good bye slackware =(
 

i loved you dearly. lack of official x86_64 support has sent me packing. you have been so very good to me slackware.

about 10 minutes into debian x86_64 i seriously thought about going back lol, i had to fix my flash package to install under a non i386 arch. i hate the visual login, and no way to repair it in inittab. i hate not having my fortunes now also.

trying to install the video drivers is insane. first it was no gcc, then no libc, now no kernel source tree =(

the apt-get is funky, slapt-get was more intuitive than this.

Have you tried slamd64? I've heard good things, though I don't have the hardware to run it myself.

In addition, I'm sure you could get it to drop to a tty instead of gdm by default in just the same way as you do the reverse in Slackware, though I think Debian uses different numbers for each runlevel.

Fortunes are easy to set up too, just download and install them and add a line in your .bashrc or .profile or /etc/profile.

Best of luck Ninja. I hope you find the grass an acceptable shade of green close up.

Hello,

Before packing did you try x86_64 derivatives like bluewhite64?

I run it, and it's just as stable, fast, easy to use as Slackware. It should be made official, but that's up to Pat V.

yup i had thought about both of them, but lack of official support was the real kicker. its too bad slackwares not mad supported like debian is. debian had like 30 different architectures to choose from. i figured out apt-get has a similar program for searching the apt get called "apt-cache" got my drivers going, and not so many problems since =)

debian and ubuntu's run levels are jacked, they are ALL multi user visual gdm login, except for single user.

the apt function is soooooo nice. but i dont know, theres nothing like getting down and dirty with a tarball.

to get the login slackware style i have to get down and dirty with the rc.2 files in etc.

I can also recommend Slamd64, it's pretty much the official Slack recompiled for 64 bits. It's not official but as close to the official Slack as it could be.

I'm keeping my main Slackware machine because well, it's Slackware. What more do I need to say?

But like you, I had a need to find an OS to exploit some new 64 bit SMP boxes and more RAM. I haven't found anything I'm happy with yet. We should probably open a new thread for Slackers who want a 64-bit OS.

So far I have tried Free, Net, and OpenBSD in i386 and AMD64 ports. Mind you I have run all these on i386 single CPU boxes in the past but I wanted to see what the i386 port did on an SMP box with plenty of RAM. NetBSD screams, but it locked up one time too many and I am waiting until the next version to try again. DragonFly sounds way cool but it usually doesn't boot on my boxes and these new ones are no exception. OpenBSD runs great but has a limited package tree. Even so, almost every reasonable app is available now, it's getting better and better each release. FreeBSD gives me high benchmarks (almost at the top of the list on phystech) but it feels horribly sluggish. Apps take forever to load. And rarcrack only does 22-25 pswds/sec while on openSUSE 11.1 x86_86 on the same box does 750/sec.

Still looking for something I can live with. If OpenBSD can run rarcrack at or better than openSUSE does then it will be the new choice for me.

If Pat will bless a 64-bit variant or even better put out his own then I will go back to 100% Slack. If not, I'll keep on keeping on with my 32bit SMP Slack which does run great and keep searching for something else to exploit new hardware in the meantime.

The biggest thing that puts me off debian, is all that political infighting that seems to break out at regular intervals, like the current silliness over whether or not to include binary firmware blobs which is delaying the release of Lenny. At the rate they're going, it'll take longer to free Lenny than it did to free Nelson Mandella!

What I don't understand is why it has to be deemed "official". It's just a word.

For me, I trust Pat because of what he put out over the years. If he makes it official then I know it will flat work and it will be around for a long time. It would be something I would have confidence in.

I would also prefer a single lib distro as opposed to multilib. I think it will encourage people to start coding for pure 64 bit and a lot more stuff will be available and work. Running multilib is not so different from running Linux compatibility in FreeBSD for example.

yup, if he put his stamp of approval on slamd64 i would migrate to it. im about going nuts looking for tarballs now =). oh and i fibbed, im still having problems with adobe flash. must see you... tube.... haha

Do you really do anything that will take advantage of the 64 bit procs? I could understand the RAM thing, if you didn't want to rebuild your kernel... The avg person doesn't do anything that will really take advantage of the 64bit arch - especially when it comes to desktop users.

If you really love Slackware, you should try some benchmarks on your 'normal' or even 'abnormal' uses to see if 64 bit is actually helping you. This is the reason I run Slackware on all my 64 bit systems (minus a personal Xeon server and a SPARC). I (personally) gain nothing from running 64 bit OS on those machines. Of course YMMV...

I'm not sure there's so much to be gained from 64 bit mode but they don't sell many 32 bit chips and it seems kinda wasteful to have a big machine loafing along. Surely people can start taking advantages of new services while coding and start exploiting some stuff that will yield performance advantages....or maybe not. In my job there was a huge gain going from 24 bit to 32, but from 32 to 64 it's been a huge yawn.

Seconded. In addition, I have a lot of admiration for Pat for sticking to those principles in the presence of considerable market pressure to jump on various bandwagons or adopt new technologies. That has to be difficult. The result of that steadfast commitment to quality and stability is a distribution in which I can persuade skittish managers to have confidence.