okay... this is for non-commercial purposes
i want to move on to some stuff i haven't really tried using and am deciding between 2 distros. i have installed debian before but after all the hard work(it was hard work then... stared a whole night wondering what it was all about) , the tight security defaults of allowed me to only access the command line. knowing nothing beyond installing a distro then, i was left staring blankly at a command line... ho ho ho.

would like to have all the 2 cents worth of views on preferences of people between the 2 famous DIY distros, debian and slack. would prefer to hear from people who have actually tried and used both... but i suppose anyone can contribute.

i'd be grateful if u could also tell me what are the good and bad features of what you experienced.

thanks in advance to all...

Not actually tried either successfully, but:
Jamaso's experience endorses Slack as a good distro to learn from.

I don't know much about any distro but i installed three distro last month: RH mandrake and slackware.

What i was amased by was the fact that most people i talk to told me how hard it has to get that slack going but installing it from an iso file was quite easy (maybe it gets harder after ;-)
but i had a fealing that installation was hard before and people still thing it is.
The version 8 as nautilus and other gui things too! In fact, the only difficulty i faced was on the network install (i did one too!) well it needs a root disk on top of the net.i disk but it was well documented...
btw no ftp install choise. But again the cd was no problem.

A friend of mine told me once: "You run Slackware until you've compiled netdate for the 11th time and realize there's a Debian maintainer out there that hasn't gotten laid in five years that's keeping up the .deb pack for you."

I still don't care: Slackware.

Debian is labelled DIY, but really its just as easy as the rest of the distros after you realize how to use apt-get. Good things to say about it:

-SysV init so the stuff you compile from source tends to work on the first try.
-Very minimal install so it works well on old boxes with tiny hard drives. I've got a Debian laptop (p1 133) running half of my wireless LAN.
-More stable than the comercial releases, but a pain in the arse to upgrade the whole distro without having fat bandwidth.
-You get to feel like such a marxist. I don't know if this is good, but it gives me a chuckle.

Slackware is half-way to BSD. Bad things to say about it:

-Alot of things require tweaking the makefiles (most recently I had to mess with X-cdroast's).
-The bsd style init is supposed to be easier to debug blah blah blah, but really it just makes it funky to add things since the dog+world ran with sysV.
-Slackware is always a little behind. 8.0's default kernel is 2.2.19, then again so is Debian's 2.2r4 (potato). There are options for 2.4.5, which can be just as grumpy sometimes.
-pkgtool, compared to apt and rpms just blows. Then again, real men compile from source.

I run some flavor of Slackware on 9 of the 14 machines I might deal with in a day. Why? Maybe its because masochism breeds competence, but until I either get off my arse and do an LFS, or find some brilliant rogue distro, I'm sticking with Slack.

I know I didn't actually say anything good about Slack, but Taz, Aussie and Trickykid will take care of that soon enough.

-Cheers,

Finegan

head is spinning already...

hate it when sociology bites me in the head and makes me itch to ask questions like:
finegan, why does debian give u the marxist feeling?

(and i say sociology not because marxism belongs to sociology per se, just that i had some encounter with it in sociology some years back... )

another thing (out of context of the original post):
X-cdroast gives problems anyway right? it just supports SCSI CD-ROM drives (unless u want to mess around with some file or other and manipulate my poor ATAPI CD-ROM drive... haven't had time to look into this coz i'm in the midst of EXAMS! aarrgghh...)

as u can see from the distro i use, i'm not guru(Slack people) nor minimalist marxists (deb people)... and u can also detect from the above statements, i'm no hardware guru...

and appreciate all the replies so far... interesting... keep 'em coming please... and agreed finegan, the strongest proponents of Slack have yet to speak... lol

OH my, how could you say such things? My head, it's spinning, think i'm fainting....EEK! LOL Well he called it...I'm only ringing in because of the fact that i've not had one problem with Slack 8. It's got as up to date software as any. Of course it doesn't use glibc 2.2.4 since it was introduced before they came out etc..But pkgtool has been superb for me installing the .tgz packages that have been provided in the ongoing slack-current folder over at sourceforge. Even if Slack comes with 2.2.19 and 2.4.5 i've used both "out of the box" and worked perfectly. Downloading 2.4.16 was a breeze to build. So of course there's room to upgrade everywhere. It's more stable and sure than any other distro i've used. THOUGH, i can't say i've used a debian based distro, I wouldn't change now if I was given a free CD. Slack also uses SysV init and have no clue as to what you mean by being half-way to BSD. It's one of the ONLY true original distros left and as the rest move towards ease of use, Slack, even if you have to tweak a file, is more secure and solid than anything else out there and I would put money on it! Actually I did, but the price of the cd's was quite nothing in comparison to what I got from the distro. It's also very minimal and so configurable you can install as little as the base system. Yes, every distro has a few things you'd rather not see or have different, but Slack has the least of that i've seen unless you want some eye-candy, then obviously we're talking about the wrong distro all-together. If you wanna learn and fast! Go with Slack. If you want pretty packages with distro specific extensions like .deb that presume to be easier, I guess you can go marxist. But last time I checked, this was America and a democracy!

Debian is entirely built and maintained by its user base. Technically every Linux distrubution is too, but RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, and to a much lesser extent, Slackware, are all publicly traded companies that are still out to make money. Progeny is a company that basically ships Debian's potato CDs with a manual, so Debian isn't completely exempt, but the basic idea is that virtually no one is working on Debian for a dime.

I feel like I'm about to be baited into a socio-economic debate, so I'll cut it off here.

-Cheers,

Finegan

Oh, btw, does XCDroast only support scsi CDRs? Odd, I just accidently only tried it on SCSI CDRs... weird.

well i always give two thumbs up for both of them... whatever people say, there will always be ones who like it, and some who don't. i just wish everyone thought like me, cause i love slackware and just prefer it over debian... that's all. but don't get me wrong.. debian is awesome too..
people just steer to what they see fits them best.

i am gonna say one thing....
once you get used to debian's dselect and apt-get for package maintenance....that alone is worth it.
i ran slack before...i don't like redhat...and i hate mandrake.

Debian is my preference......but everybody is entitled to their own opinions

I don't believe that Slackware is correctly described as a publicly traded co. There is one man behind all of the work and he (Patrick Volkerding) has always been the most adament about NOT straying from the original intent to have a most UNIX-like distro. Slack was one if not the first on the scene back in '93 when Linux became of more interest. RedHat started out ok back then too, but none of them were too user/hardware friendly. Slack is, has and I believe always will be the only distro to stay on the original path as close as possible. That decision isn't made by a co. but by one guy who does all the work for us. Linux itself is maintained by it's user base, that's the whole point, so whether or not Debian does that doesn't matter. Everything you run in Linux is a contrib work without any monetary interest. Ahh heck, i'm tired....

finegan:
no no none of that... had enough of it in the uni...


taz.devil
och, sorry about that tazzie thanks fer yer contributions here...

tell ya what guys. after my exams, i'm gonna try slack...

but thanks for sounding out what it is all about... i have yet to experiment with re-compiling the kernel... so actually that's what i was worried about... and how much trouble it was worth going thru etc etc (worried newbie)

but i guess it's a big adventure for me so it's okay(see? i have no life... i play with linux and post in a forum... that's an adventure to me... ho ho ho -> no offense to ppl who have the same lifestyle as me)

cheers guys... thanks fer the views... i truly appreciate them all

It's all good, no hard feelings ever...Usually I must say recently that I decided to get RH 7.2 to compare to Slack and others i've used to see what all of the hoopla was about. I must say i've been jaded towards Slack, because I started out in console and everything that is and should be standard as is with Slack, isn't there with RH. It's designed to be used almost fully in one of the GUIs of which I must say Slack has twice as many as. No Enlightenment standard? What the hey??? So my test has left me with $8 dollars in coasters LOL. It was worth the small amount to prove myself that I love Slack to death and that once you've gotten into it, is easier to maintain, upgrade and yes recompile a kernel than any i've seen yet. RH has alot going as far as userability right off, but then what? Oh well...Time to go repartition today and wipe out the evil one (RH) Go Slack you'll never go back! LOL

On a side note, here is what Joerg Schilling (the man who wrote cdrecord) has to say about ATAPI-IDE CD-RW,

hey thanks Aussie... just the info i needed...

btw, are SCSI CD_ROM drives more commonly used or ATAPI?
(it does seem that more ppl use atapi in my country...)

ATAPI are the most common because like scsi hard drives, scsi cd drives are a lot more expensive.