Hey all.

I thought I would ask a few questions here about slackware.

Recently, I have strongly considered testing and installing Slackware. However, I am not very familiar with it and would like some feedback on what to expect with Slackware as well as advantages and disadvantages...

At this time, our network has a Red Hat Linux backbone. It is comprised of 9 total servers, all running Red Hat..(Ranging from 7.3 to 8.0).

Anyways, i'd like to put up another Linux workstation (I currently have a Red Hat station) with another Linux distro on it to play with.

Right now, here are the Distros im considering:

Mandrake 9.1
Suse 8.2
Slackware 9.0

I recognize that slackware has a strong following. But what I wanted to know is:

Why would someone want to use Slack?
What are the advantages?
What are the disadvantages?
Why should I use slack over the others listed above?

Any feedback or experiences that anyone can post here to let me know what exactly I will be working with in Slackware will be greatful.

Thanks all.

Tarballed.

P.S. For Slackware 9.0, is the .iso bootable when burned?

Slackware is for those who are more comfortable with the command line....

It doesn't have a gui installer, but it is still easy to understand. Slackware is the opposite of RH and Mandy, which in some peoples opinion suffer from too much bloat....

When it comes right down to it though...it's not that much different ffrom other distros, it just offers you more control and doesn't hold your hand quite as much.

Good to know. I am not much for GUI's like Gnome or KDE. They feel to heavy for me. I never install them and usually put on something more "light" like Blackbox or fluxbox.

Is there any FHS difference in slack, or does it go the same was as other distros?

Thanks again

Tarballed

I think if anything slack would be closer to the FHS standard than the others.

In the words of slack's creator: "slack tries to be the most Unix-like Linux" or somesuch.

I noticed you have 3 BSD's listed under distrobution. I am not to familiar with OpenBsd or NetBsd but Slackware's installer is very similar to FreeBsd's.
Also, Slackware uses tar.gz, tgz, and bz2 instead of rpm(although you can use rpm if you want).

I administer a small network at work with Linux servers, Linux X terminal workstations and a handful of DOS and Windows machines. I use mostly Slackware, except for a couple of Debian boxes. I experiment with other distros at work and at home so that I can keep track of what the other distros are doing. If some one comes up with a distro that meets my needs better than Slackware, I'll switch. But so far, no one has.

I use Slackware because:

1. It will install and run reliably on a very broad range of i386 hardware. Debian "Stable" does too, but isn't quite as up-to-date. Slackware stays pretty much as current as RedHat, but unlike RedHat, I can experiment with new configurations of Slackware on a 486 or P1 with 16 MB RAM before committing a production machine. A PI with 16 MB (or the rare 486 with PCI slots) and an adequate video adaptor also makes a good X terminal with Slackware, and that's not feasible with anything else except Debian.

2. Slackware's installation utility is less likely to fail on supported hardware in my experience. I don't usually put cdroms in most machines and I normally install via nfs over the LAN. Slackware is very reliable for this, and the disk set selection is a more intuitive approach to installing what you want, and leaving out that which you don't want.

3. Slackware's system initialization scripts under /etc/rc.d are easier and quicker for me to edit along with /etc/inetd. conf to quickly configure wanted/unwanted services, than the full blown SYS V style initialization used in Debian and RedHat or their derivatives.

4. Once up and running, Slackware seems to consume fewer machine resources than RedHat, and also seems to run more quickly. Maybe if I was an expert, I could tweak RedHat, but I haven't been able to. Maybe RedHat's i686 optimizations really don't help. I don't know, and I haven't run any benchmarks. But it feels like a processor upgrade and an additional 64 MB RAM has been installed when I switch a PII or better from RedHat to Slackware.

5. Over the past four years, I have only had a handful of inexplicable lock ups or crashes with Slackware on both production and experimental machines running Slackware 3.5 through 9.0. Using RedHat 5.0~7.3 on a smaller number of machines (mostly for testing), I've experienced numerous lockups and unresponsive systems. One such machine was put into production as an XDMCP server with Slackware 7.0 in December, 1999, and was only replaced with a new machine running Slackware 9 last week -- an upgrade -- the old P200 was still running okay.

Everybody has their preferences. Maybe a larger company that needed Oracle and that had a large budget for hardware would be better off with RedHat...particularly if management insists on things like support contracts and remote upgrade capability. A home user with one up to date, powerful, PC and no particular need or desire to learn to administer a LAN of Linux machines might be happier with RedHat. But if you want to experiment, "off budget," with things like "Zope" on an old 486 or P90 that costs nothing and nobody cares about before you commit to buying a new PIV, then Slackware has definite advantages. You can configure the old junker just as you would the production PIV,and get things right before you spend money.

And once you do put a service into production with Slackware, I think you'll often find it to be faster, and probably more reliable, than if you provide it using another distribution.

(But I'll admit to having a bias. The main thing is "ease-of-use." If Slackware seems easier to me, then anybody with half a brain can use it.)

Just to chime in. My home machine in RH, mainly because someone gave me a set of 5.2 disks a number of years ago and I've upgraded ever since. At work we mostly run Suse, mainly because it had the best PPC support (old RS6000's). I just installed Slackware 9.0 on a new machine and despite some convolutions based on hardware (no cdrom yet, all scsi) with the boot and utility disks (that good old # prompt) I was able to partition the drives, get the network up so I could copy the .tgz's to one partition and throw the installation image on another partition to use as the boot root partition. The system was up and running in no time flat -- none of the `leading' distros could make heads or tails of this. It is fast and stable -- I am a convert.

I've found that configuration on both Suse and RH require one to decipher and reqrite often convoluted scripts that often don't do what is needed or desired. Slackware is much more straight forward, presuming a person knows what they are doing (or at least wants to know what they are doing). I support the "ease-of-use" opinion.

Thanks guys for all your input. I really do appreciate it very much.
I really like what i've read here as it makes me think about a lot of things.

Currently, we are shifting our network to a all "Linux Backbone" running all of our servers: Apache, Mail, LDAP and a few others. (I'm running a FreeBSD box for our DNS server....)

There are a lot of things that I have considered lately regarding distros and what to use. That is why I wanted to get some additional feedback.

I think it was mentioned that Red Hat does hold a good grip in the market as far as name recognition. However, I have used Red Hat 7.0-8.0 and so far, I like 7.3 the best. I flat out dislike 8.0 and have yet to try 9.0.

Like I said, I dont like a lot of extra weight on my workstation or servers when I install a distro. Red Hat 8.0 feels really sluggish to me and that is what started to turn me away from it. (Althought i've shut off a ton of services since I mostly adminster it through SSH)

Anyways, I'd like to try out the following distros on a few test machines, to see what I can do:

Suse 8.2
Mandrake 9.1 (Which ive tried and seems pretty nice...I am very very interested in the "Cooker" packages they have available)

and of Course, Slackware 9.0 (Quickly, is the CDROM ISO bootable once burned?)

I do tend to really like *BSD. They are very very stable and at times, more secure IMHO. However, they do lack in some support for things that I would like to implement....

I do appreciate everyones input.

Also, anyone know of a good link that does testing for Linux running as certain servers? I'd like to find some reviews to see how certain things ran running certain services.

Thanks everyone!

Tarballed

Yes, the ISO is bootable.


I like Slackware for the reasons mentioned above. I have found it to be much faster than RH and Mandrake, and it offers much more control.

Also, Slackware seems to be able to compile and run the most software. Because Slackware is so generic, you dont need special packages for it (though they are available), you can use any source off the net, and not have problems, unlike some of the Commercial distros.

I use Linux for personal use though, so I couldnt tell you what I would pick for a real production environment.

"control" is the main reason most of us here choose slackware ...

Everyone has made Xcellent points!!
Let me ask this, Are you tired of the point and click world?
R/H and Mandy are point and click worlds just like windows.
With Slack it is the Command line, Because if something needs to be fixed or a script needs edited, more than likely you will use the command line in order to get X server going and get into your GUI of preference.

Try 'init 3'. No more point and click for either

I'm not an expert... in fact I can be said to be a total newbie when compared to many of the fine folks who haunt these boards. So my perspective should be considered to be of a beginner.

I've used quite a number of distros as well as OpenBSD. Before sticking with slack, I only used Mandrake extensively (9.0 and 9.1). I decided to switch distros because I got sick and tired of unsuccessful installations of KDE window decorations which I really wanted to use (stupid reason, I know... but at least it introduced me to the beauty of slack).

Anyway, from a total newbie with near zero knowledge of editing config files and kernel compiling, I achieved quite a number of things under slack. Some of my proudest achievements are:

1) I managed to get my onboard AC97 sound card working.
2) I managed to get the scroller on my Logitech cordless optical USB mouse working.
3) I managed to compile a dev kernel working according to my preferences.
4) I managed to make modload working on the aforementioned dev kernel (2.5.69) by using rusty's module init tools.
5) I managed to setup iptables to block ICMP and IGMP packets from reaching my box (quite a feat IMHO because most iptables examples on the net are for routing and/or multi-homed boxes)
6) I managed to get ADSL to work on my box.
7) I become addicted to Vi and even use it to edit files even if I'm on KDE.

Sorry for the bragging, but now here's my reason of why I wanted to try Slackware.

1) Heard from A LOT of people about it's stability.
2) Heard from A LOT of people that it is more Unix-like among other distros. The same also goes to Debian...
3) I chose it over Debian because every package is only on ONE CD.
4) The community is more helpful and knowledgable.
5) Every library/module/etc is at its proper place, unlike weird distros like Mandrake.
6) The package system is really smooth!
7) Converting RPMs to packages is as easy as rpm2tgz file.rpm...
8) And 99% of the time the conversion actually works!
9) It makes me learn more about linux faster than any distros I've tried.

To conclude, if a newbie like myself loves it, power users would love it even more! Go ahead... take the plunge! You'll never look back... trust me

I've been using Slack since version 5.
I have tried RH, and Mandrake, and both of them seemed bloated to me.
I like Slackware because since version 5 there has been little change to the directory structure, and almost all the tutorials and programs you find out on the web will translate into Slack.

I have setup web servers, and email servers, and now I finally made the jump to converting my home system totally to Slack 9.0

Now I am having to learn new things, like USB, and X-Windows.

As you can tell from that statement I have normally setup boxes that you remove the keyboard and monitor and just let it run. And run it does. My friends and I at college setup a Slack email/DNS/web server on a Pentium 75 with 64Mb of RAM and it ran for 6 months straight. The only reason we had to restart it was our Quake server crashed and took most of the RAM with it.

So Slack get's my vote.

my vote go to slack to i tried mandrake its realy bad (my opion)