Ok I am a distro junkie. I have ran Debian on my desktop for almost a year.

However my laptop which is a Dell Latitude C600 with a P3 750 256mb ram I play around with different distros.

I just installed Vector SOHO and the install was very easy. It even choose the correct driver for the ATI card.

How does Slackware compare?

Also how do I install other software. I am used to apt-get and Synaptic.
I managed to upgrade the apps that are already installed. But is there a GUI similiar to Synaptic that let's you choose other software to install or do I have to download and compile?

So far Vector is the fastest distro, it boots in under 45 seconds. Ubuntu, SuSE,PCLinuxOS and Mandrake 10.1 all took over a minute in some cases almost 2 minutes.

I thought the package list included RealPlayer and Acrobat but I don't see them in the menu.

This is my first experience with any Slack distro so be nice.

The Vector Linux installer is very similar to the slackware installer, just with less options.

The easiest thing I have found with a slackware installation is to 'Install Everything' to start, then after install, run 'pkgtool' and remove those thing which you do not need.

With Synaptic, I guess there are repositories and stuff where you can see what software is available to download and install? I'm aware that makes little sense, but I can't think of a better way of phrasing it. Slackware's pkgtool isn't like that, you'll need to download Slackware packages from wherever they're available (like www.linuxpackages.net for example) and install them with it. There is a version of apt-get, called slapt-get, but I've never used it.

I don't like slapt-get. Another 3rd party tool is 'SwareT'. I have used swaret in the past for some thing, but you just need to make sure that you still read the changelog and stuff before you just willy-nilly go off and start doing things with it. It's good at resolving dependancies and stuff if needed. For general system updating I would much rather rely on slackpkg, as it is included in the /extra folder of the actual distrobution. Though it doesn't do dependancy checking.

Slapt-get and GSlapt are the closest things you are going to get to apt-get and Synaptic on Slackware, since they are clones of those programs.

Other than dependency checking only working occasionally (because people creating Slackware packages usually don't enter in the dependency information that slapt-get needs), and only having a fraction of the total packages available that Debian has, it works pretty much the same.

More often than not though, I usually end up compiling my own software and making my own package out of it. That is just how Slackware is.

The install is quite straight forward if you can get beyond partitioning your disk with fdsik of cfdisk and setting up your swap partition. Once you get beyond that then I usually choose, install All. Then after all that and you boot into slack, set-up users, xorgconfig, and alsaconf.
Here's a a link that'll help you install slack. This is for slack 9.1, so when you get to configuring x windows just substitute the command xorgconfig http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/...?postid=311808

The installer is simple and logical. Vector's is a copy. Install all packages (there arent that many anyway compared with fedora and suse etc). You ll have to get the mouse whell going later, sound activated and get the vimrc and bashrc placed. Try Freerock Gnome if you want Gnome.

There are some nice scripts like grubconfig, netconfig etc which are also there in pkgtool.
Installing packages is not that big a deal. Download source from sourceforge.net and compile. But I think Synaptic is easier. I havent used the slapt resource much. In any case, there are nt that many repositories for slack packages as the debian packages.

The system is very responsive for some reason. My 128 MB comp is too slow in Fedora Core 4 even after turning off services. And I goofed my Debian installation to the extent of needing a kernel compile (it worked eventually, which is beside the point). Slackware doesnt require all that.

You will have to manually change the drivers to ATI or whatever on first boot. Slackware puts the defaults as vesa.