I apologize for the length of this post, I hope you can bear with me.

I have been running OpenSUSE 10.2 on my laptop and have been generally happy with it. I have Slackware on a box at home and I do prefer the Slack approach. I initially went with SUSE because of its good reputation for hardware recognition and since it is a work computer, I needed it to work right away, which it basically did. But, I would really like to be running Slackware on it, except I have become dependent on two features in SUSE, hence, my dilemma.

Please help wean me from my dependencies.

First my hardware highlights: Lenovo T60, ATI X1400 graphics, Atheros wireless.

I have been compiling the madwifi package directly since I got this computer since the version bundled with SUSE didn't support my card, so I am not worried about that.

The graphics drivers have been a challenge, but aren't they always.

First issue for me is keeping current.

I like that SUSE tells me when security patches are available. I have never really become comfortable with slack package management and patching. Any advice or pointers to good references on this would be appreciated.

Second issue is networking.

I have a number of distinct network configurations: home, two office locations, and "roaming" with wired and wireless configurations for each "location." Some setups use static IPs on my eth0 interface (different IPs for different locations) and others use DHCP for eth0. The wifi interfaces naturally have different WEP keys and I find a lot of the wifi info I have read quite opaque. Some set-ups have static DNS server entries while others obtain them from a DCHP server.

SUSE has a neat profile manager utility that basically lets you construct a number of distinct configurations (networking plus anything else) that made switching network configs a breeze.

How do people manage a wide array of network environments in Slackware? I would guess you have a number of configuration files and write some scripts to copy in the setting you want followed by a network restart. Which files would I need to squirrel away for customization? Or is there another way?

That's it. Thanks for taking the time to read this far.

In my experience and reading, this sounds like a pretty typical dilemma. I, for one, have not found the solution and I therefore I do not use Slackware as my default.

Simplistically, Linux users fall in two camps:
1. Willing to learn a few basic things to get up and running with a user-friendly distro. Mostly interested in just getting work done.

2. Cannot stop tweaking and will customize anything they install. In the extreme this group has purist tendencies and gravitates to things like Slack, Arch, Gentoo, or LFS.

I'm in the middle: I cannot get "over the hump" with Slackware, I never have a large enough block of time for Gentoo or LFS. Currently, I typically set up a working system using Arch, and then continue to try all other distros at random.

To keep up with security upgrades, there's nothing as easy as subscribing to the slackware-security mailing list. You'll receive a message everytime there is a security upgrade. If I remember correctly, there are also mailing lists or RSS feeds on the Slackware changelog. Subscribing to those is easy too.

As for the process of downloading and installing upgrades, slackpkg (in /extra) or slackroll (my proud creation I always put in second place) make installing them a breeze.

As for the network profiles I'm not sure. There are programs out there. For example, the soon-to-be-released Slackware 12.2 will have wicd available as a stock package. It helps managing wireless profiles. Its webpage also mentions is manages wired profiles, but I haven't used it deeply and can't confirm it.

you could configure slackpkg to download latest security patches every day, that way you would stay up to date.
I believe that wicd is the best network managing solution for slackware (in conditions where switching from wired to wireless) for laptops, also it probobly doesn't have the functionality of suses network manager.
in a condition where all settings are gathered from dhcp it's great, but if you sometimes have to configure some settings with hand, then it's not so good.
an alternative would be writing some scripts for each profile (also they would conflict with wicd then)

I've once tried wicd for the same purpose: different networks with different configuration:

It is great! It does manage all network connections if you want to.
Good info about how to configure it is on slackbuilds.org

1. security upgrades - the complete recompiled packages with fixes are in the 'patches/' directory of any mirror. example: http://mirrors.easynews.com/linux/sl...ches/packages/

simply download the tgz files and type
or if you prefer, istall the slackpkg extra and set that up for your favorite mirror.
example: http://mirrors.easynews.com/linux/sl...xtra/slackpkg/

There are RSS feeds that you can subscribe to to notify you of the changes. I just upgrade whenever.

2. Networking -
You would probably have to install an extra package. Or if you got clever, you could edit the rc.inet1.conf and rc.wirless.conf and related scripts to get you a nice setup. If I were to do it, I would have a default option that automatically obtained an IP from dhcp and at my choosing I could restart the script using a profile option. Don't forget to share your solution with the rest of the class.

1) I use: http://darklinux.net/slackupdate/

2) That's a tough one. But as Slackware comes with KDE, you can try some apps from KDE. I don't really use KDE, but maybe something like:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/knetworkconf/
http://linuxappfinder.com/package/knetworkmanager

Thanks to all for the replies. The slackpkg and wicd maybe the tools I need. To H_TeXMeX_H, I looked at knetworkmanager on SuSE. It looks great for wireless, but does not handle different wired connection set-ups at all.

Now that it seems 12.2 has just been released, I may have a holiday project.

One more question. I have searched the package list for encfs (I have also searched the Slackware Package Browser) but it didn't show up. Does anybody know if Slackware 12.2 comes with this tool (it provides encrypted filesystems in user space) and which package or do I need to compile and install it separately?

You can get a SlackBuild for encfs from slackbuilds.org (it has a couple of dependencies which are listed on the encfs page, which are also available from slackbuilds.org). On a side note, wicd is now included with Slackware 12.2 in extra/, so you won't even have to use an unofficial source.

Wicd is great. When a distro comes standard with NetworkManager, I always remove it and install Wicd.

I've thrown my network configs in a handful of files (like wlan.office, wlan.home, wlan.oldlucent and so on) and start them as needed; I just have a "at home" default config in /etc/rc.d/ and that's it.

After all it's usally just switching the the IP, netmask and route - sometimes the encryption stuff - or even just calling a dhcp client.

For DNS, I usally use DJBs dnscache.