There are no Slackware ISOs. However, it's only trivial to generate them. Download what you want from the ftp site (I recommend bootdsks.144, contrib, docs, install, kernels, modules, rootdsks. and slakware, though you can leave out docs, kernels, and modules safely) and add in anything else you may want to throw on the CD, WordPerfect, StarOffice, etc...
You can use mkisofs to generate the iso which you can burn on any machine (I ftp it to my brother's win machine which has a burner on it and use Adaptec software). Here's the command I used to generate an ISO which is bootable:
Even in the stable distribution, the configuration of certain packages would fail with segfaults or other errors, forcing you to configure them manually (which I find harder to do than compiling from tarballs).
Also, dselect makes quite a few mistakes with package dependencies. I've had to force things to get them to install. It would even say that there was a dependency not met, and dump me in a screen listing packages whose dependencies were all met.
Dselect is far from intuitive as well, it makes new users cry, and myself as well because it takes me probably 2 hours to go through everything.
I would prefer it to be somewhat hierarchial, like SuSE's YAST, which is not perfect, but I like it very much.
Then after installing 800+ MB of software, I forget everything that I installed. In Slackware I can go into/var/adm/ and find out what I installed, what it does, and what the names of the appropriate executables are because everything is saved in good old text files.
Why is everybody claiming that Slackware doesn't have this/that?
It has Glibc2. It has KDE by default, but I just installpkg Window Maker. Gnome is also there along with AfterStep, FVWM, OpenLook, etc..
I tried Gnome and couldn't stand it at all. It was too much like windows (I installed SuSE to try out Gnome, in order to try out the new MC. I was incredibly disappointed. But I like SuSE anyway, it will update packages like Debian, and is fairly easy to use install/use) and was horribly unstable. I'm not a KDE fan either but it's half stable and fairly straightforward to the new user.
Patrick has had to defend his insistence on basing the distribution on libc5 (remember, glibc2 is also there) for a long time. I wondered, he explained, I now agree. Slackware is meant to be *stable*. It always was, it was the whole philosophy from the beginning. Glibc2 still has a lot of trouble but is pretty much out of it now (with the notable exception of 2.1, ouch). The next release will definitely be glibc2 based though.
I actually enjoy installing a distribution and having all of the software I installed actually work reliably, a feature which the other distributions, especially Debian, severely lacks.
And besides, compiling software isn't *nearly* as scary as it once was.
./configure;make;make install
If a required lib wasn't there, get it and install that, too.
Now how hard is that? It could get even easier, if the process was wizardised like those nice win32 installers. Generally, if you can compile a kernel, you shouldn't have trouble compiling other software, if it uses autoconf. You don't even have to edit makefiles anymore.
40 floppies? I was up to something like 60 before I broke down and bought a CD-ROM and a Slackware CD.
Oh, and X was just beautiful to set up on my generic 256k VGA card. It invariably took a week to get X going because I ended up having to hand edit my XF86Config file for all of my settings, and I always forgot the names of things so I spent all my free time (which wasn't much) staring at the man file and flipping over to type in that particular option.
And the worst thing was, I absolutely *loved* it. I was hooked. Now I use only Linux, going to other OSes only when forced.
Is it any wonder I still use Slackware? Even though it's insultingly easy to set up now, even on the strangest of configurations (install from zip-drive, etc. I don't *have* a dos partition on my laptop).
That would probably be highly illegal, just like distibuting an mpeg would be.
Plus, I really enjoyed this one, especially after seeing Phantom Menace for the second time this morning. I just had to hear the sound difference between the two theatres. Big difference, the place I saw it first (nerd showing, 12:01AM, first regular showing in North America, because I'm as east as possible in Newfoundland, hahaha) had a way better sound system.
Yeah, that's the pain I go through when I download 128-bit crypto versions of Netscrape. 6 characters allotted, I always type the space and wonder where the final '9' went to.:-)*
Though that's not *too* bad. I remember being at a site recently (forget which one) that had the dropdown box for "state/province" which didn't actually include any provinces. There was no "other" option either.
Actually, I think I remember now, it might have been handeye.com as I was ordering Civ:CTP for Linux.
I don't know, I have a TB Montego in my system which has that damn Aureal chip in it. It was the first piece of hardware I ever bought knowing there was no Linux support. It was brand spanking new at the time and I figured it was only a matter of a couple of months before it would be supported, judging from TB's other cards. I was unaware of the Aureal thing at the time, I just wanted a good card, comparable to my GUS (still in use in a "multimedia/router" Linux box hooked up to my home theatre system). Then I found out about the Aureal connection. I was pissed. 4Front now supports my card for US$30 until 2002. It was sad that I had to do that, but it wasn't 4Front's fault, it wasn't the Linux community's fault, it was only partially TB's fault. The blame is on Aureal for continuing to be a pre-Linux-hype Diamond or an (until recently) ATI. 4Front had to pay Aureal to get support for Linux, so I don't really mind because I like my sound card and an old GUS is hard to find (few people part with them, such as myself). A somewhat happy ending though, the driver is still in beta and there are a couple of issues, like sound playing too fast. I filled out the support form and got an actual intelligent response in less than 5 minutes. It explained pretty much exactly what was happening and that they were working on it. I was impressed. I'm so used to being given the "corporate finger" by many companies, especially after my response to the inevitable (which version of windows are you running). "We don't support Linux," they say matter-of-factly. Even when OS is completely irrelevant (broken switch on Toshiba notebook). So 4Front is on my good list along with Matrox, Iomega, ZWorld, and Epson, all who have been very good to me regardless of what OS I use.
Can-con has more to do with economics than with anything else. If many stations had their way, I'd only be able to see "Friends" on all 78 channels here. More money leaving the country, more people leaving the country.
The problem is, can-con can often be some old cheap crap just to satisfy the regulations during the "beaver hour."
It's quite painful here (Newfoundland), where the only private TV station, a radio station, and a paper, are owned by one guy in Arizona. There just happens to be a major culture difference between the North American countries that people don't realise. While there are people in both countries that actually enjoy formulaic sit-coms (shudder) there are more in the States (this isn't a 'dis'). Fact is, it's the American corporations that love to push garbage down people's throats while trying to stay away from any controversy whatsoever that feeds this.
People from the South might think that having a government owned media network (CBC) would be a form of citizen control but it is in fact the converse. The government gets more razzing from their own CBC than they do from anyone else. This is possible due to the lack of traditional corporate ideas there. Ask Rick Mercer, he'll tell you.
You could also ask Michael Moore (Roger and Me) whose TV Nation show (excellent show) was dropped by two broadcasters (NBC and FOX) because it tried to put politicians and greedy corporations in their place. He had to bring the show up here (on Bravo) in order to do it (under a different name, but it's the same great idea, I enjoyed the way he displayed how Kenneth Starr could have saved a lot of taxpayers money by having actors dressed as puritans running around Washington asking politicians if they "fornicate.").
Do you think the National Film Board could have happened in the States. Interestingly, a NFB animated short recently became a series on Comedy Central (Bob and Margaret).
I hear you, I tried to install Solaris 7 on my box yesterday. I gave up.
No support for my video card (Millenium G200), support for my Montego costs US$40 from 4Front (I already paid for the Linux ones), and, of course, no support for my 10GB drive.
On top of that, NO GUS SUPPORT. Unacceptable.
I gave up. Slackware 4 works fine for me. At least it works.
I naively thought that Solaris would support this hardware but it is evidently not the case
Ever see the Maxell commercial of Ella Fitzgerald (I think it was her, it was a while..) breaking a glass with her voice? I've seen it numerous times in physics classes.
Anyway, programmable microcontrollers that use EPROM are commonly erased with UV light (PIC and 8051 are notable examples). This is for prototyping, however. For production, OTPs (One Time Programmables) are used. They have the exact same makeup, save the clear erasing window. I saw a discussion a a PIC list somewhere about some of the people on the list who were experimenting with erasing the OTPs. They were trying x-rays, high-intensity UV, all at different wavelengths, with some success (managed to erase them, didn't work again, ie: destroyed).
So there are magic frequencies that destroy chips.
> This is great, as it could replace the use of > the more lethal weapons out there, and would > also help curb police brutality...
I'm not sure if "curb" is the appropriate word here. Try "increase." It's bad enough, the basic human rights that police rob now (many get away with it, too), imagine what'll happen if they have these things. They'll shoot on a whim.
I remember the time I got pulled over for having long hair. He even admitted that.
Plus, you absolutely *know* that people other than cops will have them. Here's an incredibly short list of things that could happen, some of them already mentioned:
Slashdot Mirror
There are no Slackware ISOs. However, it's only trivial to generate them. Download what you want from the ftp site (I recommend bootdsks.144, contrib, docs, install, kernels, modules, rootdsks. and slakware, though you can leave out docs, kernels, and modules safely) and add in anything else you may want to throw on the CD, WordPerfect, StarOffice, etc...
You can use mkisofs to generate the iso which you can burn on any machine (I ftp it to my brother's win machine which has a burner on it and use Adaptec software). Here's the command I used to generate an ISO which is bootable:
mkisofs -a -b bootdsks.144/.eltorito/eltorito.img -l -r -v -c bootdsks.144/.eltorito/boot.catalog -o slak40.iso -V "Slackware 4.0" slackware-4.0
This command generates a bootable ISO called slak40.iso from the contents of the slackware-4.0 directory.
That's it, burn it and boot it!
Even in the stable distribution, the configuration of certain packages would fail with segfaults or other errors, forcing you to configure them manually (which I find harder to do than compiling from tarballs).
/var/adm/ and find out what I installed, what it does, and what the names of the appropriate executables are because everything is saved in good old text files.
Also, dselect makes quite a few mistakes with package dependencies. I've had to force things to get them to install. It would even say that there was a dependency not met, and dump me in a screen listing packages whose dependencies were all met.
Dselect is far from intuitive as well, it makes new users cry, and myself as well because it takes me probably 2 hours to go through everything.
I would prefer it to be somewhat hierarchial, like SuSE's YAST, which is not perfect, but I like it very much.
Then after installing 800+ MB of software, I forget everything that I installed. In Slackware I can go into
Why is everybody claiming that Slackware doesn't have this/that?
It has Glibc2. It has KDE by default, but I just installpkg Window Maker. Gnome is also there along with AfterStep, FVWM, OpenLook, etc..
I tried Gnome and couldn't stand it at all. It was too much like windows (I installed SuSE to try out Gnome, in order to try out the new MC. I was incredibly disappointed. But I like SuSE anyway, it will update packages like Debian, and is fairly easy to use install/use) and was horribly unstable. I'm not a KDE fan either but it's half stable and fairly straightforward to the new user.
Patrick has had to defend his insistence on basing the distribution on libc5 (remember, glibc2 is also there) for a long time. I wondered, he explained, I now agree. Slackware is meant to be *stable*. It always was, it was the whole philosophy from the beginning. Glibc2 still has a lot of trouble but is pretty much out of it now (with the notable exception of 2.1, ouch). The next release will definitely be glibc2 based though.
I actually enjoy installing a distribution and having all of the software I installed actually work reliably, a feature which the other distributions, especially Debian, severely lacks.
And besides, compiling software isn't *nearly* as scary as it once was.
./configure;make;make install
If a required lib wasn't there, get it and install that, too.
Now how hard is that? It could get even easier, if the process was wizardised like those nice win32 installers. Generally, if you can compile a kernel, you shouldn't have trouble compiling other software, if it uses autoconf. You don't even have to edit makefiles anymore.
Oh, man, the memories are coming baaack.
40 floppies? I was up to something like 60 before I broke down and bought a CD-ROM and a Slackware CD.
Oh, and X was just beautiful to set up on my generic 256k VGA card. It invariably took a week to get X going because I ended up having to hand edit my XF86Config file for all of my settings, and I always forgot the names of things so I spent all my free time (which wasn't much) staring at the man file and flipping over to type in that particular option.
And the worst thing was, I absolutely *loved* it. I was hooked. Now I use only Linux, going to other OSes only when forced.
Is it any wonder I still use Slackware? Even though it's insultingly easy to set up now, even on the strangest of configurations (install from zip-drive, etc. I don't *have* a dos partition on my laptop).
That would probably be highly illegal, just like distibuting an mpeg would be.
Plus, I really enjoyed this one, especially after seeing Phantom Menace for the second time this morning. I just had to hear the sound difference between the two theatres. Big difference, the place I saw it first (nerd showing, 12:01AM, first regular showing in North America, because I'm as east as possible in Newfoundland, hahaha) had a way better sound system.
Though that's not *too* bad. I remember being at a site recently (forget which one) that had the dropdown box for "state/province" which didn't actually include any provinces. There was no "other" option either.
Actually, I think I remember now, it might have been handeye.com as I was ordering Civ:CTP for Linux.
I don't know, I have a TB Montego in my system which has that damn Aureal chip in it. It was the first piece of hardware I ever bought knowing there was no Linux support. It was brand spanking new at the time and I figured it was only a matter of a couple of months before it would be supported, judging from TB's other cards. I was unaware of the Aureal thing at the time, I just wanted a good card, comparable to my GUS (still in use in a "multimedia/router" Linux box hooked up to my home theatre system).
Then I found out about the Aureal connection. I was pissed.
4Front now supports my card for US$30 until 2002. It was sad that I had to do that, but it wasn't 4Front's fault, it wasn't the Linux community's fault, it was only partially TB's fault. The blame is on Aureal for continuing to be a pre-Linux-hype Diamond or an (until recently) ATI. 4Front had to pay Aureal to get support for Linux, so I don't really mind because I like my sound card and an old GUS is hard to find (few people part with them, such as myself).
A somewhat happy ending though, the driver is still in beta and there are a couple of issues, like sound playing too fast. I filled out the support form and got an actual intelligent response in less than 5 minutes. It explained pretty much exactly what was happening and that they were working on it.
I was impressed. I'm so used to being given the "corporate finger" by many companies, especially after my response to the inevitable (which version of windows are you running). "We don't support Linux," they say matter-of-factly. Even when OS is completely irrelevant (broken switch on Toshiba notebook).
So 4Front is on my good list along with Matrox, Iomega, ZWorld, and Epson, all who have been very good to me regardless of what OS I use.
Can-con has more to do with economics than with anything else. If many stations had their way, I'd only be able to see "Friends" on all 78 channels here. More money leaving the country, more people leaving the country.
The problem is, can-con can often be some old cheap crap just to satisfy the regulations during the "beaver hour."
It's quite painful here (Newfoundland), where the only private TV station, a radio station, and a paper, are owned by one guy in Arizona. There just happens to be a major culture difference between the North American countries that people don't realise. While there are people in both countries that actually enjoy formulaic sit-coms (shudder) there are more in the States (this isn't a 'dis'). Fact is, it's the American corporations that love to push garbage down people's throats while trying to stay away from any controversy whatsoever that feeds this.
People from the South might think that having a government owned media network (CBC) would be a form of citizen control but it is in fact the converse. The government gets more razzing from their own CBC than they do from anyone else. This is possible due to the lack of traditional corporate ideas there. Ask Rick Mercer, he'll tell you.
You could also ask Michael Moore (Roger and Me) whose TV Nation show (excellent show) was dropped by two broadcasters (NBC and FOX) because it tried to put politicians and greedy corporations in their place. He had to bring the show up here (on Bravo) in order to do it (under a different name, but it's the same great idea, I enjoyed the way he displayed how Kenneth Starr could have saved a lot of taxpayers money by having actors dressed as puritans running around Washington asking politicians if they "fornicate.").
Do you think the National Film Board could have happened in the States. Interestingly, a NFB animated short recently became a series on Comedy Central (Bob and Margaret).
Ok. I've ranted enough.
I hear you, I tried to install Solaris 7 on my box yesterday. I gave up.
No support for my video card (Millenium G200), support for my Montego costs US$40 from 4Front (I already paid for the Linux ones), and, of course, no support for my 10GB drive.
On top of that, NO GUS SUPPORT. Unacceptable.
I gave up. Slackware 4 works fine for me. At least it works.
I naively thought that Solaris would support this hardware but it is evidently not the case
Ever see the Maxell commercial of Ella Fitzgerald (I think it was her, it was a while..) breaking a glass with her voice? I've seen it numerous times in physics classes.
Anyway, programmable microcontrollers that use EPROM are commonly erased with UV light (PIC and 8051 are notable examples). This is for prototyping, however. For production, OTPs (One Time Programmables) are used. They have the exact same makeup, save the clear erasing window. I saw a discussion a a PIC list somewhere about some of the people on the list who were experimenting with erasing the OTPs. They were trying x-rays, high-intensity UV, all at different wavelengths, with some success (managed to erase them, didn't work again, ie: destroyed).
So there are magic frequencies that destroy chips.
> This is great, as it could replace the use of ...
> the more lethal weapons out there, and would
> also help curb police brutality
I'm not sure if "curb" is the appropriate word here. Try "increase." It's bad enough, the basic human rights that police rob now (many get away with it, too), imagine what'll happen if they have these things. They'll shoot on a whim.
I remember the time I got pulled over for having long hair. He even admitted that.
Plus, you absolutely *know* that people other than cops will have them. Here's an incredibly short list of things that could happen, some of them already mentioned:
mugging
armed robbery
carjacking
rape
kidnapping
....
And the list goes on.