Any good noob friendly reads?
 

I'm still really new to Linux. I've messed around with a few distros, but from what I read, Slackware seems to be the one for me—I really like the “building from scratch” aspect. But, I'm a little scared, I guess.

My experience so far, has still been fairly light. I have yet to compile anything from source or anything of that nature so I'm still a little worried about installing programs/drivers.

Is there any good FAQs/HowTos I should read before I start? There's “The Book” on the Slackware page, of course, and I browsed through Shilo's guide. I was just wondering if there was anything else. Perhaps, something to get a noob like my self “up and running” once it is installed.

Thanks for any suggestions.

www.slackbook.org --learn it, love it, never leave it.
Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition

and, as always, Google is your friend.

Good Luck, and Happy Slacking!

Iam afraid for telling you that a linux newbie can't make all his/her hardwar up and running by using Slackware. This does not mean that Slack is bad, It's for linux experts audience. Slackware is not for newbies by any mean...
A lot of linux users says that Slack is a Godsend, yeah.. but it's a Godsend for experts cuz they can do anything with it. It's also a great distro for Server use.

You'll be very disappointed if you installed a distro like (Slack, Debian, Gentoo..) then find only a black screen with a prompt like "$". What will you do?!! as a newb you can't do anything

My suggestion is to install somethin which is designed for newbs. Try Ubuntu, Suse or Mandrake. These distrops are made for newbs, tho I prefer Ubuntu (It's the best newb distro *in my opinion*). After installing one of these Go to Linux Documentation project (www.tldp.org) and learn linux and all its magic. When you begin to feel that you are standing on a solid rock of knowledge go to (Debian, Slackware or Gentoo)

And if you had any problem, We are all here to help each other

Slackware 10.1 was my newbie distro. Do not fear the CLI.

I have been using Slackware 10.0 for the past 6 months and it is my newbie distro. As long as you are prepared to read up about stuff and search the internet if you have problems I think it is OK. Also, like Charred said you have to be comfortable with using the CLI. I find the CLI to be essential for the stuff I do on Linux and I found it to be reasonably easy to learn to use it. I have heard that you learn a lot more and quicker if you use Slackware too.

Here are some sites which you may find useful. I spend quite a lot of time reading these forums and I find them to be pretty useful too.

The revised Slackbook project is available at http://slackbook.lizella.net/ I haven't read this so I don't know what the differences are between this and the original Slackbook.

I also found another forum with this link http://www.hackersplayground.org/books.html#linux There is a slackware book available at this site (I haven't actually looked at it though)

There is also www.tldp.org (not slackware specific) which I have found very useful.

HTH
Richard

Not to be argumentative, but I completely disagree with comments suggest that "Slack isn't for newbies". The Slack installation doesn't happen to use a slick GUI, and IMHO that's the key reason for a lot of people to conclude that it's only suitable for highly experienced users. You can have a preview of the Slack installation process by checking out this excellent article on bitbender. Was originally written for Slack v9.1, but at least as of v10.1 it was still valid (dunno about v10.2, I haven't downloaded it yet) Good luck with it and have fun with Slack -- J.W.

Slack really isn't hard to install.
'The Book' will get you started, just follow the suggested (default)steps and it should go fine.
I'm a noob who tried Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu, Vector, Zentou, Xandros, even tried to install Gentoo for a week before giving up :) but I learned a lot in that week. I'm staying with Slack.
The documentation and support are amazing.
Just do it! :D

How new are you to all this? If you try slackware it wont necessarily be easy, but you'll learn an awful lot. I started with Mandrake. It was fairly easy, but a lot of it is automated so you dont learn an awful lot. After using slackware for a while you will be a lot more comfortable with general commands than with something like mandrake. You dont really need to do or know an awful lot to use it. What I found was that after using Linux for a few months, there was an awful lot of basic stuff I really didn't know. So what I would recommend is starting there. The link in my signature is a very basic intro to unix, which will give you the basics. It's very easy to use linux and not really know a lot.

If you're interested in getting to know how to use unix/linux OS's, it's best to start right at the beginning. Just trying to install something like mandrake or slackware, or whatever it is, is going to be very frustrating whichever you choose. You'll get to grips with it eventually. But in my case having got to grips with it, I still didn't really know much. Just get stuck in, whichever distro you choose. Mandrake is simple to install. The links given in other posts will help with a slackware install.

If you manage to get started it's really just a matter of reading up on things to learn it. The slackware book is obviously ideal if you're running slackware, as it was specifically written to help people learn how to use it. You might find some good stuff by searching for unix tutorials. It's not necessarily been recently written, but seeing as linux was based on it, you can learn much.

Also Debian might be worth a try. There seems to be a lot of documentation for it.

As some of the others here, i can confirm that slack is my firsts distro
and i still didn't commit suicide (eventhough i came close sometimes).

Actually slack was the only distro that didn't hang during install because it simply didn't have a "supershiny click me away" installer, it simply did what it had to do, i liked the effectivenes of the approach and dicided to stick with.

No regrets eversince!

I guess I'm kinda weighing in late here but I also wanted to offer my encouragement with Slackware. I have been playing with Linux for the past couple of years and Slackware is my favorite so far. I have tried RH and FC, and more recently Debian and Knoppix. While my overall experience has been pretty good, I am most impressed with Slackware. Here are the articles that inspired me to try Slackware and to set it up : http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=...rticle&sid=315 and
http://www.insyte.uni.cc/ . Since you are posting here, it goes without saying that you have a good start. And as far as the comments about the command line go, it is a good thing. I started out with PC's and Windows in the 80's so the command prompt actually feels pretty comfortable. Finally, the one thing that really threw me when I did end up at the command prompt was that to start your desktop you have to type 'startx' Happy Slacking!