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Old 09-02-2009, 02:01 AM   #1
robert3242
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I have to admit I'm impressed.


I've been using various Linux distros off and on (mostly on) for the past five years or so, but a few hours earlier, I got my very first experience with installing Slackware 13.0. I'd never even tried Slackware before because I'd always thought (based on what I'd heard and what I'd read about how difficult it can be to set up) I probably wouldn't even be able to get it functioning. I could hardly have been more wrong.

I downloaded the 32-bit DVD image, burned it, and booted it, and the actual installation was about as easy as I've ever done with any distro including those who give the user very little in the way of choices.

Within a couple of hours, I'd not only gotten KDE4 (more about that later) up and running, but had also installed flash, the multimedia codecs I need, installed the latest Nvidia driver using their installer, and also found out where to get the slackbuild scripts for openoffice, downloaded them and the openoffice source, built the thing using the provided scripts, then used installpkg to install it just as easily as I can change my shirt.

I've tried OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Debian, PC-BSD, Mint, Sabayon, just to name a few, and I've been a pretty die-hard Debian kind of guy for a long time and have a custom installation of that on another partition which does everything I need and does it all very well including my own DIY kernel and I'm happy with it. But Slackware... It's amazing to me what Patrick's done with this distro. I'm no newbie and I use the CLI a lot in Debian, but installing and configuring Slackware was still several orders of magnitude easier than I thought it could ever be.

I went with the whole KDE4 installation and again, I've tried KDE4 on several other distros including Kubuntu and Mandriva, and have been less than impressed. What Patrick's managed to do here is to make the darn thing work. I'm not saying I've decided it's the best GDE out there as there are several things about it I'm not crazy about. But as provided in Slackware 13, it does work and I've gotten it to do everything I want.

I'm definitely going to be playing with this for a while. The only thing Slackware seems not to have is Gnome (which I'm used to and always use in Debian), but that isn't a deal-breaker by any means.

Patrick and whomever (if anyone) helped him put this release together, IMHO, are to be congratulated.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 02:03 AM   #2
Daedra
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Quote:
Originally Posted by robert3242 View Post
I've been using various Linux distros off and on (mostly on) for the past five years or so, but a few hours earlier, I got my very first experience with installing Slackware 13.0. I'd never even tried Slackware before because I'd always thought (based on what I'd heard and what I'd read about how difficult it can be to set up) I probably wouldn't even be able to get it functioning. I could hardly have been more wrong.

I downloaded the 32-bit DVD image, burned it, and booted it, and the actual installation was about as easy as I've ever done with any distro including those who give the user very little in the way of choices.

Within a couple of hours, I'd not only gotten KDE4 (more about that later) up and running, but had also installed flash, the multimedia codecs I need, installed the latest Nvidia driver using their installer, and also found out where to get the slackbuild scripts for openoffice, downloaded them and the openoffice source, built the thing using the provided scripts, then used installpkg to install it just as easily as I can change my shirt.

I've tried OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Debian, PC-BSD, Mint, Sabayon, just to name a few, and I've been a pretty die-hard Debian kind of guy for a long time and have a custom installation of that on another partition which does everything I need and does it all very well including my own DIY kernel and I'm happy with it. But Slackware... It's amazing to me what Patrick's done with this distro. I'm no newbie and I use the CLI a lot in Debian, but installing and configuring Slackware was still several orders of magnitude easier than I thought it could ever be.

I went with the whole KDE4 installation and again, I've tried KDE4 on several other distros including Kubuntu and Mandriva, and have been less than impressed. What Patrick's managed to do here is to make the darn thing work. I'm not saying I've decided it's the best GDE out there as there are several things about it I'm not crazy about. But as provided in Slackware 13, it does work and I've gotten it to do everything I want.

I'm definitely going to be playing with this for a while. The only thing Slackware seems not to have is Gnome (which I'm used to and always use in Debian), but that isn't a deal-breaker by any means.

Patrick and whomever (if anyone) helped him put this release together, IMHO, are to be congratulated.
There are actually gnome projects out there for slackware... not sure if they have packages for 13.0, but soon probably.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 03:27 AM   #3
bzyk
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Well, slack if beautiful, but only when you have much time, or no need some exotic stuff... But try to use this distro when you busy man and need ad-hoc some soft like... Miro for example, or DigiKam. With Debian and his apt-get it's very fast and simple.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 05:55 AM   #4
rvdboom
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Quote:
What Patrick's managed to do here is to make the darn thing work.
I think the main thing is that Patrick and his team apply very little patches to released sources, while many distros tend to backport many patches applied to trunk, especially in KDE. I guess many of these backports are not completely thought out and I believe many complains about KDE4 come from these shaky backports and patches, aside from the problems with video drivers.

Quote:
you have much time, or no need some exotic stuff
... or are well organized. Once a slackbuild is available, compiling from sources is usually not a huge problem and you can do it only for each new release if you don't want to spend much time in it. Or you can as I do compile a svn or git pull once in a while, and this can be completely automated.
I use Digikam and many other "exotic" project and it's really not that much time to handle.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 06:13 AM   #5
bzyk
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rvdboom View Post
Once a slackbuild is available, compiling from sources is usually not a huge problem and you can do it only for each new release if you don't
Searching, downloading (or in worst situation - creating) slackbuild is always more time-consuming then simpy apt-get install
And what about dependies? Can you imagine this all dependies for Miro?
 
Old 09-02-2009, 06:37 AM   #6
GazL
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bzyk View Post
Searching, downloading (or in worst situation - creating) slackbuild is always more time-consuming then simpy apt-get install
And what about dependies? Can you imagine this all dependies for Miro?
It's a trade-off. Time and effort, against getting exactly what you want, rather than what the repository/package maintainers think you should want. Both schemes have their pros and cons.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 06:42 AM   #7
brianL
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bzyk = yet another Debian Troll.
Every so often (too often) we get a whining Debianite jumping into a thread, criticising Slack. Why? Why?? Why???
 
Old 09-02-2009, 06:55 AM   #8
Cheesesteak
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I'll go the other way... I've played with Debian, and I don't like apt-get. In fact, I like to call it crapt-get. That, and aptitude... they try to be too smart... end up removing wanted packages automatically. What a pain! I thought it was supposed to make life easier.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 07:03 AM   #9
vbisis
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@robert3242 : I think ist is just good to hear what you say.

I think absolutly the same about Slackware, those behind it do a really great job. All I've learned about linux, I actually learned using Slackware ( started with 9.1 ).
I had a problem, I googled, I found a solution and it worked. It was great. XServer was rock stable, while it used to crash my whole Systme under Suse. All my hardwrae worked flawless including my usb-printer it was just great to just have a working system where YOU know what happens
 
Old 09-02-2009, 07:05 AM   #10
Martinezio
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brianL: In our country You can hear, that "If You don't know, what's about, it's about money"

bzyk: playing with dependences is fun, and You can learn much more, than from simply apt-get install And slack offers You debian-like package management tool: slapt-get, if You don't know Of course, the dependences are on You, but You can get that way many ready packages from remote repositories Do not criticise anything, if You don't know enough about.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 08:45 AM   #11
hitest
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bzyk: Each to his own. True. Slackware does take a bit of effort to get configured, but, to me the effort is worth it. My operating system is second to none.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 10:43 AM   #12
glore2002
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I use both, Debian and Slackware. Both are great and stable distributions so no need to say one is better than the other. I like both. It takes time to get used to a linux distribution so it also takes time to evaluate it.

Well, that's my opinion. Thanks to you all.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 12:29 PM   #13
rvdboom
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bzyk View Post
Searching, downloading (or in worst situation - creating) slackbuild is always more time-consuming then simpy apt-get install
And what about dependies? Can you imagine this all dependies for Miro?
It's usually a work you do once and then are done with it.
And I've given up on dependency management in packages the day apt-get has decided to install a full gnome environnement when I just wanted CUPS, just because the CUPS debian package had a dependency on gnome-print.
It's true that with Slack, you might want to know what you install on your system and why. But actually, that's exactly one of the main reasons people using Slackware use it.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 01:03 PM   #14
robert3242
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rvdboom View Post
It's usually a work you do once and then are done with it.
And I've given up on dependency management in packages the day apt-get has decided to install a full gnome environnement when I just wanted CUPS, just because the CUPS debian package had a dependency on gnome-print.
It's true that with Slack, you might want to know what you install on your system and why. But actually, that's exactly one of the main reasons people using Slackware use it.
I've settled on Debian in the past simply because one can install a system such as I've done in my other partition which keeps the fluff to a minimum (unlike a good many other distros which shall remain nameless). But you're right about the dependency issues. In my case, I've learned to work around the worst of them and not get too much more than I actually want. The question for me with Slack is will I be able to manually resolve such dependency issues as may arise. So far, I've downloaded, built, and installed several packages from the Slack repo itself and even more from Slackbuild and I've run into no problems. I'm building Wine as I write this, read the README first and built and installed fontforge as it said that was required, and so far so good. Building openoffice was a breeze and I was able to do it so quickly it really blew me away. And it runs perfectly.

The more I use Slack, the more impressed I am, so much so that I haven't even booted my Debian system all day so far and this is the first time in a *long* time I could've said that.
 
Old 09-02-2009, 01:09 PM   #15
vik
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Try adding your own builds into the mix with apt-get or aptitude. Say you compile your own version of mplayer and then want to install something with a dependency on mplayer. Aptitude will force you to install another mplayer, even if you explicitly tell it not to as this would result in a "broken" package.

I agree with the above poster about dependency hell: one time I wanted to upgrade to the xine in the testing repository and it ended up wanting to upgrade 47 packages with it, since X "depends" on xine.

There are pros to Debian's system: if you like the package maintainer's version, then just selecting the package in aptitude to install is easy as cake. It is a good way to try out new software as well. But it is harder to do things your own way: i.e. installing Firefox instead of Iceweasel. Also, tweaking a slackbuild is easier than trying to mess with Debian source packages...

Another good example: compiling your own kernel the standard way, not the Debian way. I couldn't get it to work without an initrd even with ext3 modules built-in; but I can get it working in Slackware.
 
  


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