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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.
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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.
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."
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.
---
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
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
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.