dear all,

as many here, i'm new to linux and did some testings on various distris as everyone just does to find out the distri that would be THE ONE for me

this is my little walk:

1. some live CDs like gnoppix and knoppix, which totally caught my interest.

2. mandrake 10.1: too much in their hands, i simply didn't like it and it freezed 1 out of 2 times at boottime (i'm on a x86_64 machine, don't know if that had anything to do with it).

3. fedora core 3, was much more happy about it, though as i was just starting with linux i just couldn't set it up to have a proper multimedia support for my files since i didn't find, for instance, mplayer setup package for FC3 on a AMD64 architecture.

4. i decided then to try SuSE 9.2, and this is the distri i'm currently working on. totally happy. well, not TOTALLY. this is what i'm missing: though i really do enjoy YaST, it only manages those packages that come with the distri. all the others, you have to do them manually. kinda miss YUM of fedora.

furthermore, i'm telling myself: with YaST doing loads of things instead of hard core typing into files, i'm not sure what i'm really learning here.

SO: do you think a newbie like me can start with slack without seriously getting frustrated by the need of editing 4 config files on boot, launching modules, etc? don't want to stop linux out of a total disappointment on me not getting it to run properly. what do you think to be the greatest advantages of this which seems to be the distro with the best comunity out here?

any opinions gratefully welcomed!

cheers,

aj

enjoying the trip to linux

you can .. you can start with anything my suggestion is to read documentation on it and what not but yes slackware is kind of a car you baught at a auction cept this one is about 10 yrs old and you have to tune it to your perfection .. but hey try it if you want

just understand what you are getting, a distro built on simplicity and speed not to be user friendly. In one way it is easier than other distro's because of the way it's built, but if your new and don't have much experience some things might be more than what you want to get into.

As far as package management, there are a couple of tools out there, swaret and slapt-get come to mind, but they have a habit of improperly installing some things ( not too much, but there are some issues here and there).

Botton line, (just my 2 cents), if you want a good distro that is simple (as in not too much clutter, but you have to manually set it up) and fast then you could give slack a try. If you are looking for something that has nice gui tools to use for system admin. and does everything for you, you would be better off with something else.

Slackware was more or less the first Linux distro I used, so you should be fine.


Just rememeber: README, INSTALL, etc, are your friends.

slackware was the first distro i got my hands dirty with. its more of a hobby than anything else. i love slack for the power it gives you over configuring anything from a simple desktop to a powerful webserver and database server and you do get to learn a lot of linux internals with this distro. simply put i couldn't live without slack on my box.

Yes, Slackware was the first distro taste of Linux I'd ever had. It is remarkably easy to learn, and if you have problems then there's a great community that is more than willing to help.

No matter what you start out with, you will end up with something else.

No matter what how good you get with one distro, when you try something else you will feel like an idiot all over again.

Eventually you will get to a point where you realize that "it recognized all my hardware out of the box" does not mean you have the greatest distro.

At some point you get tired of learning how to configure the same shit all over again and just stick with what's stable and what you know and what you trust.

If you know how to configure a kernel and compile from source you can make any distro do what any other distro does.

You WILL destroy your install no less that 14 times. When you learn you don't have to re-install to fix it - THEN you're beginning to get somewhere.

Eventually you will end up with slackware. But I'll be honest here. I use SuSE 8.2 as a file server. When did that come out - 2 years ago? That thing just chugs along. I really does not matter. Once a linux system is configured you can just about forget about it.

The thing with slackware that is hard is finding out what to edit where. But once you do it you know it. As frustrated as I was when I moved to slack from SuSE, I'm FAR more frustrated when I try other distros now.

For example - today I installed Ubuntu warty whorebag, or what ever they call it. "The benneton distro" What distro disables root... WTF is that! Yes I know I can sudo, but come on!!! So I do some googling and I find the following quote on the Ubuntu wiki:

sigh..... Let's treat the user like an idiot why don't we. Ya know, now that I think about it, I do have to keep asking my parents what my middle name is cuz "I so rarely use it".

So my extra partition remains empty cuz "aint nothin' like my slack".

franklin hit it dead on. i tried redhat, mandrake, slackware, bsd, fedora and suse in that order. guess what im on. SLACK. why? because its stable fast and once you understand it the other distro's feel...... like windows (no flame inteded).
i do get frustrated at times, but i know in the end i can get anything i want going (especially with this forums help). the other distros just take too much of the hackability away. ex. slack i can compile a kernel from start to finish in 20 mins. with suse for example, due to "thier" patches it became too much of a pain and i still wasn't sure if it really did anything or if thier patches overwrote what i did. to be honest i didnt give it too much of a chance, but thats because i felt i lost control of the OS.
im not much of a gamer so i can really get rid of my windows partition, but i cant yet as i use it to rip and burn dvd movies.(havent found anything yet tried and trued for linux.
as for stability, my server is slack, running ftp, http, dhcp, dns, samba and nfs and the only down time i had was when i had to cut power to work on the house.

personally if you just dont want to pay for windows but want that type of experience out of the box i would suggest suse. if you want to learn about the os and eventually have the power that windows wishes it had i would suggest slack. it all depends on the time your willing to give it

and again, i am not flaming any distro just my impression and i still consider myself a newbie.


to break it down from best to last (my opinion of what i tried)
Slack (bow down to Pat)
bsd (nice os, just didnt click with me is all)
suse (fast, stable, lacks power user control)
mandrake (little to bloaty for me)
fedora (i like to be somewhat bleeding edge but hate the idea of running a test bed for another os.....redhat)
redhat (i consider this a ms project since you have to pay to play)

Why do people always act like there's loads of configuration required in order to get Slackware working properly? And how do people break their distributions so many times? What!?

Just read, and you'll be fine. There really is no explanation required - just think things through and read the documentation.

Hi acidjiuce,

I can just say: simply do it. I've used Slackware from my linux start and am very happy with it. Slackware has a steep learning curve, but once you've got it behind youself, you won't panic anymore if anything's not working. This is just my 2 cents.

Greetings, Seppel

oh well oh well

this is just fantastic Franklin and pitt30, you've been very precious in determining my choice, however i am really happy and want to thank you ALL guys for this great input.

i'm downloading right now the 4 cds of slack. pity there's no DVD, or at least i don't seem to be able to find it, so i'm gonna build my own bootable DVD out of it (thanks to darren for this one).

hopefully i'll be back in some hours/days with my brand new box, IF i can get my network card running (it's a hell it's an nVidia networkking controller gigalan :S)

again thank you for prooving THERE IS a wonderful community out here. i guess this is a major argument for me switching (or at least trying to) to slack.

cheers,

aj

You only really need the first two CDs.

Actualy, you ONLY need the first CD, the second is purely optional stuff (GNOME/KDE) and heres what i got to say

1. Bow to BSD, its older, its wiser, its UNIX
2. Bow to Andrew Morton, Linus Torvolds and all the other kernel gods, they control your linux .
3. If you don't want to use BSD, use either slackware, debian or gentoo (my preference is in that order).
4. After picking a distro, make love to it.
5. Bow to the kernel demigods
6. Bow to the great commutity of experts in the slackware, debian, gentoo and *BSD commutites.

~predator.hawk

again, thank you.

my only issue with slack is that there is no x86_64 distri. i'm on this architecture. not sure that i'm willing to let that go...

really interested in slack, i'm actually considering gentoo now, for that x86_64 is supported.

mmm.

btw predator.hawk: if you also have AMD3400+ and kingston memories, we're about on the same hardware

Actually, I find that slack is oftentimes easier than some other "easy" distros. I have an nvidia board, and it's a lot easier to run the nforce scripts and install my nvidia hardware with slack than with anything else. Also, although it may not seem like it from a gui perspective, slack has a lot of good customization and hardware detection! Slackware's hotplug is second to none. Lots of little, unobtrusive scripts make life much easier (and faster) than some of the other "elite" distros. If you want to upgrade your kernel, you just get the source and do it. You don't have to worry about hacked, patched kernels. You don't have to worry about your mp3 codecs not being installed. You don't have to worry about breaking your dependancy system by using unofficial software (don't get me wrong, apt-get rules, but every now and then, it's kind of limiting).


Finally, you might find that not having an amd64 port at this point in time isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's some commercial software that you can't find binaries for, and then you have to consider loading 32bit libraries side by side with your 64bit ones. Essentially, you load the same library twice. Sort of kills the purpose of running a highly optimized, 64 bit system.