Slackware VS Gentoo/Sabayon
 

A friend of mine gave me the Slack 11 DVD a while back, and impressed me with the standardized SlackBuild/Install system and the level of customization I could squeeze out of it. (Plus, I love the CLI, which Slack still uses a lot).

Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't get CPU throttling or XGL/Aiglx working on the sucker, try as I might. So, I tried Gentoo. That was all good and well, until my laptop overheated during the compile and shut itself down among some fireworks, figuratively speaking. "To the trash bin with you, Gentoo!" Not wanting to abandon it completely, though, I grabbed Sabayon's minidisk 3.2.

Impressed hardly fits, I'm amazed! My no-name wifi card was ndiswrapped out of the box, XGL and AIGLX were wonderfully easy to set up, plus the default themes were all very consistent. I still don't really like the portage system too much, but overall Sabayon makes a great mobile distro, at least for me.

Slack is still my main desktop distro, though.

Slackware can be tough to get Beryl and the like working on. The main problem is that Slackware is shipping with XOrg 6.9, not the modular XOrg 7 that is required for all this new GXL fanciness.

Which means you either need to build XOrg 7 yourself, or find unofficial packages. Then you need to deal with the fonts, do you keep the Slackware official ones and just deal with the dual X11Rx directories, or get everything installed under X11R7.

I got it installed a few days ago on my Slackware 11 machine, and it was definitely not smooth sailing. A lot of head scratching, especially since the "guide" I was following turned out to be all but completely inaccurate.

So it isn't impossible to get that running on Slackware right now, but I REALY hope that Pat upgrades to XOrg 7 soon, because it was certainly much harder than it should have been.

Speaking of, where would I find out when 11.1/12 would be coming out?

There is really no release schedule to speak of, Slackware is released under an "it's done when it's done" sort of mentality.

However it is even more uncertain now, as Pat is taking some down time after the release of Slackware 11 to contemplate the future of Slackware, and to prepare for some big changes.

The basic situation is that features people want added into Slackware, and the new versions of glibc, are now preventing Slackware from continuing support for the 2.4 kernels. So the decision currently on the table is to either move ahead and drop support for 2.4 and upgrade glibc with all the new features people want, or to keep the older versions of the software so Slackware can still ship with a 2.4 kernel.

I am hoping that this is going to be a real turning point for Slackware. The focus to keep 2.4 supported (or even worse, as the default) in Slackware has started to take it's toll, and I am honestly a bit concerned about Slackware's long term development if Pat isn't ready to just abandon the old and move on as every other distribution has.

Slackware has survived very well as a "cult" distribution for the last few years, with "friendly" distributions like Ubuntu taking the spotlight. The userbase is fine with that, but I am afraid it won't take a lot to push Slackware from cult to irrelevant.

Slackware is foever
 

I would notice that Slackware did not 'survive' as some sort of "cult" or any other sort but a "rock-solid stable-features" sort of distro.
In fact Slackware has eversince been so stable, that it could sustain extreme customization and still outperform any other distro regarding stability. You must pay a toll do do that of course.
So, as long as there is a single one man, in need of reliable OS doing 7/24 and up in less than a day, 100% bulletproof on the net:
Slackware will be the choice.

It simply is so. It has the most common-sense defaults. It's a core-distro: No one pursuits all of the projects out there to fit in. That's up to the users. Pat and the core-team just takes care the core is rock-solid and secure.

And regarding Slack, I see no particular flaw i 10.2. I switched to 11.0 just to support Pat's effort and help debugging it (had no much to do either).

And regarding packaging/ vs. making from source: nowdays is often quicker to config/make a package than do download it ;-). It gets down the line in few sec right, but while I find it, read where the download section is, find my (any) distro, load the pack, invoke the package manager, he checks for deps. (may be dloads a bit or two...) ... ( well I type fairly quick :) ).
So the absence of packages for Slack is not really a issue here. Anyway source is allways more current than a package.

End of story. Slack is Slack and there will allways be a need for it. The question is will there ever be a decent replacement for it? So far no good except BSD, or is BSD also tending to be irrelevant (OS-X and others)?.
:)

You have to wait a lot...
 

go look on http://www.linuxpackages.net/
They broke the news earlier than Slackwares own site :)

:) Shame on You MS3FGX, to scare off newbies from slack :)

I have nothing against Slack; in fact it was my first distro back in 1995 and I'll always have a sweet spot for it, but...

Slack is a cult distro. I don't know if it's stable or not 'cause I've never used it on a server. And I don't know anybody that has used it on a production server either. RHEL/CentOS, Debian and SuSE get the lead here.

Oh, and for me BSD means more than having BSD-style init scripts and using BSD tar. So OSX isn't BSD. FWIW, any resemblance between Darwin and FreeBSD is pure coincidence. Not that it's bad either, since I prefer "Free" OSes, but I just had to say it.

I agree with the Slack cult idea, and I'm still feeling guilt pangs for removing the ol' boy from my teenie hard drive. I am having serious trouble getting used to the lack of the non-SysV setup, but I like variety, so I'll try Gentoo-Sabayon for a while. I can easily see myself heading back to Slack soon, though.

MS3, is there any chance you could enlighten us as to how the heck you got Beryl-Compiz running? :scratch:

First I would like to say that I don't mean anything negative about Slackware when calling it a cult distribution. Slackware was the first distribution of Linux I ever used, and remains my primary distribution to this day because of it's consistent quality and logical layout (even if it does tend to lag behind with software releases). There is no other distribution in the world that is as high in my mind as Slackware.

To be a "cult" anything is not a negative connotation at all. It simply means that it is supported by a relatively small group of diehard fans, and does not have a mass market appeal. If you are thinking purely in terms of popularity, then yes, that is not very good since you will never have the user-base of a Debian or a Gentoo.

But the amount of people running a particular distribution is not what makes it good, or defines it. After all, if we were just following what the masses were doing we would all be running Windows right now.

As for Beryl, I started the installation foolishly thinking that all I needed to do was follow this Wiki page.

After that completely failed, I had to mainly go out on my own. I have been considering rewriting that Wiki page actually, but until then I can tell you what I remember off the top of my head.

The package downloads listed there are fine. The MyTux.org site has the rest of the packages you need, like Beryl itself and Emerald (they are up to date to, as far as I can tell).

The problem comes as soon as he starts giving the instructions. The first part is the "optional" removal of XOrg 6.9. This is definitely not an optional removal. Almost everything in Slackware is hard coded to /usr/X11R6 (even though the symlink to /usr/X11 should be preventing this). Installing XOrg 7 over the default Slackware installation will do nothing but add more files to your system, you will still be running XOrg 6.9 without changing a number of configuration files.

So after removing XOrg 6.9 and the Nvidia driver (assuming you are using it, of course), you put in XOrg 7 and reinstall the video driver. Go ahead and make the changes like he lists to xorg.conf, making sure that the paths for the fonts are pointing to the symlink /usr/X11, which the installation script for the XOrg 7 packages will have linked to /usr/X11R7.

Then try to run your WM, and watch as it completely fails.

The problem is that Slackware is not setup at all to load any of the libraries or binaries from anything but /usr/X11R6. So you have to go in and manually change all of that.

You need to open up /etc/profile and change all instances to "/usr/X11R6" to either "/usr/X11R7" or "/usr/X11". I would suggest using "/usr/X11", since then you don't need to change the files back if you decide to revert to the official Slackware XOrg server.

Log out and log back in, and you will now have half of the links corrected.

You now need to edit /etc/ld.so.conf to point, again, to the new XOrg directory. After editing this file, you will need to run "sudo ldconfig" to update the shared library links.

Also, /etc/rc.d/rc.M contains a reference to fc-cache, which again is being run from /usr/X11R6. This needs to be corrected so the font cache updates when you reboot. You might as well run this now as well too.

After doing all that, you should now be able to start up your WM properly. Then just run "beryl-manager", and hope it works. Emerald is going to complain about some missing packages probably. If you don't have DBUS installed, it will want that, and it will also want libglitz. I think there was another package or two it wanted, but if I recall correctly they were up on LinuxPackages.net, and were not a problem to get.

I think that was all I did to get it running.

That's more slack-like
 

:)
Ant THX for the instructions.

BTW,
now you know one who's running slack on production servers (smallones but profy ones)

MS3FGX: Thanks! I don't know if I'll try it (lost too much hair over it as it is), but thank you for the instructions. I'd recommend reposting that in the Slackware forum, if I were you.

I'd point out that you COULD leave X6 on there and still install 7, since you are editing all the symlinks/references anyway.

Oh yeah, you could certainly leave XOrg 6.9 installed if you wanted to after editing the various files so that they point to /usr/X11R7 (or at least /usr/X11 which points to it).

But the problem is that the existing instructions don't tell you to modify any of those paths, and that the removal of XOrg 6.9 is optional. If you were to literally follow those instructions, you would not actually be using XOrg 7 at all. It would still be using the binaries and shared libraries from the default Slackware packages, and the XOrg 7 files would be just sitting there doing nothing. The only directory that would be in your path would be /usr/X11R6, so when you ran "startx" you would actually be starting the version from XOrg 6.9 and not even realize the system has ignored the newly installed version of XOrg. That was what I was trying to convey.

Though as you said, if everything was properly adjusted so that it was really pointing to the XOrg 7 installation, both versions could co-exist. Though I am not sure what the advantage of that would be.

Advantage? XD

I'm having some problems configuring X11R7 and beryl on slackware as well, i also tried to fallow that same guide and I ended up with a really screwed up X, what I did to "fix" the issue was to remove both X11R6 and X11R7, rename /usr/X11R6 to /usr/X11R7, create a symbolic link from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/X11R7, and install X11R7, the system still complaining about the font cache though, and I never got to see the fency things beryl has to offer, i think this is because esmerald isn't working (do i need esmerald for beryl to work?), its missing some lib packages.

Technically, you never have to run Emerald for Beryl to work, but Emerald manages all the themes for Beryl, same as Compiz Themer. An ideal Beryl installation would have the Theme Manager, Settings Manager, and Beryl Manager for everything to work right.