hello.
this is my first post on here, so if i do something wrong ill say sorry now.
basically ive been using ubuntu 7.04 for a few months and whilst ive been reading through posts on various forums ive notice people mention slackware.
so after some reading i thought, what the hell i see what its like, now i went to the slackware main site, but to be honest i got a little puzzled by all the stuff thats up for download, but in the end i found a torrent for the slackware 12 dvd iso (which im now downloading) so what i want to know is will the dvd have everything on it one would need to install slackware ? or would it be best to go back and download it in cd format (i think theres 6 cd's in all)
i know i could do various google searches and such like for this information, but ive found that asking people who have experience is very helpful, more so than a shed load of searches.
what is the hardware support like in slackware ? not that im running anything special, just curious.
another thing is when i installed ubuntu i used 1 cd which you boot from at start up, so why are there so many discs for slackware ? (as i said im downloading the dvd) is it because the discs have everything you will need, without having to update anything ?
cheers.

Hi,

And welcome to LQ!

Realistically all you need to successfully install and run slack
are CD1 & 2 ... the DVD should be plenty in that it brings the
/pasture plus all the source packages w/ build-scripts as well.


hardware support: the kernel is the stock kernel, you wont' find
proprietary drivers, and chances are not everything will be configured
for you (specially if the hardware is quite recent).


Cheers,
Tink

cheers, ill see how quick the dvd downloads and if its slow ill maybe try for cd 1 and 2 instead.
im not bothered about the drivers, it was more of a if i install it will it run everything enough for me to install the drivers i need, if any.
im presuming that as it uses the stock kernel then it should run everything, the only driver i install is the nvidia driver for my graphics card, i only really install it for the desktop effects you get with beryl and the like.
cheers for the info.

Welcome, but I don't think Slack does beryl. You may
be on your own trying to get that to work. Slacks focus
is on stability, performance and usability, at the expense
of eye-candy, bleating (!) edge and gimmicks.



Cheers,
Tink

Compiz is included in 12.0, though.

its slackware 12 im downloading, so maybe ill see what compiz is like, and maybe have a go at getting beryl to run on it.
ive got beryl installed on ubuntu, it runs great and its stable, even with some of the plugins, like the snow plugin and others.
the only problem ive had with ubuntu is a disc drive problem, for some reason films dont auto mount after the kernel was updated, i can play them using xine or vlc, blank dvds mount fine, but as i said films and data dvds (game dvds) dont automount, and as yet ive not found away to get access to the contents of a game disc to install one, ive been messing with cedega aswell as wine, but because of the dvd issue ive had trouble, but never mind.
cheers

I got Beryl working on Slack back in 11.0 with the instructions posted on the Slackware section. I didn't like the 3D-effects that much so now I don't use it anymore

And if you're just after the window shadows and/or little transparency, you can easily enable composite extension in xorg.conf. By building your own kernel you get more out of it than just using the huge kernel that comes along..

I don't fancy beryl/compiz that much, it does look good and I do use it occasionally, but on my Slackware system I don't need all that. The main thing is that it works.

Note that if there is something you want to achieve, it's probably possible, and if it's working on some other Linux distribution, it's definitely possible on Slackware. It might ask you to do some work to get it done, but pretty much nothing is impossible (people are running recent Gnome desktops on Slackware too - I've heard rumors that some have even compiled that stuff themselves!)