You're exactly right about coming back to slackware. I started out in linux with slackware, thought it was rough but loved it even back then. I got hooked on RH when 5.1 came out and actually paid for the thing to get the books and all the cds. I liked it until 7.0 came out and I was always looking for another distro that would be more to my liking. Finally I tried slackware 7.0 for awhile and really grew to enjoy linux again. Then I kind of let it go as my job doesn't require me to use slackware but RH so on the shelf it went again. Until 8.1 came along, I grabbed it and threw it on my laptop and haven't looked back since. The system is smaller, more responsive and nothing is on there that I didn't say could be installed. I love it and now I see what I was longing for when I went on a distro search after RH 6.2... now I'll never go back.

hmm... well, I started with RH 7.2 a four or five months ago, then I switched to RH 8.0 about a month ago. I've had nothing but headaches ever since, the interface is nicer and stuff, but there are alot of things pissing me off. Then I rebuilt an old p160 and went looking for a distro to put on it, it has not cdrom drive, so I settled on it. I've liked it so far, been a little challenging, but it's more fun that way. The way things are going, I'll prolly switch my main box over to Slackware-current or something. Just need a little more experience first.

I've been using slack since the version 3 release and I love it. I started using redhat for a little bit to see what it was all about, but I'll never stay on another distro except this one.

Slackware, simply the best!!!!!

May the force be with you guys.

ha ha ha, You guys are all geeks Fin, great response. Wouldn't everyone here like to take a trip just to see Finegan's setups, and listen to the man think?

I went Mandy 7.2 and continued (with an hour or 2 of other distros along the way that just straight up sucked) until 8.2 About that time, I plugged in Slack 8.0 Stupid me didn't know ANY command line usage, so I quickly pulled the plug on that. Once I got my hands on the basic command line usage, I plugged in Slack 8.1 and have used it as my primary distro ever since. I still have used other distros along the way, but continually wipe all of them (except Mandy, I will always love Mandy, it helped me to detach from the evil claws of... nevermind, this is about slack ) off and throw on something else; never removing slack. I've given Debian a try, but it's not nearly as well setup as slack, nor did I like anything about the way it was setup. Gentoo might be worth my time if I didn't love slack so much; and I have a working LFS installed and like to plug away on that every so often (mainly it's my trouble shooter).

Slack has everything you want in a distro, and nothing you don't. If you want a package manager, pkgtool is there. KDE, well it's there too (but why? ). You can easily configure it to do anything any other distro will, and you can do it knowing exactly what's happening.

Slack-aholic, I wish. I'm still a newb, but 10 years from now, I'll let you know (Slack 13.1 )

Cool

I eventually upgraded my system from 3.5 to 8.0, well... more like I added a bigger harddrive and used it. never would have been able to do so if I hadn't put the older version on first though, I had to transfer files and stuff.

You dudes are a hoot! But you make me glad I've got slack. I've always hated windoze, and still use the msdos prompt as much as the gui. Dude! I was there when it first came out (just realized how old I am), and wouldn't start using it till 3.1 was pretty old.

Anyway, I just built a P4 box, and saved 10GB from XP to play with Slackware Linux. I'm pretty raw with Linux (newbie). I think it took me 30 hours to get the gui even working (busmouse + GeForceTi4200=pain). But it works now. Next is the network, a modem of some kind, and then ... Unreal online! You know, it feels like I'm learning to skate on racing blades. Right now my ankles are still splayed, but I can tell this baby can fly. It's obvious slack is a high performance OS just from the lack of BS (did I mention I hate XP?) Right now I'm banging my head against the GCC wall, trying to wring 10 gigaflops out of the P4, so I can do some serious simulations. But of course, 8.1 thinks I'm on a '386. :P

When I finish figuring out 8.1, and have the PC fully functional with it, I plan to give KRUD 8.0 (RH) a go, since I have the disks. But after reading you all, I'm already planning to put Slack right back on the machine. Maybe I'll grab 9.0 first. I want to reinstall Slack anyway, just to get a clean start after all the failed compiles, environment variable setting, and "tainted kernels".

I'm not sure if it's good or bad that slackware thinks your box is a 386, but if it's a problem just recompile the kernel for 586 or 686 when you get to it.

I built a Slackware box yesterday in work - first time I've ever done any kind of Linux install, and the last UNIX install I did was SCO SVR4, so I was prepared for the worst, but there were no problems at all - used cfdisk for the partitions and the rest was easy.

So right now I'm trying to decide between Slackware and the Athlon-optimised Gentoo for my newly-spare home machine...

Slackware was the first distro I tried... (there weren't many at the time) and used it to 'learn' linux (yeah - I'm not done learning by any means) - that was in the early 90's (anyone remember Linux '95'?). I've also tried Debian, but wasn't happy with it, also tried Mandrake and loved it but still the init system threw me (I believe it's similar to RH and I remember it looking like Solaris also!) ... then some 'BSD's' liked FreeBSD best - just to play with.

Right now I'm looking for another hard drive so's I can install slack more permanently (rather than running it off the live CD - which I used to troubleshoot my DSL connection - stupid Winders XP!!!)

- Rocket

I've used a number of distros in the past. The 1st I ever used was Caldera's OpenLinux, which was administrated by someone else. Then came Redhat 5.x (I don't remember the exact version) which I used on a friends computer. The first I actually installed was Redhat 6.1, then 6.2. First on my PC, then on a Sun UltraSPARC. However, RH decided to stop support for Ultra platforms, and I was stuck with RH6.2 for a long time. Even when the 7.x series came out, I still stuck with 6.2 on my own PC and on the Sun Ultra (since they behaved the same way).

I think I learned most of my Linux knowledge on the Ultrasparc, since there were few SPARC rpm's for popular software, I had to install everything from source (and debug weird errors that came out... that was truly a learning experience).

Around that time I downloaded many distros, including Mandrake (which I hated, really flaky) and SuSE for SPARC (which was slow). It was also then that I downloaded Slackware 8.0 on a whim (it was the first time I had a free 24-hour internet connection, so I was downloading ISO's left and right).

I never got around to installing it until a friend of mine needed to use Linux on a rather junky machine. I decided to give Slack a go, since it's not as resource hungry as the bloated distros that came out at that time. After installing it though, my friend didn't really get around to using it, but I was intrigued by the ease of installation of Slackware that I decided to install it myself on my own PC. That's when I fell in love with Slackware.

I've never looked back since.

Slackware is fast, light and feature-full. Whatever I don't have I can simply download and install (usually from source). I was really impressed by how flexible Slack was, and how easy it was to use. I guess once you get used to other Linux distro's (but never really liking them), Slackware fill feel like a long lost friend.

-= Obi-Wan =-

only one thing to say:

use the force !

Obi-Wan,

You might want to look at a Slackware derived side-project called Splackware, its a ground-up recompile of all of the standard packages for Sparc and UltraSparc. I don't know how many iterations of Ultra it runs on, but it probably covers the IIi if you have an Ultra 5 like me (although mine's running OpenBSD and its FAST).

Cheers,

Finegan

I have been running linux for about a year, keeping windows around for games, the occasional dvd, and my new cd burner which I haven't been able to get working yet... I started with Red Hat 6.1 a few years ago and took it off my machine in about a week. Recently, I needed to learn Linux/Gnu for school -- I'm a physics student, and the scientific world uses Linux a lot. So, I tried Lycoris, which I very quickly outgrew. Then I tried Mandrake 8.2, which wasn't bad. I then went to Redhat 7.2 and was quite happy with it. (Somewhere in here I tried Slackware 8.0 and felt quite lost. Had to drop it for the time being, but - being an Austin, Texas slacker, I had Bob on the brain.) Not too long ago, I switched to redhat 8.0, and was pretty happy with it. But, I finally, today, got Slack. I got Slack good. My system's configured about as well as my Redhat one was, but with 20X the control... I even installed GrUB as my bootloader! I guess I've learned a good bit.

Glad to be a part of the Slackware community.

I prefer to say use the source

As for Splackware, I'm very very keen on trying it out. I haven't found the time yet. Does it really behave the same way as the PC version of Slack?

docGonzo2000 : I use my Slack box for DVD playback... works flawlessly

-= Obi-Wan =-