(Read Subject Header in my comments!) hehehe. I sure hope slackware has made their distribution a little more “User Friendly” than it use to be a year or so ago.
The whole point of Slackware is to be as manual as possible…not “user friendly.” If you want such a distribution then go with something like Red Hat. I use Slackware 8.0 everyday and am not bothered by the lack of fancy setup programs, since I write my own configuration files and then back them up. Hopefully 8.1 will be out soon…
I’ve run slack 8 for a year. I’ve spent the last month on gentoo, but am considering returning to slack, not because I like slack (gentoo is wonderful), but because devfs problems with gentoo (which are my fault, not gentoo’s) which prevent me from being able to use a few pieces of hardware which I’d like to use (my zip drive, and my usb->serial 4 port hub).
On slack these things Just Work ™, as long as your kernel is compiled right; whereas on gentoo no matter how much RTFMing I do, I can’t get them to work at *all*.
Regardless, if you’re willing to read the documentation and the comments in slack’s init scripts, you’ll find that of all the linux distros, it’s the easiest to tailor by hand.
Slack, like gentoo, is meant to be configured by hand and as such, it is well-designed, well documented, and works as advertised. You can’t beat that, if you ask me.
I started on windoz about 5 years ago, got really good with that (got my MCSE, I know it is worthless) then went and decided to try linux one day. It was Mandrake 6.x that I got with a copy of “Maximum linux”. To put it nicely I had a 6 hour thrashing at the hands of the penguin. I had never read a man file, never looked at anything and thought, ohh, well I’ve been installing windows for 3 years, how hard can it be, I remember halfway through, it dumped me into fdisk and said, OK you can setup your partitions now, HUH? anyway after read a few of those handy man files I got it working. Upgraded to 7.2 a while later and 8.0 a few months ago, then I got sick of newbie linux and tried Redhat, that was pretty cool but rememinded me too much of Mandrake, so I wanted to really learn about the inner workings, so I downloaded Slackware last week. Now slack is where it is at baby, finally an OS that lets me choose my cluster size without looking up wierd ass switches. Finally an OS that lets me do everything by hand so I can learn! I’m a slackware convert baby and I’m not going back, WOOO HOOO.
(Read Subject Header in my comments!) hehehe. I sure hope slackware has made their distribution a little more “User Friendly” than it use to be a year or so ago.
———————–
Nicolas Farley
http://www.nicarley.tk
The whole point of Slackware is to be as manual as possible…not “user friendly.” If you want such a distribution then go with something like Red Hat. I use Slackware 8.0 everyday and am not bothered by the lack of fancy setup programs, since I write my own configuration files and then back them up. Hopefully 8.1 will be out soon…
I use Slack 8 every day as well and it is
very user-friendly. I haven’t needed to
write a single configuration file. In my
view it is one of the better distributions
for serious beginners to learn from. If you
want to learn about the guts of Linux, DO NOT
use RedHat. It is too difficult for that.
For those who want to just get on the net
for mail and www, use Slackware and choose the
KDE ‘option’ as your desktop. Slackware being
unfriendly is a myth.
>Slackware being unfriendly is a myth.
no
I’ve run slack 8 for a year. I’ve spent the last month on gentoo, but am considering returning to slack, not because I like slack (gentoo is wonderful), but because devfs problems with gentoo (which are my fault, not gentoo’s) which prevent me from being able to use a few pieces of hardware which I’d like to use (my zip drive, and my usb->serial 4 port hub).
On slack these things Just Work ™, as long as your kernel is compiled right; whereas on gentoo no matter how much RTFMing I do, I can’t get them to work at *all*.
Regardless, if you’re willing to read the documentation and the comments in slack’s init scripts, you’ll find that of all the linux distros, it’s the easiest to tailor by hand.
Slack, like gentoo, is meant to be configured by hand and as such, it is well-designed, well documented, and works as advertised. You can’t beat that, if you ask me.
it r00lz!
I started on windoz about 5 years ago, got really good with that (got my MCSE, I know it is worthless) then went and decided to try linux one day. It was Mandrake 6.x that I got with a copy of “Maximum linux”. To put it nicely I had a 6 hour thrashing at the hands of the penguin. I had never read a man file, never looked at anything and thought, ohh, well I’ve been installing windows for 3 years, how hard can it be, I remember halfway through, it dumped me into fdisk and said, OK you can setup your partitions now, HUH? anyway after read a few of those handy man files I got it working. Upgraded to 7.2 a while later and 8.0 a few months ago, then I got sick of newbie linux and tried Redhat, that was pretty cool but rememinded me too much of Mandrake, so I wanted to really learn about the inner workings, so I downloaded Slackware last week. Now slack is where it is at baby, finally an OS that lets me choose my cluster size without looking up wierd ass switches. Finally an OS that lets me do everything by hand so I can learn! I’m a slackware convert baby and I’m not going back, WOOO HOOO.
I’m interested to see 8.1, hope it is good