Since this is the distribution section and I have so much time on my hands along with extreme boredom, I thought i'd put my two cents of experience and explainations in. At membership to this site, I was and still am a die-hard Slack proponent. "Then why are you using RedHat now instead of Slack?" I thought I'd give a few different distros a 'go' to be fair and unbiased in my Slackness, Mandrake 8.1 and RH7.2 to be specific. Mandrake 8.1 is nice, worked perfect 'out-of-the-box' with my hardware. It's simple and severely user friendly. It had me up and going in moments. By far the best Install program i've used. In the end, shortly after install, it didn't cut the cake, so back to Slack! Although Slack satisfies what I expect in a distro, I, like so many other ex-ish Windows users, wanted a little bit more ease of use. I've got Slack down pat as far as config and usage, but it left me just a tiny bit hungry yet. At the install of RedHat 7.2, I appreciated it's Installation Prog. also. Very easy although less configurable than Slack or even Mandrake on a lower level, it suited just fine. Of course I am happy to say it too worked with my hardware 'out-of-the-box'. It's not a whole lot different from Mandrake except for the fact that it's stability seems far superior and i've yet to have any sort of error, unlike a few in Mandrake. Even though it installs a bit bloated, I was happy to see what it offered and i've of course tweaked everything to my wants and needs. It's been so easy in fact that i've not had a reason to go back to Slack. Though I do NOT like SysV initialization, it too hasn't forced me back to Slack's BSD style of which i'm used to. So to date, yeah, i'm giving Red Hat a longer term go. Perhaps I feel a tad guilty leaving Slack and the Slacker community aside for a 'prettier' distro. But When you get tired of editing files all day and could have run through a setup, I must say it's a nice break. So for now, i'm putting on the Hat. If anyone actually read this AND was wondering the hardware used in these three distros of which all detected and used properly, here are the specs. if you will:
AMD 1Ghz Athlon (T-Bird)
1 x 512 pc/133 Micron DIMM
30Gig 7200 Western Dig. HD
16x12x40 Cyberdrive CD-R/RW
SB Live! Value
32 MB DDR Creative Labs Annihilator GeForce 2 MX

There's my long post for the year. If for nothing else but to take up space on the server! LOL

well yeah, that's why i use mandrake over somethign like slack. if i had time to get everythign worknig exactly as i want it, i'd go with slack i expect, but I use linux for an OS, not just soethign to do, and i don't want to *have*to mess with config files all the time. I'm fine doing it when i want to... but things like erm.... rpmdrake just make things so much easier at times....

Yeah i know what you mean, plus the copy and paste is so annoying in linux.

My sentiments exactly. I guess you just have to look at things and say "hey, i'm happiest with THIS or THAT distro" and use it. I feel bad that the Slack community is getting thin but then again, I can't let a distro run me, it should be the other way 'round... And as rpmdrake is to Mandrake, I must say RH's up2date utility has been flawless so far. I understand much more now why my poll resulted in huge red hat, mandrake usage.

c'mon guys wheres your slackware spirit?? Yeah, mandrake and RH are far more easier to use and setup BUT, they are far less secure (u can secure them manually tho), they come with tons of unstable or plain useless software, I tried configuring RH like i do with slack, editing files and RH just overwrited all the filesi modified on the next boot!, You dont learn anything with those distros, might as well go back to winblow$, they are slower than slack due to useless things started at boot time.
I am not saying that they are bad distros but they are becoming fool proof and quite insecure, in other words they are becoming microsoftish..
Sure why not use them if they are easy, but at least keep a minimal installation of Slack at hand, just to remind yourself of noGUI tools and power that slack gives you. And you actually learn something!
There is no reason to limit yourself on one OS anyway, i have slack, suse, win98 and win2k on the same machine and i use whichever i feel like, mostly slack tho. And if you have more than one machine you can run different distros on each to compare them. And then did it ever happen to you that those pretty GUI tools get annoying and that is sometimes just simpler to add a line or two to a config file? I understand you tho, i wanted to do the same a month ago cuz i couldn't get DRI to work in Slack, but what the hell, keep trying (i still didnt figure out how to use DRI in Slack). Don't leave Slack only because its hard, it gives many other advantages. And feel free to boot any OS you feel like, don't limit yourself on RH, mandrake or Slack..

?? no way, copy and paste on linux is VASTLY easier than ctrl+c ..... ctrl+v maybe you'ev just not been told how to do it kiddo?

And i learn all i need to learn from mandrake, i CAN go down to the same detail as slack as and when i want to, i just don't want to HAVE to.

this whole linux spirit thing does seem to be a bit of a stumbling block. i'm gonna be a well-paid linux sysadmin in 3years or so i expect, and i'm still gonna reserve the right t not be forced to fart around with little things when i don't want to. Till then, i'm quite happy to use fontdrake to import ttf's thankyou. I don't leave slack cos it's hard, i'm sure i could deal with it, i just don't want to needless hassles

Yes, its easier but too bad that in KDE you cant replace a current selection with the one you have on the clipboard. you know when you have a url copied and want to paste it into the web browser replacing the current text.

Taz, dude, man, what? The Hat? You've put on the North Carolina Hat? Dude, man! What in the world? Holy jumping Athlon on a Socket A mobo, what in the Intel? Dude?

What am I talking about, half the machines in my house don't run Slackware... but then again, the other half all DO!\

No, its not easy to configure, and its set up goofy, and really NSKL, Slackware is NOT more secure than RH or Drake, or Suse or X-Distro-Here. Portmap a few default installs of either and all the same stuff is open. Okay, okay Slack got away from wu-ftp a version sooner than the others, but things like that are pretty minor compared the the bullet-proof security of say... OpenBSD.

I think what you were aiming for was stability. I've got a Slack machine sitting in the corner of my house, serving out games of Nethack to my friends that's been up for 92 days or something. I could get that under RedHat, but I would have to fiddle with the crate every once in a while.

I honestly recommend trying them all. I think I've just finished. Oh, well kinda, I've got X86 Solaris downloading at home.

Honestly Taz, try the other Intel based Unixes. If you're going to experiment do it hard!

Just anything but the Hat!

Okay, I'll calm down now. Sunday's at work just suck.

Cheers,

Finegan

FreeBSD 4.4 eh? well i tried FreeBSD 4.4 a few days ago on my other box and i couldn't ge the damn x-server to work. it SUX. here were the specs dont know if it is supported or not under freeBSD.

Asus CUSL2
p3 733@800
256mb ram
voodoo5
linksys LNE100TX revision 2.
Hercules Gamesurround Muse XL sound card (simply a CMI, works in Mandrake).

LOL, sorry bro, yeah I switched over to the dark side. Or is it just the dark side of the moon where distros shine in the sun, overlap in the shade and grubble in the dark? Ok, enough off my Freudian Floyd...I do want to try out some of the other distros in time. I plan to give Open, Net and Free BSD a full go, along with Debian once woody goes stable. For now, i'm just finding it nice to point and click with minimal editing. Everyday the Slackster is calling me back, so who knows when he'll win over and I wipe out the madHatter??

Cool, tell me how Open and Net bsd are. I tried FreeBSD and it SUX. If you have a new video card like the geforce series or 3dfx voodoo4/5 you will have a terrible time getting the x-server to work right.

Well, I got rid of the useless bootime progs and daemons and it boots quite fast now. I don't consider Windows to "blow" and my Slack 'spirit' is fine. Becoming fool proof is a good thing and all Linux flavours have gone more graphical over the years. Even Slack, just not as much right off. I don't have more than one machine, though the gui tools haven't ever gotten boring, no, it's only been a week on RH. I believe you misunderstood why I switched over, I didn't do it cause Slack was hard, I could configure Slack with my eyes closed by now, I got 'tired'. I do dual boot between Linux and Win98. As for DRI, I don't need it. The NVidia drivers require you to disable it actually. But I don't know your card's chipset so i can't say...

I'll tell you right now, much the same. OpenBSD's shipping version of X is much newer than 4.4's, so it would probably support your fifteen minute old hardware (the video card that is, all of these will install fine on the rest of your stock kit.) whereas FreeBSD4.4 shipped with a slightly older X. OpenBSD is much more of a headache to install as its head developer, Theo DaRaadt, does not do training wheels. NetBSD I've only installed once, and really I just helped, but that was on a Playstation, so whatever... the idea is that it goes on any architecture.

The BSDs are not built for the beginner, which is one of the reasons why not to many people use them. Some Linux people migrate up to them, a lot of Sysadmins use them when they need something really secure, and then there are the die hard Unix geeks who claim they are the only true Unix for the Intel desktop. FreeBSD doesn't suck, its just built for people that would either know their card wasn't supported under XFree86 3.3.x, or would find out shortly and then just download the new X, compile it, and install it.

BSD is a beast.

Open you're going to have to pay for. Don't trust those home-brewed ISOs, unless of course you just go for a net-install, which is MUCH easier than it sounds. Net and Free are freely downloadable in ISO format.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for the heads up on the BSD's yuh'all! I heard NetBSD is pretty killer, but we'll see. FreeBSD we'll see also, perhaps i'll wait for the next release. Right now, I think the next set i'll get is either Progeny or GNU/Deb 2.2r3 and say forget waiting for woody to stabalize. I can't (well I could) download the ISO's since i'm on 56k. So I order the CD's through LinuxCentral which are pretty cheap. We'll see soon...

Here is how I made my slackness even slacker....Mondo Rescue, after an install when it's configured and I've set up all my hardware/programs I do a system back up to a set of bootable cd-rw's with mondo, currently running to nine disks for the complete system and id takes about a day to complete (because I only have 4x disks), my burner will do 10x for cdrw so I'll have to get a new box to speed it up. The bootable disks will let me do a full restore from bare metal to a new file system, hard drive or even to a raid system.