For almost a week now, I’ve been using Slackware 9.1 (RC-1 released today), and I am having a blast. Slackware doesn’t have more than 6-8% of the Linux market these days, but it used to be one of the most-used distros back in the day. Today, many think of Slackware as a true classic, a thought that is often accompanied by a feeling that Slackware is not a user-friendly or an uber-modern Linux distribution. There is some truth in that statement, but there is always the big “But”. Read on for our very positive experience with Slackware 9.1-pre. Update: In less than 24 hours since the RC-1, Slackware 9.1 RC-2 is out.Installation
Slackware 9.1 comes in two CDs and it’s Installation is text-based. People who have used Debian or FreeBSD before they would find themselves accustomed to the theme. The only snag might be that the user will need to use the command line and not extremely user-friendly fdisk application to create partitions for Slackware. A tip: to avoid problems later, select the “full installation,” it will save you some headaches along the way. Slackware successfully found most of my hardware – 2 sound cards, network card, 2 CD/CDRWs, USB, and my PCI Firewire card. However, XFree86 requires manual tweaking by editing its configuration file and adding your monitor specs and graphics card driver to load. Using a mouse with a wheel would also require you to add the ZAxis and IMPS/2 (for PS/2 mice) options on that file.
The great
Gnome 2.4 is included, XFree86 4.3.0, kernel 2.4.22, KDE 3.1.4, Apache, Bind and a whole lot of other software too. Soon you are presented with a nice and modern desktop to work with. Configuring the system is also pretty easy to learn, as Slackware is all about simplicity: its /etc/* setup is pretty easy to learn and understand, while its INIT system is BSD-like.
The packaging system is minimalistic. It does not support dependency resolving, but so far I did not felt that I need any. All packages are coming pre-compiled with some i686 optimizations (Slackware runs minimum on a 486) and usually, all depended .tgz packages are to be found at the same place. Just do an “installpkg *” on the directory you downloaded them, and then you will be ready to fire them up. Getting Java runtime support was extremely easy for example.
For dependency checking and automatic FTP update there is a handy third party utility named Swaret. If you are using Slackware and need to stay current, this is a must have.
The three main strengths of Slackware I see are these:
1. Simplicity. Init scripts, configuration, package installation are all minimalistic and simple.
2. Speed. Together with Gentoo, I think we are looking into the two fastest consumer distros on the planet. Slackware boots in less than 16 seconds on this AthlonXP 1600+.
3. Stability. I think this is the first Linux distribution that I haven’t managed to crash it completely or just its X within 2-3 days of using it.
The not so great
No matter what driver or front end combination I use (alsa, oss and artsd/esd), I can seem to have only a single application that can use the PCM or /dev/DSP at a time (card is a VIA 8233 on board, chipset is an Avance_Logic_ALC200/200P_rev_0). For example, if XMMS is playing something and I load Totem to play something else, I will get errors like:
audio_alsa_out: snd_pcm_open() failed: Device or resource busy
audio_alsa_out: >>> check if another program don’t already use PCM<<<
or
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:597:(snd_pcm_hw_open) open /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p failed: Device or resource busy.
It is somewhat discouraging to see Alsa to still not have iron out these mixer issues at this time and age. When I changed my sound card into a Hoontech/Yamaha Digital-XG YMF-754, the problems went away. I believe that the via82xx Alsa driver does not support advanced mixer capabilities and this is something that needs fixing in my opinion as these onboard VIA sound cards are very wildly used.
Additionally, I would like to see more graphical administration tools to be included on Slackware, e.g. the Gnome System Tools, Gnome-DB, Bluetooth and Wireless utils, phpMyAdmin and PostgreSQL in addition to the existing mySQL package.
Conclusion
Slackware is my new favorite operating system along with FreeBSD, Windows Server 2003 and Mac OS X. It works great as a workstation and a desktop system and I have no doubt that it would do a great server as well.
I have tried more than 10+ different Linux distributions in the past 4 years but I never stuck with any. Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE are too bloated and slow with complex internal structures (however Red Hat evolves faster of the three). Gentoo is way too involved and got bored easily of its long compilation times while Debian is way out of date in many ways (not just packages) for my taste. The ironic part is that my husband, who used to use Slackware when he was studying at the Ecole Polytechnique in France in the ’90s, was always prompting me to try Slackware out, but being so absorbed with the mass’ direction, I was mostly ending up using the well known distros mentioned above when I had this urge to use Linux (I get that from time to time :).
If you are an intermediate/advanced user, you really need to have a look at Slackware’s simple way of doing things. Simplicity and speed is all I am after and while a Unix can never be too simple (as in let’s say, BeOS or Syllable-OS), with Slackware I found a solid Linux OS that just works the way I want it. It could be even more painless though, if the Slackware maintainers realize that times change fast and that the “minimalistic OS nature of 1997” is not the same kind of the “minimalistic OS nature of 2003” and pay more attention in adding hot-plug/automatic support into less mainstream hardware (e.g. firewire/usb drives, bluetooth) and add more admin tools and automation, without of course losing the simplicity and speed that currently Slackware users enjoy.
Installation: 6/10
Hardware Support: 7.5/10
Ease of use: 7/10
Features: 8/10
Credibility: 10/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 8.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Overall: 7.83
You dont have to use fdisk. CFDISK is also available (at least in 9.0). Its VERY easy to use. I wouldnt see any problems using it.
When I was using Slack 8.1 it was the first linux distro that I found I kept on my partition for a long time. Other distro’s I usually formatted.
I also find KDE is rather fast on the latest versions of slackware.
>I also find KDE is rather fast on the latest versions of slackware.
Indeed, KDE apps launch new windows or load very fast on Slackware. Severn/RH9 on the same machine/partition was never as fast.
Sorry for posting twice, If your sound issue only happen w/ XMMS and other Apps, this is a known XMMS problem.
Type the error into google.com/linux and you’ll see many possible solutions.
No, it happened with all apps. No app could share the sound with any other app. It seems to be a limitation of the driver, because the YMF driver did not have the problem.
I find the lack of HP’s wireless tools a big step in the wrong direction. Each day I need iwconfig to get my work done. Yes, I know it probably compiles perfectly on slack but it means that I have to manage updates. etc. FreeBSDs ports (sorry, I tried to resist) makes me feel much more at home.
There are [command line] wireless tools coming with Slackware 9.1 by default. I think they are on ap/ if I am not mistaken.
Wow, those are some nice spam emails in that screenshot of Evolution’s inbox! Maybe you should have chosen a different inbox or something? Nothing like seeing porno spam emails in a distro review!
>Maybe you should have chosen a different inbox or something?
No, that email address is just is just spam really…
I never read it anymore, so please don’t send me to that account.
Good ol’ Slackware has got a new one on the way
How is Slackware’s long-term management and stability compared to Debian for servers? How about for updating/upgrading?
Thanks.
Linux is slower and less stable than windows
My windows box uses about 40 megs of ram to boot, Linux uses about 175 (and Linux is a monolithic kernel)
Linux crashes much more often than windows, way more
The few Apache/MySQL vs IIS/MS SQL tests I have seen have been won (sometimes dominated) by Windows
X is a one size fits all poor implementation at a responsive display server (both Apple and MS are moving to hardware accelerated GUI)
KDE is maybe the only thing on earth more integrated than windows explorer, everything under the sun imbedded into konqueror, it makes it clunky as hell, Nautalus is nearly as bad
Ease of use for the newbie is not as important as ergonomics for powerusers, but Linux has yet to bring an environment to the table that I can efficiently get work done it.
WinXP Pro comes with a 480 meg CD, Mandrake is 3 CD’s and SuSE is 7
NTFS is much more stable than any Linux file system, hard shut down in Linux and watch it fsck your box
Installing software on a Linux system is badly broken, often you end up fixing make files, chasing dependencies, or in situations where you can’t update a library with out breaking other apps, many libraries are not very backwards compatible and someone still has yet to write an installer for Linux. Nullsofts SperPiMP installer for windows is only 498K but such a simple installer has yet to exist for Linux because its design is fundamentally flawed.
Even windows 3.11 had an installer and you can install the 32 bit libraries for it and still run binaries that were compiled on XP, lets see Linux do that
Developers will often use GPL just so they can avoid having to create and test separate packages for the last 3 versions of every major distro, GPL lets someone else do it.
Say what you will of LSB but I can think of no reason to have all 15 or so text editors in seperate directories, where is /apps/texteditors when you need it?
I’ve used slackware in the past (3 yrs. ago or so). Either I’m getting lazy in my old age, don’t have enought time or just spoiled by distros with easy hardware setup. I just don’t see the point of struggling to get sound cards, printers, X settings correct or whatever wireless or USB hardware you may have working.
That’s why I like Knoppix so much. Just plug it in and go.
On the desktop, I want something easy. On the server, I don’t mind spending some time. That’s why lately I’ve been using FreeBSD on the server and Windows on the desktop.
Darren
The reason you are having issues using the soundcard with multiple applications is due to the hardware.
A lot of soundcards these days don’t have multiple channels for output that are multiplexed in hardware. The SB Live is an example of this: I can play something like 32 different sound streams simultaneously.
However, on my T23 with i810 audio, I only have 1 output channel so I need to use ESD or aRTSd or someother userspace tool that applications connect to in order to multiplex the single output channel.
In short, configure XMMS to use ESD output and have Totem do the same if it doesn’t by default.
The package thing is a MAJOR hurdle that desktop Linux faces. You can’t just keep building all the software for every version of every distro and just adding to the number of CDR’s. Usually the reason I upgrade my distros all the time has little to do with the distro itself and more to do with getting the updated packages bundled with it. Lack of backwards compatibility often means updating libraries and breaking other stuff that depends on them. I would love to see a statistic on how many man hours this wastes. All sources seem to point to Linux getting much bigger in size (kernel, KDE, Gnome, packages). Many OSS coders like to add cool features, but going through old code and fixing it is much less a priority for most. In its current state, Linux is heading at becoming a maintenance nightmare. Not to mention that most Linux distros seem to agree that throwing all the crap in a handful of /bin /usr/bin /sbin /usr/sbin style directories is the best place for it.
My Red Hat install uses over 200 megs of RAM just after booting. After using it for a while it climbs over 400. Many would say that the idea of storing more in RAM is smarter for speed reasons. But 200+ megs of RAM just to boot is a hell of allot of code just to boot the system. KDE is slow and k-apps like to crash on my computer (must be hardware!). Linux chokes when it’s improperly shut down and there is a long list of bugs. Linux is stuck in perpetual beta.
Many people think Linux will take over the world, I think it will implode.
>In short, configure XMMS to use ESD output and have Totem do the same if it doesn’t by default.
Did you not read the previous comment? The problem is NOT with XMMS, it is with all sound apps, they just don’t share the sound.
> Did you not read the previous comment? The problem is NOT with XMMS, it is with all sound apps, they just don’t share the sound.
Maybe you didn’t read _MY_ comment fully. Your soundcard only has one output channel in hardware.
The first app to get it will have the sound until it closes the device.
If ESD or ARTS isn’t the first app then you are out of luck. Similarly, since ESD is configured by default to release the device if no clients are using it then XMMS (which is configured by default to do OSS output I believe) will have control over the device.
This is coming from someone using Slackware 9.1 on his T23 with a cheap soundcard with one output channel using ALSA drivers, XMMS using ALSA output because ESD has synchronization issues with the video card and ESD for everything else.
>In short, configure XMMS to use ESD
It did not work with ESD, it was producing no sound. As I wrote in the article, I tried ALL combinations, it just doesn’t work with anything else other than ALSA or OSS (and in both cases won’t release the device).
Right now I can not go test it anymore, as I said I installed a Yamaha PCI card and I am all fine.
> The first app to get it will have the sound until it closes the device.
The VIA8233C does support multiple pcm streams/multi-channel output but as is stated in the review it’s not working hence ESD and ARTS will somewhat fix that.
> it’s not working hence ESD and ARTS will somewhat fix that.
It didn’t. As I said in the article, I DID try all combinations.
i have heard that gentoo is like slackware in steroids.
what do they have in common? is gentoo better than slackware?
thank you for your comments…
– 2501
ps: i used to run ydl 3.0 and it was great. what about gentoo running in my ibook???
> There are [command line] wireless tools coming with Slackware 9.1 by
> default. I think they are on ap/ if I am not mistaken.
I’m just on http://ftp.slackware.com right now in ap and I assume you mean the ifhp package. If that’s wireless tools, I might just give slackware another try
Were you sure ESD was running? You may have to start it manually, I doubt XMMS (or other player) would initialize it.
Also, have you used ALSA or just the default OSS? I use to have those problems with my Audigy(emu10k1) until I switched to ALSA and everything’s been peachy.
I also had the problem of not being able to have 2 sounds being played at the same time on Slackware. I think i fixied it but changing the permissions of /dev/dsp and /dev/dsp1 to something like 777. Hopefully that works.
> It didn’t. As I said in the article, I DID try all combinations.
I believe you did, but you’ve run in to a driver problem not a Slackware problem which isn’t clear in the review.
I don’t recall if you checked your /etc/modules.conf to make sure that OSS compatibility was enabled.. but as a user you shouldn’t have to do that. That’s a Slackware problem, but it is also another factor in the soundcard’s correct use.
Finally, did you know that GNOME 2.4 includes ALSA Mixer Control in the Multimedia menu? Try that to see if you have advanced mixer information as the default volume control applet doesn’t do all that nifty stuff.
I liked your review, very accurate and honest. I’ve been using Slackware since 94-95 and things are getting much better.
Sorry, ignore the post above. I was thinking of something else. hehe
Does anybody know where I can download Slackware 9.1 (RC or current) CD-ROM images? I need to do a clean install, don’t have a floppy disk drive, and Slackware 9.0 doesn’t support my hard disk controller.
>Were you sure ESD was running?
What do you think? I was running GNome with all sounds ON.
And yes, permissions were just fine.
>Finally, did you know that GNOME 2.4 includes ALSA Mixer Control in the Multimedia menu?
Argh! Of course!
People, please stop replying on this issue and giving me such advices, I even discussed the problem with Patrick from Slackware. Rest assured, we did our homework.
I use linux for only about 2 years. I started with mandrake, then headed on to redhat. Neither of them was so convenient to use as Slackware. Mandrake and redhat are so overloaded with it’s utilities and X system trying to make it more user-friendly… While Slackware uses classic (true) linux structure, with no WM selector screen on boot (it’s only an example). Only with tris distro I got to now linux as a respective OS. f.e. now I at least know where all my config files are, I don’t have to use no stupid configuration tool which usualy hides a few options from me…
Looking forward to 9.1 final version.
If nothing changed you are talking about tool for hp jetdirect card.
nifotc is Correct – The VIA sound chips do not support multiple input streams. When I looked at this a couple of months ago (on the very same chip) there was an argument raging on the lists as to if channel mixing should be handled at the driver or user space level.
Since I’ve got an SB Live! which handles multiple channels in hardware, I stopped caring.
My feeling is that it should be handled at the driver level. ESD/Arts do nothing for me (unless I’m running a remote client), yet KDE / GNOME wanting to run them by default. So with a default setup, this means that userspace level software is emulating hardware. Stupid. It would be much better for the driver to handle mixing. This would mean that h/w mix cards could do it in hardware, and software mix card
can do it in software, without having more complexity added to the system. For those who, for whatever reason, don’t like software mixing on single channel cards, this could be turned off during compiling.
This is however, an ALSA issue, not a Slackware issue. ESD and Arts sound like their broken – this is the beta after all.
RE Linux will implode by none:
It sounds like your major issue is with Redhat and it’s package system. Try something debian based or source (gentoo maybe) based? Things should work a lot cleaner. I’ve been running Debian unstable with large amounts of upgrading for the past couple of years off the same installation – and apart from the occasional problem with unstable packages (my bad), things have been pretty clean.
As for memory usage, Linux will use whats avaliable. This isn’t an issue. You may also discover on closer inspection that the ‘200 MB’ is shared. Example: Five programs use 5 MB each, plus 15 MB of shared memory. The total used is 40 NB. The total reported is 100 MB.
As for KDE – I’ve heard reports that it is essentially broken under Redhat. If you prefer KDE to GNOME, Redhat is probably the wrong distrobution to be using.
> If nothing changed you are talking about tool for hp jetdirect card.
If that’s the case, I wonder which package in “ap” was the wireless tools Eugenia was talking about. I guess I’ll just wait until the official 9.1 release and do a complete installation. If iwconfig works at the command line, I’ll be one happy man.
Eugenia,
Have you tried updating your drivers? Is your filesystem intact?
Well, I’m running RC1 on to machines. Slackware RC1 was released on the 22, and during the last week slackware did go trough changes (btw, I saw your name on the changelog).
The review is cool and very to the point and objective.
Yestarday I got my hands on a SuSE 8.2 copy and I’ve installed it. After 3 hours of pain I’ve removed it. I don’t wanna write a review about how bad it sux because SuSE would sue me:)
Btw: SuSE is the biggest distro that was forked from Slackware, but its a bad fork, nothing from Slacks simplicity and structure has been maintained in it, and its also totaly nonstandard (if you compare it to other rpm based distros).
Sorry about all the confusion. HP’s wireless tools (iwconfig… etc) is located in the slackware/n directory in a package named wireless-tools-26. Looks like slackware is in fact on the ball.
I have slack 9 installed on a box here and after all I’ve heard about Slackware’s “weak” package management I have to say this is not the case at all. Swaret takes Slack package management to new levels. The latest version of swaret have real dependency checking and is a real easy app to use. Now keeping your Slackware up to date is almost too easy. I urge everyone interested in Slackware to check out swaret.
Dropline Gnome is another wicked slack oriented project. If you are used to using the Gnome that comes with Slackware or even if you are a KDE user try the latest dropline Gnome release. It has actually, in the latest release, move me to being a Gnome user. With Dropline Gnome keeping up to dat is almost too easy as the dropline-installer does it all for you.
I’ve used so many distros I can’t count, but now finally found one I can live with. it just works.
None?? Linux implode?? I guess the city of Munich, the u.s.navy, the recently announced other cities in germany, the alliance of japan china and korea, and Ford Motor Company pushing into linux adoption and development is a sure sign of imminent OS implosion. NOT. As for stability.. my junkbox running slack9+dropline gnome is rock steady. And when an app crashes it has NEVER taken the system down with it. Remember that when you reach for the power button after a bsod leaves yer machine a humming power drain in your home.
I also started with Mdk, than moved to RH.. and than at the urgings of a friend I overcame all the negative hype that i had heard about slack and installed 9. It was an absolute breeze. After doing a bit of googling I had my hp printer up and running with CUPS flawlessly. So kudos to the slack team and mr.volkering. I love your work and slack will always be my fave..for its ease of install, speed and panache. And also because running slack has taught me more about Linux in 4 months than a year with the rpm based distros(no flame intended).
>None?? Linux implode??
I suggest you do not reply to flamebaiters, but ignore them.
Did you try updating your drivers? Is your filesystem intact? You may want to have a backup of your kernel, if you do a make with any newer drivers.
Using rh quite long but so now, some problems s comming up and I like to switch to slack. I like to set up and use LVM but not sure how to configure on slack. Any ideas please.
“nifotc is Correct – The VIA sound chips do not support multiple input streams. When I looked at this a couple of months ago (on the very same chip) there was an argument raging on the lists as to if channel mixing should be handled at the driver or user space level.”
I used to have a Via KT400/8235 based system, it used the southbridge 8235 onboard sound with an AC97 ALC650 chip. It was able to do 4 sound channels at once so perhaps it is either the older 8233 or AC97 200 chipset that is at fault. Certainly not all Via chips are limited to only one channel.
BTW – Software mixing is not done at the driver level for any card (afaik) due to a general decree that no extra unnecessary processing be done in kernel space. However, alsa does have new software mixing support in libasound, which is called dmix. I don’t know if anything actually uses it yet though.
If you don’t want us to reply to them.. mod them down.
I’m sitting here typing this from my wonderful slackware box smiling and waiting for 9.1
Eugenia,
Does the issue you have experienced with Slackware occur with say redhat 9?
Debian uber alles!
just wondering…. it came with OO.o 1.1? final? coz I didn’t see that in the changelogs, and don’t see 1.1 final yet anywhere.
No, I installed the RC-2 myself, it was painless.
Chris Cheney – I hadn’t considered that. A libary based thing is probably the next best thing. The reason I don’t like userspace things is due to the tendancy for xyz or abc lib to things slightly differently, and this screw everything else up.
On the VIA chip level – the board I have/had with the VIA chip is a bit older than yours – KT133 of some vintage.
lspci reports a VT82C686 AC97, on a VT8363/8365 bridge.
I’ll have do a bit more looking into this dmix thing. I know there are several other people with single chan cards who would appreciate this.
“I am literally having a blast”
I’ve noticed that people (especially Americans and the US media) use the word “literally” to emphasize something, and unless the definition has changed in America, it means just the opposite.
It really annoys me when words are used incorrectly, but I’m not too sure why. Other people have mentioned it to me as well.
Literally: “actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy: The city was literally destroyed.”
Setting up XFree86 is extremely easy in Slackware. When you boot into a freshly installed system, just run
xfree86setup
from the shell prompt.
I agree that Slackware’s attraction is in stability and simplicity. Swaret and Checkinstall are nice new additions. However, I disagree with the opinion that Debian has outdated software. I installed Debian Sid through Morphix and it has very up-to-date software.
I have been running 9.1Beta for a while, and it runs really great! I bought the last few releases, last week I decided to take a subscription to support Patrick V. and Slackware Inc.
Happy Slacking 🙂
Last time distros were compared according to their speed, Gentoo finished dead last behind Mandrake and Debian.
> Setting up XFree86 is extremely easy in Slackware. When you boot into
> a freshly installed system, just run
> xfree86setup
> from the shell prompt.
I’d recommend setting up X with /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config -textmode as this presents you with an easy ncurses driven setup without the need for graphics mode, hence autodetection.
> However, I disagree with the opinion that Debian has outdated
> software. I installed Debian Sid through Morphix and it has very up
> to-date software.
If you’re prepared to run a system with horendous (for lack of a better word) instability problems, debian sid is one possible solution. Stable is the only viable solution for the real world IMHO and the ‘HOs of many others. As far as distros based on the 2.2 kernel go, debian comes at the top of the list. In some server and embedded systems, debian is top notch. It’s just a shame that it isn’t a little more with the times (in stable). I would be willing to tolerate old development/productivity software if it came with up to date drivers.
Just my two Australian cents.
SuSE is and never was a fork of slackware. In the early nineties SuSE sold translated slackware disc’s. After that, they used Jurix as the base for their distro and pretty soon they had their own non-forked distro.
Windows is not more stable than Linux, when people like you say “Linux krashed”, I bet it’s not Linux(=the kernel of your GNU-system) that krash, it’s more likly XFree, your WM or another application. Just kill the app that krashed and you see it’s not Linux.
hmmm a blast eh? hope it’s not msblast lol thanks I’ll be here all week
I Have dabbled with Linux for a few years on and off. Tried most of the larger Distro’s, and also FreeBSD. Of them all (not bashing the others) Slackware and FreeBSD were alot easier for me to “grasp”. To clarify a couple points: when you use a full journaled file system e.g. JFS if you walk up to the running system and hit the power off switch, powering it back up is no more likely to cause a the dreaded “fsck-go take a coffee break boot time” than a Win2k machine is likely to give you a “scandisk” (assuming NTFS). JFS has a method and mode of disk checking that is Extremely Fast. Not saying others dont, only that I run my Slack 9 box on JFS and have been VERY pleased with its boot speed, overall speed, and rock solid stability. I even dual booted Win2k / Slack 9 and ran the game Never Winter Nights: system has 896 ram and is a P3-933 with GF 2 video and SBLive sound. Believe it or not in actual gaming play with ALOT of spells going off and sound on full the Slack box was Notably smoother. Scenes that turned Win2k into a slide show, only made Slack 9 hiccup a bit and merrily march along. Disk access was nearly non existant with Slack, windows disk access was constant. Hope this gives a few small insights into Performace.
Migod. I’ve never seen such an obvious troll.
I could go through everything, and explain why your points are wrong, or invalid, but I really can’t be bothered, since it’s unlikely you’ll take any notice anyway.
So I’ll some it up in a few simple words.
You are Wrong. Now Go Away.
(Capitalization intentional)
Eugenia wrote:
Indeed, KDE apps launch new windows or load very fast on Slackware. Severn/RH9 on the same machine/partition was never as fast.
Hoi Eugenia,
Download kernel-2.6.0-test5 and patch it with 2.6.0-test5-mm4.bz2 and you will have a TURBO desktop 🙂
groetjes,
Rintek
“Just kill the app that krashed and you see it’s not Linux.”
That’s right but usually suits don’t care (and rightly so!) if it’s the kernel or the application which crashes. Productivity is the victim in both cases, and it’s something which can be measured in dollars. What matters is the stability of the whole system.
I am very interested in giving Slackware a try. I tried it briefly during 7.x, but that was ages ago and I got scared and went back to RedHat. Now after having used Gentoo, Debian and FreeBSD for a long time, I thing it’s time to give Slack another go. I just can’t decide whether to do it *NOW* with 9.1 RC2 or wait until the final release…
If I go ahead now, will I be able to painlessly update to the final 9.1 release ?
I see Evolution in your screenshot’s. Do you installed the packages from 9.0 package or are there any native 9.1 packages avaible?
If you’re prepared to run a system with horendous (for lack of a better word) instability problems, debian sid is one possible solution.
This is rubbish. What Debian calls unstable is what most other systems calls ‘up to date’. By Debian’s standards, a system that hasn’t undergone a prolonged freeze with thorough testing and bugfixing just isn’t ‘stable’. So when you point your finger at Debian Unstable and claim that it has ‘horendous instability problems’ whereas other systems that are just as up-to-date if not more so (for instance Debian’s unstable branch still hasn’t upgraded to OpenSSH 3.7 because “3.7 includes a complete replacement PAM implementation and isn’t appropriate for a hurried release into Debian.”, but has instead backported fixes. Within hours, of course.) are somehow magically stable, you’re being fooled by semantics. In fact, Debian’s mandatory system and packaging policy http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ makes the system far more stable than most things out there. And I’m also pretty sure that there are more desktop users of Debian Unstable than there are of Slackware or FreeBSD.
That said, there are two issues that give rise to ‘instability’ in Debian Unstable. The first is when a package depends another package that is in the pipeline but but has not yet entered the Debian repository. This can render a package uninstallable for a few hours or perhaps a few days.
The other is when important pieces of the system infrastructure is being upgraded to a new major version, like the libc or GCC. When this happens, a note is sent out on the Debian announce mailing list advising people who value stability to not do an ‘apt-get upgrade’ for a few days. For those who are caught unaware, such a transition might cause some pain, for most of us it causes no problems at all.
I’ve been running Debian ‘unstable’ since late ’99, and I strongly suspect that most people who have been using Debian for a long period of time are doing the same.
As far as distros based on the 2.2 kernel go, debian comes at the top of the list.
Based on the 2.2 kernel? You can easily boot and install a 2.4 kernel with Debian Woody. It is one of several kernels on the boot-cd. The 2.2 kernel is just the default.
I have a Matrox Millenium 4MB PCI graphics card and I didn’t have to configure anything, slackware autodetected it and set up my Xserver.
The only thing was that the refresh rate was 75Hz and I changed it to 85Hz with a program that Slack has in the KDE Control Center that I haven’t seen in other distro’s.
My hardware is a bit old, but slack 9.0 detects and sets up everything. To show how old here is a hardware list.
AMD k6-2 450Mhz
ASUS P5A-B Mobo (ALi M5229)
Graphics card as mentioned above.
40GB Seagate Barracuda ATA III
Microsoft Intellimouse 2 button wheelmouse(USB or PS/2 adapter)
SB Vibra 16
As you can see nothing exotic but all gets automatically detected. Something I use to complain about with 8.1 was that it would automatically detect my hardware. But now with hotplug, and whatever Patrick have done with 9.x it all works.
Thanks Patrick.
I’ve tried Slackware 9, and really tried to like it. However, has font support in 9.1 been improved? I suspect that post-RH8/9 has spoiled me with regards to fonts in Linux, but Slack9 just seemed a bit on the ugly side. Any improvements? Oh, and has anyone noticed if the Audigy is supported in a fresh install, or do you have to use Alsa, or compile the sourceforge module into a fresh kernel? Slack seems to be one of the few (thankfully) major distros left that you have to tinker with to get that card to work with.
Anyhow, looks nifty, must say I’ve for a while admired the whole philosophy behind Slack…on the Unix end of things that is, what the heck is that Church of the Sub-genius stuff??! Patrick’s not into that is he?
Plenty of things to pick on here, but I’ll just touch on a couple of points.
A tip: to avoid problems later, select the “full installation,” it will save you some headaches along the way.
Really? So you installed it, got into problems because you didn’t do a full install, decided to start over and do a full installation and then ignore the part that gave you headaches in the review?
Speed: 8.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Uhu. And this is with the vanilla no-preempt no-lowlatency kernel from kernel.org, right?
I find a lot of your writing on this site to be very coloured by how you wish things were, as opposed to how things really are, and this ‘review’ is a good example.
Hey, no doubt I’ll be the one to get modded down, but the moderation system here still needs some work.
Trolls are still slipping through. I know about “alternate opinions” and such, but flamebait like “linux imploding” should be shot down with a mod stick.
I am very glad to see that Slackware is _not_
“for geeks and developers” any more 😉
I bet that’s what you’ve been reading when you googled for suse’s history. Jurix is like a goost, butI’ve googled for it and it sounds like slackware. In fact Jurix was a slackware distro with rpm as a package manager. I’ve been using slackware for years, and I saw many things that are still there. Take a look into /etc/rc.d…Its SysV but then again, look closer…
On the other hand, the way SuSE is made and giving the fact that its an rpm based distro its not compatible at all with RedHat… SuSE has its merits I agree, but the way they are distributing it, I would expect more qualitty. I think they confuse the Linux cround with the Windows croud.
what the heck is that Church of the Sub-genius stuff??! Patrick’s not into that is he?
Seriously, it is a joke
.
i finally got around to looking at your screenshots, Eugunia you sure get plenty of spam, you know there are filters for that…
You’re right.
My cleanly installed Gentoo, running X and Fluxbox, takes up about 24megs.
At the minute, I’m running Gaim (with 2 chat windows), Mozilla (with 4 windows open), Sylpheed-Claws, X, Eterm (running irssi), 4 aterms (3 bittorrent downloads, and mp3blaster), Fluxbox and Fluxter (pager), and consuming 217megs RAM.
Just running a freshly booted XP takes up about 250megs on my machine.
I have 1024megs RAM anyway, so it doesn’t really matter in the end, but the troll that posted the original artical is either mis-informed, has a crappy setup, or is just flamebaiting.
Just a note…
My Debian stable (Woody) box boots up to spot-on 30MB ram used (as reported by free -m), with a Gnome 1.4 desktop. That’s with several server daemons running: apache, samba, jabber, CUPS and webmin. That leaves me 994 MB RAM to use for MY purposes.
Debian stable – fast, clean, secure, small and ultra-stable. I’ve used a lot of distros, and settled on Debian for it’s software/security management.
I FreeBSD is pretty much the same as the Debian box you mentioned. KDE 3.1.2 with all the bells and whistles going doesn’t consume as much as Windows XP. I always find it funny how there was ment to be a review process to stop this, however, now we have the reviewers in on this whole “lets incite a holy war between the two communities”.
” I have tried more than 10+ different Linux distributions in the past 4 years but I never stuck with any. Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE are too bloated and slow with complex internal structures (however Red Hat evolves faster of the three). Gentoo is way too involved and got bored easily of its long compilation times while Debian is way out of date in many ways (not just packages) for my taste.”
I have been searching high and low for “the distro.” The other day I stumbled across a slackware 9.0 disk that I burned right after it came out, but had never used. I was always kind of intimidated by slackware. It just seemed so archaic, and there didn’t seem to be enough “packages” for it. However after giving it a try, all I can say is WOW! This is what I’ve been looking for. I’ve been very close to giving up on linux, and have tried a few times, but as Eugenia said, I get the urge to use linux sometimes, so I keep coming back.
My experiences with all of the distros she listed are exactly the same as hers. Redhat/Suse/Mandrake all suck (redhat is the best out of all of them though). Debian is good in theory. If there could a more up to date “stable” version I would use it, but you either make the choice of running old crusty software, or running unstable. And please no one chime in with, “I’ve been running debian unstable since 1967 and I’ve never had a crash.” I’ve tried it out, had it running great for around a month and one day did an apt-get upgrade and gaim wouldn’t work. After spending 2 hours trying to figure it out, I decided I’d had enough of debian unstable.
Another thing about debian is I’ve never really been successful in compiling my own kernel for some reason. I haven’t had any trouble in any other distro.
Gentoo isn’t much better. Portage is also good in theory. The problem is, first off to get a working system it takes at least two days. (NO I WON’T USE STAGE 3 W/ GRP!!! THE ATHLON XP VERSION CHOKES EVERYTIME I TRY TO INSTALL GNOME). So I decided I was going to give it one more shot starting from stage 1. Two days later I had gnome and everything up. However, I go to try install XMMS, and it tells me it needs to uninstall gnome panel 2.2 and install 1.4. I’m just like whatever, and I booted into XP because I didn’t want to deal with it.
Later on I think, “lets give slack a try.” Dropline Gnome 2.4 just came out, and I’ve been itching to try 2.4 out. 2 hours later (yes hours not days). I have the most amazing desktop I’ve ever laid eyes on. Dropline is the rolls royce of gnome distributions. And wow rc scripts, they make life so much simpler.
I really think that all of the rpm distros and even debian are guilty of creating FUD about compiling your own software. They kind of make it sound like you can’t install anything unless its already built into a nice neat rpm that depends on fifty other rpms. Yesterday I compiled and installed galeon 1.3.9, gnucash 1.87, rhythmbox, ogle, and mplayer. It was so freaking EASY! I had never really compiled software on my own before because I was afraid I’d break something. OH, and checkinstall is your friend! Instead of running “make install”, you run checkinstall and it installs a nice neat slackpack and gives you a copy of it. All I can say is my reliance on package management is over. Even the best of the best are not as good as doing things your self.
Do yourself a faver and give Slack a try! If you’re new to linux and don’t feel you have what it takes to run slackware, great! Don’t waste your time with other toy distros. Go to the slackware store, preorder slack 9.1 and also get the slackware essentials. You’ll be glad you did. (sorry that sounded like a commercial, honestly I’m not getting paid by Patrick Volkerding.)
I completely agree. I’ve always tried Linux but kept going back to FreeBSD because I couldn’t stand the crappy package management. The ports system on FreeBSD is bloody awsome. Clean, concise and to the point. No unneed frills, just the operating system.
Slackware is the same thing. Its an operating system, plain and simple. It is there to work and not to try and thrill end users with frills and nice flashy, unworkable graphical installers and tweakers.
Anybody have an unoffical ISO of RC2 yet?
I used RedHat 7.x for a long time, but I always had X configuration problems, when I switched to 7.3, those problems became unmanageable (snow on my screen no matter what resolution / refresh I chose.) I switched to Slack and it worked right out of the box. I’m glad to see Slack get its props here.
I recently upgraded to 9.1 and was impressed and disappointed at the same time. Impressed at how much it has progressed since I first used 4.0. Disappointed because it is getting too easy to use. Seems to be fairly stable.
What you’re saying here just defies all logic to the non-slack-initiated reader.
1) Installation and configuration
I don’t really care that it’s a text based intaller, but some previous note pointed out how easy it was to setup X, just run xfree86setup from bash? If you have to find each and every seperate setup tool for each software, the dist has done NOTHING to simplify for the user. If you have to bloat the system by installing everything, you come down with 0 points in this category.
2) Software up to date?
Here, it seems slack scores a full pot.
3) Software management.
If there is something a dist should do it is to bundle software from developers and make it easy to install for the user. Without dependancy resolvers you obviously have to install everything. Well, what if I don’t have the space? If you want to remake that old 486 to a firewall, you need a simple way to install just the packages you need and no other.
0 out of 5 again.
(Having to install all packages? How much more bloated than that does it get?!)
5) Stability.
Well, there is no way that one can say anything about stability in 2 days. You say that every other linux version you’ve tried has crashed within 2 days? How did you do that?! I havn’t been able to crash even mdk cooker (which is supposed to be unstable of the unstable) in that short a time.
3 out of 5.
6) Hardware detection and support.
From your review Id place it at about 2 out of 5.
It feels like I could go on for ever. What I read your review it feels like watching a kid talking about their favourite pet. The downsides are not that important, and the pros are all that matter, and they matter ALOT! Had it been mandrake you reviewed, you would have put two pages of agony upon the problem you had with XMMS.
You end your review with stating that this is your new favorite distro? Personally I think you’ve never had any other, and with the attitude in the article, you never will.
From the notes posted here, I don’t think anyone will see the post. It feels like some sect working their way to a frenzy. This distribution is a small step from doing everything by hand together with an installer, and if that’s what you want, fine. If you want to be able to install the system in 15 mins and already have most things configured the way you want them, look elsewhere.
You can make your own ISOs quite easily… check /slackware-current/isolinux/README on your Slack mirror of choice.
First off you really don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’ve ever visited this site before you would know that Eugiena has run just about every distro there is, including the *BSD’s.
The point of slackware is to give control to the user. If you don’t want to worry about configuring things, by all means use mandrake or redhat, heck just use windows xp.
However, when you use a redhat ar a mandrake or similar, you start to see that there are obvious limitations. They want you to confine yourself to using packages from whatever package manager they have chosen. Sometimes packages break things, sometimes your RPM database gets corrupted.
With slackware you don’t have to worry about these things. Let me tell you something…. dependencies are not as big of a problem as many people think. RPM’s require other rpms becuase thats what they were built against, but if you build your own software on a system like slack, most likely you aren’t going to have to worry about that. When you do your ./configure, it will tell you if you are missing anything.
I’ll give you an example. One reason why I was hesitant to use slack was it didn’t have gnucash. I hunted around for a package for 9.0, and I couldn’t find any. What did I end up doing? I built it my self. The only problem was slack 9 did away with gnome 1.4 /gtk1 libraryies which gnucash requires (hopefully they update to gtk2 soon). I just pulled them off of the slack 8.1 install and I was fine. Try doing that with an rpm distro. I guarentee it would have puked. It’s just too easy to make an rpm distro break. If you break slack, you will most likely know how to fix it, because you’ve done everything yourself, so you know the system.
Just give it a try, you will like it. It takes a little bit of reading, but in the end it’s worth it.
1) Whereis iso ??!!! http://www.linuxiso.org
2) Not for geeks ??!!! I don´t think any Linux is only for geeks. I have used Slack for a long time, but now I had to say Debian is my choice, no matter why. For any ComputerInTheBox buyer, even WindowsXp is anoying to install and configure. Try install a Win98 in a new FloppyLess PC !
3) Kernel compile/patch/update/customize, is so simple that thereisnt any computer in my home with a same one, even the Notebook has his own customized.
4) For those wants install and use without any customize action: Yes! Slack could be more chosen. Its is perfect.
5) apt-get with unstable debian is not perfect, but is so cool aways have the latest KDE and other stuff 1st than everybody.
When it really gets down to it, there’s really little to know difference among the Linux distros. No, slackware isn’t any faster than SUSE, and Red Hat isn’t any slower than Lindows, neither is Mandrake slickier than Knoppix, or whatever.
So, what makes them different. Well, just two features
i). An easy init system and
ii). A great package management system.
Based on my above criteria, you can’t go wrong with two and only two distros. On the part of binary distros, debian comes out at the pinnacle. On behalf the source distros, please put your hands together for gentoo.
Please rethink using any distro that forces you upgrade or update only through biannual and annual CDs. The idea alone is repugnant. Having said that, and based on the above mentioned criteria, 95% of all other Linux distros are a bunch of crap.
Undoubtedly, this comment will generate avalanche of flames. But I’m pleased the internet is an avenue where opinions are shared, analyzed and critized, no matter how silly they may be. Does slackware provide me with my pertinent features? Ummm…no.
1) Installation and configuration
I don’t really care that it’s a text based intaller, but some previous note pointed out how easy it was to setup X, just run xfree86setup from bash? If you have to find each and every seperate setup tool for each software, the dist has done NOTHING to simplify for the user. If you have to bloat the system by installing everything, you come down with 0 points in this category.
3) Software management.
If there is something a dist should do it is to bundle software from developers and make it easy to install for the user. Without dependancy resolvers you obviously have to install everything. Well, what if I don’t have the space? If you want to remake that old 486 to a firewall, you need a simple way to install just the packages you need and no other.
0 out of 5 again.
That will happen if you don’t know what packages needed to build a firewall server, or desktop system, or web server, or mail server and so on.
If we know packages we need we will install those and forget about the rest. No need to install everything.
I think this is why administrator is needed.
Slackware is never intended to become next generation desktop system. New user to linux that don’t know everything will not install firewall, don’t you think?
2 -.manc.broadband.ntl.com
You really donot know what you are talking about.
Most of this 200 Mb used for page cashe and disk buffer cache.
Just run “free” command and you will see. You even can
paste here output and people will explain that digits mean.
Please rethink using any distro that forces you upgrade or update only through biannual and annual CDs. The idea alone is repugnant. Having said that, and based on the above mentioned criteria, 95% of all other Linux distros are a bunch of crap.
I don’t think I know distro that forced its users to upgrade only once or twice a year? Name it please?
And about claim about good distro, please explain what kind of :
– easy init system, and
– great package management system
you think is good.
There are several flavour of distros, because there are several kind of taste about “good” and “bad”. And we can pick one the most fitted with us.
In the review:
A tip: to avoid problems later, select the “full installation,” it will save you some headaches along the way.
| | 3) Software management.
| | If there is something a dist should do it is to bundle
| | software from developers and make it easy to install for
| | the user. Without dependancy resolvers you obviously have
| | to install everything. Well, what if I don’t have the
| | space? If you want to remake that old 486 to a firewall,
| | you need a simple way to install just the packages you
| | need and no other.
| | 0 out of 5 again.
|
|
| That will happen if you don’t know what packages needed to
| build a firewall server, or desktop system, or web server,
| or mail server and so on.
| If we know packages we need we will install those and
| forget about the rest. No need to install everything.
|
Exactly how difficult is it to *not* do the “full installation”? I don’t want Gnome/KDE, just icewm. Will the installer provide that smoothly?
About dependancies:
skaeight, you know that ./configure is a way of handling dependancies, right? Even though it is at a development level, looking for header files and the like, it still checks if you have the packages needed to build the software.
When you build software, you link the binary to libraries to use functions within them. You don’t distribute all libraries that you’ve linked your software against because it would be reduntant, it would mean that every gnome software would have to be bundeled with the gnome libraries, glibc, etc. Instead you have packages that contain these libraries, so that you only have to install them once.
These dependancies doesn’t have much to do with RPM or deb but they are inherent in the way one makes software on the linux platform. The differance is that mandrake and debian lets a piece of software work out what other packages needed to install, while slack lets the user fetch whatever is necessary.
About locked within the rpm database.
One is not locked with the pre-packaged system with an rpm or deb based distro anymore than a slack user is. I can download and compile gnucash on my mandrake system if I wanted, now urpmi gnucash is all i need to do.
There are also simple commands that let you rebuild you database incase you have destroyed it.
As for configuration, you cannot deny the fact that sometimes software is needed to configure software, like the XFree config that slack uses. If you were against that, then you would always write every configuration file from scratch in vi. Many distros have improved upon these configuration software and put in autodetection etc. This is not a BAD ™ thing. This is mainly because after this software has terminated, you can edit the configuration file it has made anyway you like. Hence, you don’t lose control with good configuration software, you just make a better config file to start working upon (if you even need to work on it).
As for knowing what you’re building:
I agree with you. If you can substitute for the dependancy-resolving software, good for you. My question is merely that how can the lack of such features make it the best distro on the face of the earth? Reviews like this makes friends of mine, who have very little linux experience, call me when they have problems installing gaim. If you know exactly what you want to do, and you want to do it by hand, then slack is maybe the best distro, but for most other things, mandrake and debian are legues ahead of slack.
As for the need of administrators:
Yes, they are needed, but to what extent they should be needed is another issue. Should one need a certified admin just to install a piece of software? Sure it is fun to say that you have done it the hard way, and that you’ve mastered linux, but is it really necessary? By the same logic it would be a good thing to write the whole system by yourself.
Did any one use Dropline and swaret?
I use Slack 9.0 updated with dropline and recently by swaret, I think it´s amazing the work dropline and swaret do, but after all the updates, my system is almost as unstable as windows98 🙁 Nautilus 2.4 it´s crashing after a drag an drop gnumeric 2 sometime crash just after open it, Evolution 1.4 can´t send my mails (maybe is my account I don´t now), abiword 2 crash after a I paste a word, copy from a “Msdoc file”
Did I made a mistake mixing dropline and swaret?
Did anyone do that (mix dropline-swaret)?
Eugenia thanks for all your reviews and point of views!
First off,
Anonymous Coward (IP: —.vic.bigpond.net.au) wrote:
“”I am literally having a blast”
I’ve noticed that people (especially Americans and the US media) use the word “literally” to emphasize something, and unless the definition has changed in America, it means just the opposite.
It really annoys me when words are used incorrectly, but I’m not too sure why. Other people have mentioned it to me as well.
Literally: “actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy: The city was literally destroyed.””
As an American I have to ask, Did you read what you wrote?
“I am literally having a blast” means (to this American);
“I am really, without exaggeration, having a blast, no really, I’m not kidding, exaggerating, or making this up, I really am having a blast.”
So how exactly does that mean exactly the opposite? The next time you hear someone use the word “literally”, as the person you quoted did, substitute your definition “actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy” in its place. That’s what they meant.
Now, having said that, I burned the Slackware 9.0 ISO meaning to replace my RedHat install, but got tied up in Windows land for the last couple of months (VB/VBA/Access development, don’t ask
. Now that I finally have the time to install Slack, I hear about 9.1 rc. *sigh* Should I install 9.0 anyway and then upgrade, install a rc, or wait until 9.1 goes gold? Suggestions anyone?
Thanks in advance,
someone247356
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
I completely understand that ./configure checks for dependencies. My point is that ./configure; make && make install is not hard to do and does all of the dependency checking that is required. Why do I need another layer of complexity added into the mix? I’ve always had some stupid problem with every distro I’ve used up until slack, and it usually came down to package management getting in my way. Whe even bother with it?
As for as configuring X, no you don’t have to write the whole configuration by hand in vi (i prefer vim). What I do is run XFree86 -configure as root. It plops a XFree86Config file in /root. All you have to do is add the refresh rates of your monitor and your preferred resoltuions. OH and “ZAxisMapping” “4 5” if you have scroll mouse. Yes I know not everyone wants to do this, or knows how. My point is, just because slack doesn’t have a gui interface built into the installer to configure x, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. Just RTFM as some might say.
Learn about your XFree86Config file, learn about your entire /etc folder. From my experience at least, changing one value in a text file in vim is a lot easier than trying to work with mandrakes half assed control center. Once again not everyone cares to do so and that’s fine. But I dont know how you can say debian and mandrake are light years ahead of slack.
To start with, nice review BUT, are you getting paid by Slack ?
Somewhere you say: “2. Speed. Together with Gentoo, I think we are looking into the two fastest consumer distros on the planet.”
There was a good test on osnews before that proved that even Debian is faster then Gentoo.
Then the point about Debian being too outdated.
This is crap too. Of course it is true when comparing Debian stable standard install with Slack unstable.
Debian woody(stable) can be installed with bf24 (2.4.20 last time I tried). Now let’s be honest and compare unstable with unstable.
Debian unstable comes with latest kernel, heck even a STANDARD package for 2.6.0-test4 and stuff.
And let’s not forget about the other stuff you need to source-upgrade in 99% of the distro’s out there before you can even run latest kernel/apps.
And last, please tell me how to crash your linux distro in less then 2 days cause even RedHat runs longer here.
For me, Slack is just another one out there that’s just not it.
Not that there is ANY os that’s it, all os-es sux in a way, just choose the one that sux in the places you never go to but when reviewing stay honest and don’t tell things that are not true.
just my 2 euro-cent
Slack is defenitely not a distro to please everyone. But once you started to like it, you will probably stick to it.
xf86cfg is graphical X config, lets all cry cuz we are n00bs!
Why are you modding down responses to comments that aren’t?
CooCooCaChoo shouldn’t have been modded down unless the parent of the post was too. The original post was ridden with inaccuracies and was obviously meant to be a troll. But it was moderated as the opposite.
Sorry, but this is really wrong and therefore should be rectified.
Ok, if ./configure is all you want, so be it; I’ve spent hours looking at ./configure output and guessing what packages contain the libraries mentioned, and I prefer apt-get or urpmi to install packages, but if you want to do it by hand your free to do so. Just keep in mind that apt-get is a BONUS, even on debian you can compile software from source and resolv dependancies by hand if you feel like it.
Pretty much the same goes for configuration files, I only pointed out that software to configure software is sometimes needed; and prefered. You mention that you use software to do the foundation of the XF86Config, and then continue to edit it by hand. What it comes down to is how well the software that creates the foundation can predict what you want in your config file. Personally I think XFdrake does this by far better than XFree86 -configure, but it doesn’t really matter. In any case you can always edit the config file by hand afterwards.
That slack doesn’t have a graphical installer for XFree isn’t a reason not to use it, but it is a disadvantage to other distros, which can do what slack can and then some more.
Finally, I know about XFree, I know about /etc, and I still have to edit XF86Config-4 to get nvidia support, but the foundation Im working needs less hard work and less Reading of The Fucking Manual which is a good thing ™.
“literally having a blast” would more likely mean they were blowing something up, or they themselves were blowing up. Thus, literally was misused. “Figure of speech” is derived from things spoken Figuratively… “having a blast” is speaking figuratively to begin with, thus saying you’re literally doing something figurative you remove the exaggeration and come out with exactly what the statement says. So once again, “literally having a blast” would mean either they were blowing someting up, they themselves were blowing up, or maybe they were eating someting which was blowing up… like “having a piece of cake”… to be honest, “literally having a blast” doesn’t make much sense at all.
On to slack.
I’ve been using slack since 3.1 if I remember correctly. Between 3.1 and 7 I dogged around a bit, and tried Slackware 4 aswell. Hands down no other distro seems to cut it… and I’ve tried plenty. One I’ve not tried that I’m tempted to is Gentoo, but I see no need for it, and I’m not a fan of ports like systems. I prefer doing most of the work of retrieving software, figuring it’s dependencies, and installing myself. I just feel it keeps my system cleaner if I know where everything is. Slack is just a great distro, it’s clean and to the point. It’s lack of a truly good built-in package management system is one of the things I adore about it, because despite what others think, package management systems become a pain in the ass.
To answer someone’s question earlier. There are several modes for installing slackware. The best way to go is the expert route where you choose each package singularly. Since all of the major libraries you’ll most likely need for dependencies are all stuck in one package set, if you enable everything in the “l” package set, you shouldn’t have any problems. Installing everything in the L and select packages from other sets means you’re not installing the whole thing, only problem then is you may not need some things in the L set. It’s best just to know or have an idea what packages use what and what you’re more likely to need for your system. I personally install only several common packages from the L set, and I leave out both Gnome and KDE without any problems. I leave out the majority of extra X apps too. I’m very selecting about which applications I use and I’m not a big fan of what any desktop environment bundles with it. So in short, the installation is easily and massively configurable if you know what you need. If not you’ll be more prone to installing just entire sets, or the whole thing. Mind whoever say having to install the whole thing makes bloat… one great thing about slack is Volkerding likes to keep it all on one CD. So installing everything slack comes with and installing Half of what some other distros come with tends to be the same thing. Bloat isn’t just a matter of how much of a distro you install… it’s how much that distro offers you to install compared with how much you do.
I guess if you’re either willing to sacrifice a modern base distro or stability apt-get is a bonus. To me it’s not worth messing with it, because when you run debian your system seems to be on auto-pilot, it will change your configuration files when you upgrade, which I really don’t like.
Also Debian doesn’t have rc scripts…end of argument.
Read two posts up, he knows what’s up.
BTW, have you actually tried slack?