (via NFS and Ethernet) on a 486DLC-40 (similar performance wise to a 486DX-33) with 8M. It is slow, especially when running X, but it does work reliably. One of these days I will have to get around to bumping the memory in that box up to 20M or 32M.
I'm curious about those versions of redhat that don't install on laptops
Well, I have an IBM ThinkPad 355Cs (which is an old and slightly funky semi-proprietary 486SX-33 laptop). I can't get it to read the Red Hat 5.1 or 5.2 boot floppy. I've been able to get both Slackware 3.4 and SuSE 5.3 installed on it. I've tried making Red Hat boot floppies on several machines (thinking it is an alignment problem or something). This model ThinkPad requires "floppy=thinkpad" as boot line parameter or an append with Slackware and SuSE. The Red Hat boot floppy doesn't seem to grok that or something.
Laptops aren't normal x86 boxes though... they are often highly funky. It does sometimes take a considerable amount of experimentation to get them to play nicely, even with Windows.
Too bad you'll never see the SuSE box here in the States
They've got it at the local Borders, and I live in a small (~300,000) midwestern town. The same Borders also carries Red Hat, Red Hat Power Tools, SuSE Linux Office 99, Caldera OpenLinux and quite a number of Linux books. Viva La Borders!
Going back to the topic of this whole posting, maybe that's a good machine to try out Slackware 4.0 on. :)
Perhaps, although I am happy with SuSE on it at the moment, albiet I probably should upgrade it to 6.0 or 6.1.
I don't have any experience with that model, but Debian is probably easier to get installed, it seems to give a lot more flexibility in the install process.
I don't have any recent versions of Debian, nor do I have a fast enough net connection to find downloading it pleasant. Someday I should at least try out Debian, it is the only major distro I haven't ever played with.
I assume the system doesn't have a CD-Rom,
You are correct. The first install I did on the machine was Slackware 3.4 which I did from floppies I made from a CD on another machine. That is very time consuming, but not difficult. Later I purchased a new hard drive (2.1G to replace the 270M drive it came with), a 32M memory card (to replace the 8M card that came in it and expand it from 12M to 36M), and a MegaHertz PCMCIA combo 33.6 modem and Ethernet. I attempted to install Red Hat, but as I mentioned, due to the floppy drive funkiness on this series of ThinkPads (which apparent afflicts the 75x series as well as the 35x series), that failed. However, as I mentioned, I was able to get a network install of SuSE 5.3 to work, so all is happy.
but if you can boot to DOS on it, you could install the packages you need on a DOS/umsdos partition and try booting it from loadlin.
I don't use MS-DOS (for that matter I don't even think I have a copy of it anywhere), so that isn't really an option. I was told the machine had MS-DOS 6.x and Windows 3.1x on it when I got it, but I never booted it that way to find out, the first thing I did was boot Slackware and fdisk away the Windows infestation. I do have a copy of DR-DOS 6.0 around somewhere, so I suppose I could have played with that. However, due to limited disk when I first purchased the machine and no network connection, that didn't seem very workable.
But the idea that RedHat can't install onto laptops is just silly.
Very true. Unfortunately, as I noted, getting any OS installed on some laptops can be an adventure. For me it was easier to just use SuSE, since I already had it, and it worked without hassles. It is not completely fair to pick on Red Hat because of the problems some people will encounter with laptops (and that isn't what my intention was), as it is mostly the hardware manufacturer's fault. At any rate, I personally would guess getting Windows 95/98 installed on this laptop would be more difficult than SuSE or Slackware. Thankfully, since I don't have (or want) Windows 95/98, that isn't an issue.
Libraries are the *only* reason to get a new distro. Installing new libs is just a friggin pain in the ass. I haven't bought a dist since RH 4.2. I'm satisfied with glibc5 and kernel 2.0.36 and the few extra packages that I compiled from sources for now. Soon I will buy a new dist with 2.2.x and glibc6 -- I haven't decided which one, but it probably won't be this distribution. I just don't have the time to recompile every package on my machine. Dists are worth a few bucks to me every few years.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
My understanding is that this is a libc5-based distribution, but has runtime support for glibc-2.0.7-pre6, but no runtime support for glibc-2.1 or glibc-2.1.1-pre1.
Glibc is in a state of flux, particularly with 2.1 being recalled. 2.0.6 is, so I hear, buggy. 2.0.7 is still a -pre6 release, though everyone seems to pretend that it is a real release. 2.1 is another big step, but it's not clear that it is ready for stable systems.
So the choices are:
Use libc5. It works, is stable, but not trendy.
Use glibc2.0.7-pre6. It works, is stable, but you'll have to transition to 2.1 soon, anyway.
Use glibc2.1.1-pre1. It might work, is relatively untested, but is what everyone will eventually be moving to.
Personally, I think Slackware made a reasonable choice. I wouldn't compile for glibc2.0, as that's a dead-end library. Why bother making that transition? Instead, provide the runtime support for the binaries that require it, release another libc5 system, and focus development on glibc2.1.
the debian web site states they are planning to give out some cd's at Linux Expo maybe you can get one there CmdTaco
Damnit, Slackware is getting real outdated real fast. now that glibc 2.1 is out,they're TWO versions behind (although to be fair, I think only Stampede is going to use glibc 2.1 right away.) I've tried Debian, Stampede, OpenLinux (ewww), and SuSE, finally settling on SuSE because YaST just plain rocks, even if their packages aren't all the latest and are RPM. Too bad you'll never see the SuSE box here in the States... ;-)
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Speaking of Slackware, I'm running a 3.5 partition at home, and one day I rebooted and after I logged in, my prompt was simply "$". it looked like all my executables were dos file and I couldn't execute anything. It is still like that and I don't know why. The last thing I had done I believe is to attempt to install Bashprompt, which I failed at doing for some reason. Anyone had any experience with this?
Mark
Then I got too busy to learn stuff, so I left it alone for a long time, until I downloaded RH 5.2 and installed it on my old 486 in the corner with my cable modem acting as my firewall for the other three boxen. If not for Linux (or *BSD), that computer would be utterly useless, because Windows is painful.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
I'm downloading slack 4.0 right now, I looked in the a package before downloading and noticed in addition to libc4 and 5 it has glibc2.
I'm not sure if I should be happy or afraid for this. The only reason I am even downloading it right now and not waiting for a CD is because glibc2 thrashed my system last night. Pretty good timing, because reinstalling from my slackware 3.2 cd after doing an fdisk doesn't sound like a fun proposition.
I've been using slackware since nov '95. I've never used any other distro -- I'm kinda confused as to what all the fuss is about. I like slackware. I'll continue to buy slackware.
Slack off. Get slack.
later
Not drinking, chasing women, or doing drugs won't make you live longer--it just seems that way.
should be fairly simple to write, if you can't find sources, or alias a bash builtin with the correct switches.
--C
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
Great! Slackware is, in my honest and well thought out opinion, the best Linux distribution - at least it is for the ix86 platform.
Some may complain that there is no Alpha version of the distribution, but I don't care - I don't have any Alphas anyway!
If you are thinking of defecting from Redhat and have used it for a while, can I recommend that you either try Slackware 3.6 or wait a little longer for 4.0 - which, hopefully, will be based on a version 2.2 kernel, and have a further ease of use, while retaining it's KISS! (Keep it simple, Stupid!) ideology.
Happpy Slacking!!
Slackware is still by far the most stable and non
bloated Linux Distrobution out in existance. It
is the most straightforeword to install, and since
it avoids using dependencies, it makes upgrading
software alot easier. The only two issues with
the Slackware distro would be lack of glibc and
an FTP installation. Since one can load glib
themselves, It's not that major of a problem.
the other benifit of Slackware is the fact that
it's about as grassroots as you can get. Patrick
V. Does a tremendous job, and even entertained some comments of mine (that in retrospect are kind of uneducated) with the utmost sincerety and
accuracy that one would expect when talking to
someone in person.
I have used slackware since 3.1, have played with
Redhat and Caldera, and still faithfully use
Slackware. keep up the excellent work.
Now these were real distributions! Slackware wash just a cheap SLS ripoff :) Somebody needs to do a history of Linux Distributions.. Hmm Maybe I'll go for it.
Have you checked out Zoid.com yet? Zoid.com
Oops, What I really should have said is that Slackware is a "cool continuation" of SLS. My first installation was on a killer 486sx/25 with 16 meg. This cost arount $2000 at the time. i installed 0.95xxx? and loved it! I then changed jobs an bought the first commercial release of Linux "The Caldera Network Desktop". This was in 95. I still have the disk. I called the day the pre-release came out. I was order number 32. It ran great on a $3000 P-100 with 32 meg... ... ...
Ramble Ramble Ramble
Have you checked out Zoid.com yet? Zoid.com
My first experience running Linux was with Slackware in 1995. The main thing I remember about it (not having a direct connection to the internet) was running back and forth between the connected computer and mine with disks.
More recently, I installed RedHat 5.0. I was impressed by the simple install, and the nice idea of the RPM. However, I have not installed a single RPM since then. Everything I've done since then has involved downloading tgzs and compiling them. If I ever install a new version of Linux, it will probably be Slackware. It feels cleaner to me, and is better suited for the tgz-only install method.
You can install over your redhat rpm binaries, it won't hurt anything but might make the system bitch if you try to uninstall the rpm package later.
.conf's. I like Debian, it's great on my firewall/gateway 486 box.
Redhat's not scary, alot of Slackware die-hard's seem to be using it nowaday's cause the novelty of maintaining the system isn't as rewarding as it once was for them. I think since Debian 2.x hit the streets that most of the Slack die-hards that were using Redhat have switched to Debian though. I started with Slackware and I always preferred it. But when I bought the Debian 2.0 CD it blew my mind, dpkg and dselect are just awesome for maintaining the system. dpkg packages tend to prompt you for all config information during the install, saving time for rooting around for
But for my Pentium boxes I use Stampede. If you want pentium-optimized code, as you said above, you should check it out, since that's what it is built for. After running Stampede one tends to shy from 386/486 bins since they are so slow in comparison. Stampede's gzip is like 50% faster than standard gzip. It has its own package management format too, but you can setup pgcc and compile stuff yourself if ya want. Stampede comes w/ alot of kickass packages the other dists don't so it's worth a look. Cheapbytes has CD's for $2, or go to www.stampede.org.
It was the first dist w/ 2.2, and is probably the most actively maintained except for Rawhide.
ANd yeah I agree w/ you about FVWM(2). It's the best WM ever, fast as hell even when loaded w/ pixmaps. And who needs themes when the best one is the one you do up yourself. And as far as GTK/GNOME themes go, I haven't got that stuff to work but it looks great. Cvs stuff never compiles for me so I've given up till the stuff is out of devel. Stampede is beta as all hell but they got a kickass bugtrack that answers most problems.
Good luck on getting your system up and running. I recommend you do some security checking tho cause RH5 has some exploitable configs/apps w/ the default setup.
"Unix is a proprietary operating system intended to compete against Microsoft Windows" --Patrick Reilly
Those were the days, I stayed up all night trying to figure this new beast out.. what a thrill! (err.. what a geek!)
What *is* the deal with libc6? I've been running Slackware for several years and I have never run into problems compiling tarballs on any package yet. Are there any examples that people have?
You could always try Linux Router you don't need a hard disk to use it.
I have to confess that I've never been a real linux user, but I've tried slack 3.4 & 3.6, as well as RedHat 4.2 & 5.0, and I think slack is way better than RedHat -- even tho I'm not a linux user, I'm the kind who like to compile everything from source. Now only if someone can give me pointers to how do to tis 'n tat on slack, I'll run slack as my main OS (and Win98 for gaming -- there's no simcity3k on linux yet)
The most obvious thing that comes to mind is MySQL.. I did give it a shot installing linuxthreads, and I don't think I actually managed to get it right.
:( )
My first distro was Slackware, and was until about 3 months ago, when I switched to Debian. I hated it. I wouldn't switch back to Slackware now. As much as I said I despised package management, it's almost perfect in Debian, so it tends not to screw me up.
(I said almost - the mess with gtk did not impress me, but in part that's not Debian's fault, but authors using an unstable gtk branch.. ug, I'm still not rid of that mess..
Compiling stuff by hand I still do. It's not mutually exclusive.. (Window Maker and all the dockapps I did by hand..) It's just a lot easier for the base stuff *grin*.
-- Use the source, Luke!
I have no idea why people would shy away from a release based soley on the libraries. I have Slackware 3.4 and wanted to install StarOffice. I didnt want to trust my machine to their libc6 upgrade, so I went ahead and did it myself. In about 45 mins or so, I had both 5 and 6 set up. There are some awesome pages on the web that helped along the way (I think I started from slackware.org :P ). The point is, don't let the libraries dictate your choice. If libc6 is the only reason your staying with RH (heaven forbid), trash it and try Slackware. Its easier to keep track of where everything is installed, the initialize scripts make sense, its easy to tweak until you have it set up perfectly for yourself.
-- toolie
Admittedly, Slackware doesn't interest me anymore. However, all of Rob's comments on Debian make me wonder if maybe I ought to check that distro out.
-zack
I didn't think it was that bad with mem.. anyways I've been running Slack 3.1 on a 386 4M ram 50M HD for years now and it installed fine and never crashes of course. I use it for a lot of small tasks and am very happy with it.
I've been running Slackware since '95 and am glad a new version comes around. I really don't like the general direction that some other distros have been going. Man have I heard about glibc problems. I would never ever recommend to anyone to run any glibc-based distro until gnu libc gets its acts together. They have been one of the most unstable libs i ever saw. Anyways.. I run Slackware on my servers mainly for security, and because I know there wont be an X bin with a big security hole setuid root somewhere *laugh*
Hopefully cheapbytes.com will start selling 4.0 CDs soon so I can point people to it.
Here here! I've been using slackware since the linux kernel was at 1.2.8 (Found an old bootdisk I had made from my first install. It still boots, too!) and upgrading is not difficult or time consuming at all. As for what's open by default, no one should trust their distrobution to be secure. Any time I install a new box, I immediatly check inetd.conf and all the rc scripts so I know what's installed and what's not.
As for glibc2 vs. glibc1 (aka libc5 vs. libc6, it's all glibc), last I checked glibc still had numerous problems, and even with all the current packages getting it compiled was difficult at best. I know many people using various distros that had to use rescue disks because they decided to try glibc2. Volkerding should be praised for not jumping on the glibc2 bandwagon before the wheels are completly on.
-skullY
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
That's too bad. Your arguments aren't valid either. Let's go through and figure out why:
1) It lacks real package manager (ok, do slackware packages ever get updated after the distribution has been released or can I find "slackware packages" from freshmeat.net somewehere),
Well, there's pkgtool, which works quite well. It removes all files associated with the package, even tells you what files were removed via /var/log/packages so you can see if something got deleted that shouldn't have been (Maybe a shared file). But really, tar xvzf package.tar.gz;cd package;./configure;make;make install is not that hard, and gives you the chance to tweak things if needed (Ever use qmail with qpopper?)
There's also the slackware contrib directory, included on the cd and via ftp at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slac kware/contrib/.
And if you have no other option then to download a redhat or debian rpm, there's rpm2tgz, included with slackware 3.6, that converts an rpm package to a tgz package suitable for installation using installpkg or pkgtool.
2) 0% support (on Debian I am sure everything is up to date thanks to apt, on redhat there is at least an erratas webpage that lists fixes and updates)
Wrong again. Looking at http://www.slackware.com"> there is a lot of support there. They have a message board for technical questions, Install Help, a list of updated packages, etc. You can even email Volkerding and he'll reply.
Although by reading your message, it looks like you mean not support, but a way to see if everything's current. Well, you can just check the Changelog to see what he changed. You can find the changelog at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux /slackware/ChangeLog.txt. Not only does that notify you of security updates, but general updates as well.
3) It cannot be upgraded without trashing your system (when it is a 30 minute process on other distributions)
Really? I guess that my having upgraded from 3.4->3.5->3.6 without ever formatting must be a halucination. You have two choices. 1- Just install over the top. 2- Use pkgtool to remove your packages first, then run the install program. Takes me only 30-40mins to upgrade my system.
4) Never up to date (glibc2 ?)
Up to date is a relative term. If by up to date you mean the latest cutting edge beta libs and programs that haven't been tested thouroughly yet, well, I guess you're right. But OTOH, if you mean the latest stable libs and programs that have been tested, you're wrong. Remember, glibc2.0 won't be around long, and glibc2.1 is still beta, and still unstable. It hurts the linux community when a company puts out a distro that contains buggy software, as that pulls the general public's view of linux down to that of Microsoft. Just another company shipping products with bugs to get it on the marketplace rather then excercising a little patience and releasing a quality product.
5) It is a nightmare to maintain compared to other distributions.
I don't know how you maintain a box, but when I was working for a midsize ISP (Midsize for the area, about 1300 dialups) we used Slackware on all our machines. Rarely were upgrades needed, and when they were, we simply configured it on one machine, tar'd up the dir, and copied it to the others. We even got fancy and wrote a script to untar it, make it, then make install it. No need to worry about having dependancies, and no need to fuss with someone's precompiled binary.
Fact of the matter is, when you're running in most corporate environments, control of the box is an issue. With Slackware I just install and go. The times I've tried to use redhat, I ended up having to install several key components by hand because the rpm's didn't use the compile options we needed. Although as someone said earlier, FreeBSD is also a good option (Although I personally prefer OpenBSD as Theo is a security god).
When I was able to do my own spam-armoring, you got a chance to email me. Now you can only hope I see your reply.
First off, everything in RedHat has an associated "Source RPM" (SRPM). You can download that and use RPM to recompile..
Second, almost anytime you compile anything from a source tarball, it usually defaults to installing in /usr/local or /opt. In both RPM based(Redhat, etc) and Debian distros /usr/local and /opt are specifically reserved for stuff you compile yourself.
To me, packages give me the best of both worlds. I be lazy and download the latest RPM's to keep all the misc. stuff on my system up to date, or, for stuff I really like to mess around with (like perl), I can compile from source.
I still have yet to see a *valid* reason a distribution should NOT have a package manager.
Distributors are not allowed to dump things in /usr/local. There's that whole Linux File System Standard thing.
-David
I've still got the Slackware 1.2 (yes, one point two) disk set I made when I first got serious about Linux. In fact that's what my systems run. Of course I've replaced about 80% of the binaries by now. (Anybody know where to find sources for 'which'?)
Hey look... someone ran their mouth without doing any research... mabey if you read red-hats web site you would see that some versions of redhat don't install on laptops. Hmm.. Shut the fuck up unless you actually thought before hand.
I read the webpage, and then found a way to install it on my laptop. Things get done when you stop bitching and try to get it to work.
Nomad Linux This place uses a slack type distro, but they have a decent package manager too.
I didn't think Slackware was still around they had fall so far behind and out of date
Exactly what has fallen so far behind and out of date? As far as I know, everything still works on my system, and I started out with Slackware 3.4.
You'd be suprised at how many people still use Slackware. It's the kinda distro where those who start out with it love it, and those who try to switch to it despise it (usually those are the people who attempt to switch from something like redhat which teaches you nothing about how your system works, and then they find themselves to impatient to work with it..usually anyways).
~Steve
--
"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
Yeah really, CmdrTaco is even putting messages into a Slackware oriented post.
Anyways, I honestly don't see what's so great about Debian..It's nice..I guess - haven't tried 2.1, but 2.0 was half-decent. In any event, I have had more problems with it than I ever had with Slackware. But then again, with Slackware I only installed stuff I wanted. Why waste space on stuff that only frustrates you? (ppp in debian? ugh)
~Steve
--
"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
cheap SLS ripoff?
hmm, I could be wrong but..isn't it free?
Personally, I wouldn't attempt a history of Linux Distributions, however, I wouldn't mind seeing one. anyone else?
~Steve
--
"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
I started off with Linux on Slackware in early '96. I had a very modest PC then and I still do, and so I've just kept using Slack. I've never felt held back by it (apart from the time it takes to upgrade) and I like the hackability of it. I very much appreciate the total stability I have had from it. I get the impression that some of the more popular distros have had flaky moments, but since Slackware 96 I haven't had any inexplicable crashes (only crashes are due to blowing out swap space or bad kernel build decisions). I've got one spare partition left and i think Slack 4.0 is such an interesting development to me that I'll finally get myself a CheapBytes preview (have been happy enough with Walnut Creek up till now).
Have you looked at the system specs? Aside from the system, bandwidth's
not a problem. They've got multiple DS3 and OC3 connections
to the 'net. Even Pixar, to my knowledge, doesn't have so sweet a
setup. Although I do recall the installation of several T1s in
the office of one Steve Jobs. This was a few years ago, though. They
were, I believe, working on the sequel to Toy Story at the time. Very
forgettable are the Macs that were everywhere. More memorable, however,
was the SGIs they carted about.
Debian is well worth trying out...
Once installed you can install a new package via:
apt-get install
And it will determine what it depends on, dialup and download the stuff and install it on-the-fly. If you are upgrading (for example) lpr it will stop lpr, install the new one and bring it up again.
The key word with Debian TCO. Once running... it is the closest to zero that you can find.
Cheers
From the look of the Changelog, slack 4.0 has the same gnu libraries as 3.6. Everything was compiled against libc5, and you get only RUNTIME SUPPORT for libc6. I believe Patrick has chosen to do this simply because to this day glibc2 is a little sketchy in some areas, whereas libc5 is still solid as a rock, but aging quickly.
;)
What, me? No, I use RedHat.
Alls you do is enable your swap space before you install, so that you don't run out of memory. With Slack this is easy--it even gives you directions on how to do it when you boot off the standard disks.
And, yes, if you want a barebones linux system, Slackware is an excellent route. Chances are that you'd also want the "n" part of the distro as well as the "a", which will make your HD requirements considerably greater.
The first distribution I ever used was Slackware 3.5 (or was it 3.4? I can't remember.)
I've been running it ever since. I love it.
Sure, I've tried Red Hat. I hated it. I don't see what the big deal is. Woo! X Configuration!@# Wow! It installed way to much crap that I didn't want, and it put my files in bizzaire locations. Argh.
Debian. I don't see what's so special about this either. I remember someone saying something like this on irc: "Red Hat does everything for you. Slackware does nothing for you. Debian does just what it should." I can't agree with this. I couldn't even get PPP working in Debian or Red Hat (linuxconfig is confusing.)
Some people acclaim RPM. Why? I got along for two years without using a(n) RPM just fine...
Ah well...
I cut my teeth on Slakware many moons ago. I've run Redhat. I've run Debian. I've run Caldera. I have a system that is M$ free and I'm much much better now. That is the bottom line.
I've just installed Debian 2.1 on a PS/2 386/16 with 4 megs of RAM - there's a low memory installation floppy that sets up swap, copies the full installation floppy to hard drive and then lets you boot that. Not awfully elegant, but it works (and gives the impression that it'll work on 2 meg systems - I don't plan on testing this in the near future)
The only problem I had was that I had to extract the image from the boot disk, uncompress it, create the device notes for the ESDI drive, recompress it, copy it back to floppy and then boot. No other hitches - the module for the network card went in happily, and the rest of the installation went over NFS. It does take 10 minutes to boot and I haven't dared try compiling anything yet, but it's now a perfectly usable email terminal....
It's old, antique and does not do particular jobs very well (especially thread handling). That is why I run glibc 2.1 even on older Pentium systems.
Libc5 has thread support. It is not included, but glibc 2.x has also separate linuxthreads packages.
Libc5 is discontinued (according to H.J. Lu) because libc5 does the job, but it does not do the job good enough. Quote from release.libc6 out of the libc5 package:
The Linux C library 5 is phasing out. I am only maintaining it for
very serious bug fixes only. People who want new features and other
improvements should use the Linux C library 6, aka, the GNU C library
2.
DOWNLOAD Slackware 4.0 here
(LinuxToday appears to be slashdotted, at least from here)
--Coke
I first came across Slackware EONs ago - I recall downloading it from Compuserve at work a couple of years before we had an internet connection.
My current setup is loosley based on a basic Slackware 3.4 with a lot of extras on top - the only binaries I have downloaded being Netscape and a glibc2 Xfree.
I still prefer slackware to any other distro - I have tried Debian, Redhat, S.U.S.E and FTlinux in the past with poor results.
I just hope that a glibc 2.1 Slackware release appears soon. I would then reinstall removing all libc5 from this machine for once and for all.
I started using Linux about 2 years ago. Back then I kept hearing all these really bad stories about Slackware ("ick, that's the LAST distro you should get..."). Being new at it, I tried to download RedHat. I don't think I even got to the copying-the-software step because of repeated SIG11 errors... For some reason, I just didn't like Debian. =]
Slackware has always worked best for me. It installed perfectly on all my hardware (no SIG11's) from a lowly 386/4mb/120mb (yes, it'll still run on 4meg hardware) to my current 350mhz/32mb/2gb.
Package maintenance on Slack? Too much of a hassle. It's always seemed logical to just download the source for a new program, fix the Makefiles to the right path and install it over whatever old version was there. Never had a problem compiling anything on libc5 either... not even on the current Slack3.4-based server at my school. (If you could still call it Slack-based... I've replaced about half of everything from TGZs =])
Yes, I know Slack doesn't have any fancy control panel Xapp or one-click installation, but those have always seemed a little too simplistic. Better to open up pico and fix the config files yourself... you learn better that way =]
Oh well, enough of my rambling...
manly is a relative thing, compared to say, running any M$ product.
... not manly hairychest manly.
you could run the crappiest dist alive, and still be manly.
Manly good
I'm shutting up now.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Honestly, Yes. Anything that you have to click 'ok' to run scares me. Girls scare me. Therefor M$ scares me. fairly logical. both of them behave unpredicatably, and both of them scare me. 'nuff said.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Atlast someone that share my view!
As a steady Slackware user i cannot agree more.
Lookign forward to see 4.0
j.
This makes no sense to me. I agree with a previous poster... Slackware is definately for the tinkerer... It is GREAT (IMHO) because of it's non-dependence on packages... If you want them, use alien to convert them. Otherwise, compile your own stuff... :) It's so much nicer that way. What I don't understand is your comment about it being inherently insecure. Much like all Linuxes (and Unixes), it is only as secure as you make it. Nothing is "secure" by default, until you see to it to patch and update software towards this end. Whether this involves updating RPMS, DEBs, or recompiling tarballs... security is an issue for the sysadmin, not an issue of any particular distribution.
pk