I disagree with you on this one. Slack does have dependency problems, but because its package managment tools are not too complex, they are easy to resolve compared to some other distros. Vector Linux is working on a tool that does proper automatic dependency checking and resolution on Slackware based distros, so this maybe included with Slack if it turns out to be a good tool.

Now that does sound interesting!! I have been playing with Vector recently, and I must say they have come a long way. Quite the Distro!!

2 pence worth:

I use slackware. I'm using it now. but i had a dell d600 laptop. With an intel ipw2100 wireless card that i needed to use. I decided to use ubuntu because i had heard it would work with that hardware. now that's not to say that slackware wouldn't. But i didn't have the time to get it all working. Although Ubuntu is great, there are some problems with it. And i still prefer slackware. It's just so smooth and fast. And it just *works*. Fair play to the ubuntu team though. Hardware support is excellent and the GUI tools are really quite effective. I think my point is that slack and ubuntu are useful in different ways. Which extends to distributions in general a i guess. I would say it's much easier to break a debian based distro with installing new packages that it is with slack.

Re Vector: i run this on an 850Mhz machine. (which also has FreeBSD on it). Yes, it's very good indeed. I'm impressed. Smooth and slackware like, but it does have a couple of good GUI tools to configure it. I hope it's a distro that goes places, as installing and using it are very pleasureable. I guess it's slackware with a bit of input. I still think that great thing about slackware is that is is 'your' distributon and that the packages are as the writer intended and are not changed a lot (hello ubuntu).

Hello All!

Thank you all so much for input!

After some searching, I decided right now to go for debianpure (debianpure.com). It is a one CD Debian distribution - that purportudely doesn't change around much like other Debian-based distros.

Vector Linux seems pretty good as well. But because I never tried Debian's packaging system before, I think I'll give it a try. It has gotten some good reviews.

As for Slax, since I want more robust environment and not just a live-CD, I think I'd go for Vector Linux first if I go for a Slackware-based Distro.

Thank you all again!
Mords

Although it seems that you made a selection, already, here's my 2 Cent. If I got you right, you actually asked two questions:

(1) What other distribution will be a good choice in order to learn what else is available for a Slacker?

(2) How can I make it easier to set up the computers of my friends without having to do a lot of configuration each and every time?


Here's what I think.

(1) I'd suggest that you try Debian or one of its derivatives and SuSE. If you feel confident you might also give something like Arch, Gentoo or ROCK a try. SuSE is currently the best distro for modern laptops, because of SCPM, a tool that makes life a lot easier for roaming users.

(2) There is more than one way to achieve this.
- Set up a system with a typical configuration and make an ISO image off it. Create a bootable CD from it. I haven't done this, but it should be possible to create a Slackware installation CD that has most things pre-configured the way you want them.
- In SuSE (and, AFAIK, in Red Hat and others, as well) there's a tool that allows you to save a given configuration that you can then distribute to other machines in your network. You can even do fresh installs based on that configuration. I haven't checked it, but I am pretty sure that such a tool is available for Slackware, too. In SuSE, you can use YaST for that purpose.
- Create your own distribution. STOP! READ ON! It's easier than you might think. Just go to http://www.rocklinux.org and start reading. One good point here: The ROCK build system is a collection of Bash scripts that run properly on Slackware. So you can build your own, customised distro on Slackware. And it's not *that* difficult. All you need is a lot of patience for the first build. On an AMD 2500 XP with 1GB of RAM it takes about five or six days to compile a compile distribution. Once this is done, updates run a lot faster. (Like in Gentoo and Arch).

Have fun!

gargamel

just to add a little bit to what gargamel said:

yeah, making a customized slackware cd is very easy... i'd recommend doing that instead of making an image from an already-installed system... there's a basic overview of how to make your own cd in the isolinux readme file:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackwar...nux/README.TXT

Quote:

In SuSE (and, AFAIK, in Red Hat and others, as well) there's a tool that allows you to save a given configuration that you can then distribute to other machines in your network. You can even do fresh installs based on that configuration. I haven't checked it, but I am pretty sure that such a tool is available for Slackware, too. In SuSE, you can use YaST for that purpose.

on slackware you can use tagfiles, but they only take care of the package selection... if you know bash it's easy to write a script which you can run on the target box to set all the conf files...

http://www.start-linux.com/articles/article_64.php

http://www.bilbos-stekkie.com/tagger/tagfiles.html

Quote:

Create your own distribution. STOP! READ ON! It's easier than you might think. Just go to http://www.rocklinux.org and start reading.

also take a look at this rock-based project:

http://www.t2-project.org/