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Pre-Beta Slackware 4.0

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hammer-on-this dept.

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.

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. 8 MB is a joke by tgd · · Score: 4

    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.

  2. Come home to daddy by CMiYC · · Score: 5

    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.

    ---

  3. Teach an old dog a new trick... by HRbnjR · · Score: 5

    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.

    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 :-) 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.

    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 :-) 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.