Hello, I'm considering switching my Linux distro from Centos to Slackware. One of the things that concerns me about Slackware is the support intervals between major releases. Centos is guaranteed to be supported for 10 years, but Slackware seems significantly shorter than that.

However, I've heard that updating between major releases is simpler on Slackware. Is this true? Centos recommends a fresh install for each major version update. Is this the case with Slackware?

I'm mainly running email, file serving, & LAMP stack in a small office setting.

I've come to the conclusion that Redhat's relationship with Centos creates problems in the Centos ecosystem/community, especially when it comes to having conversations about uses in businesses and institutions. Just my take, and I'm looking for an alternative now.

Thanks.

1 - Slackware is supported for about 5 years

2 - Yes, upgrading is easy.

That's a myth. CentOS greatly benefits from Red Hat's support. Even if I'm close to 100 % Slackware now, I've been a long-time CentOS user before, and I still have a soft spot for that great distribution. In my humble opinion, CentOS is one of the three "JustWorks" distributions along with Slackware and Debian.

I forget when announced, but I believe Pat wrote that each release now has a 5 year life cycle.

Updating Slackware is not bad, but if you plan to ride a release to the full five-year EOL, then you might as well perform a fresh install because too much is changed in that period. On average new releases are available about every 9 months. Although updating is easier from release to release, doing so can be a hassle if time is a restraint. With my own life demands and personal schedule, I have for a while now only updated with every other release. Finding time to update every release has become too time consuming for me. An 18 month cycle is more palatable.

There is no "warranty" or "guarantee" when updating outside the norm of updating faithfully with each release. So far I have not had problems updating every other release using the standard Slackware package tools.

Updating Slackware does require reading the change log and update hints, etc.

Well, here's the documentation on how to upgrade from 14.0 to 14.1:

http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackwa....1/UPGRADE.TXT

Hmm, I'm kind of used to "yum update" for minor version upgrades.

Yum, at least in Centos, appears to have the ability to do a live upgrade on the kernel without a reboot. Is this something hard to do? Also, Slackware doesn't seem to have automatic dependency checking, something hard again? I wouldn't be adverse to working on these things with other people if there's a desire to do it and not too difficult. I don't know much about Slackware's development model, so I may be talking stupid.

Thanks

Slackware isn't difficult. It simply requires a little more work, and willingness to read. The benefit of Slackware is that you have much greater control over what is installed and how it is installed. It's quite easy to edit a Slackbuild and update Postfix, for example, to a new point release. The software included in Slackware is usually identical with what is released upstream; Slackware doesn't have a team of packagers sugar-coating its builds just to create proprietary lock-in, as some of the more illustrious Linux releases have. From my point of view the likes of Slackware and Crux are balanced, mature, stable and sane choices for business servers. Grab one or both while you can because a dangerous parasite which shall not be named has recently been injected into the alternatives, a parasite which will turn the likes of RH and Ubuntu and their derivatives into monocultures wide open for corporate and government intrusion and indeed malware.

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Over many years, starting with Unix System 3, though SVR4, Solaris and through multiple releases of Slackware I've learned that simply partitioning the disk drive(s) saves a great deal of time and trouble when a new Slackware (and the older Unix releases, too) arrives: nowadays I set aside a 20G partition for the operating system (all the software on the installation media) and I do a "clean" install in that root partition. I have found doing an upgrade from one release to another cumbersome (and a little error prone), so I do clean install (on multiple systems).

I do partition disk drives with /home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/lib/virtual (for VirtualBox), /var/lib/mysql, /var/lib/pgsql and one catch-all named /spares. When installing Slackware and adding partitions I simply do not format those (the root partition does get formatted). All my systems, including a lap top, are partitioned the same way; I have two data base servers, one for MySQL, one for PostgreSQL, and they are actual second drives for the data bases. I also have one that has a second drive for virtual machines -- the map is the same, but the size may vary.

I follow the old AT&T "rules" and do not install, as much as possible, additional software in the root tree; that goes in /usr/local. I install add-on "package" software; e.g., OpenOffice, in /opt. I copy /etc/ to /spares before starting an installation (so I can simply copy /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow back onto the root tree so all user accounts are immediately available. A typical installation takes about 20 minutes with an additional 15 minutes or so for other twiddling. Generally up and going in roughly a half hour, maybe 45 minutes, never an hour.

This approach has worked for me (and my clients) for over 20 years. Quick, easy, no fiddling and twiddling, no massive copies of existing data here, there and everywhere.

And, I would do and have done this irrespective of what Linux distribution I was using.

Hope this helps some.

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Hi,

Another point to remember that Slackware does provide Security patches/updates for supported releases. You can sign up for Slackware Security Advisories via Mailing Lists
Hope this helps.

Thanks everybody for your replies. They are all very helpful. I think Slackware stresses versatility over ease of use. I'm looking for something that I can give to a client and not have to fiddle with too much, or something I can morph into a distro like that.

Not having thousands of packages that are supported and updated by the distro is not a big deal. There are only about 4 or 5 + dependencies that I need. However, issues like selinux/apparmor are more problematic as are not having automatic interversion updates.

In a broader sense what I'm dealing with is an ongoing debate with my clients about whether their services belong on the cloud, on a local server, or a single server on the cloud. Something like GMail for business for instance seems appealing at first, but when you start looking at privacy issues and tight integration of email messaging with other applications, GMail starts to have issues.

Sorry for getting a little off topic, but the greater topic is that I'm looking for a distro/ecosystem that may be hospitable to optimizing for security & ease of use the individual business server and integrating it with the cloud where appropriate.

Personally I'm a vertical app developer and I'm primarily looking for platforms to run my apps, but invariably I get entangled with clients' greater IT needs.

Thanks.

Been using Slackware in our corporate environment for years (maybe 9 years), multiple facilities. Our main data center started with a RH based fileserver, some email relaying and local delivery, and some odds/ends whenever I found it to be an efficient alternative to other mainstream solutions.

From RH (1 year or so), I made the decision to move to Slackware. I just couldn't get past the sugar-coating and "fluff", although it is stable and well supported. One can argue with me all day (not really, more like 10 minutes until I get bored) on that comment, but with Slackware, it just worked and worked well. Security was never an issue, nor was documented support(I never needed any official support...yet). Anyway, made the switch to SW and it was rock solid for 2 years.

IT Director made the decision to move to CentOS with a server upgrade using an outside "expert" to perform the setup/migration. It crashed after 6 months due to a known issue that had not been addressed by that time, nor was it communicated by our expert. Back to Slack, never looked back.

We serve up millions of files to hundreds of users. Never had a problem with stability, security, or performance. I don't enable the GUI in our environment because it's not needed, but I've used it and it's pretty stable and easy to use, even for lesser experienced users.

The upgrade approach with Slackware is not difficult or unreliable. I think someone mentioned earlier that a bit of extra reading and patience is due, but it works and works well.'tronayne' described a solid and well proven approach to preparing the environment for anticipated upgrades and data "stay put" ideas, and works very well for major version upgrades with very little post-tweaking required.

I would highly recommend Slackware if the applications required are well documented for this distro. The up front extra time (minimal by all accounts) and preparation is well worth the results IMO.

Wow...been YEARS since I've posted here...lot's of catching up to do! Later.

Forgot to mention the most recent addition of SW in our environment. We use this for our eCommerce backend, which accounts for over $1.5 million USD sales/month for our company. That's how confident I am in SW for business use :-)

If I'm the only admin of the server, then Slackware is my distro of choice.

On the other hand, if the client absolutely has to get his hands dirty with system administration, I'll choose Zentyal, which is 100 % GUI.

http://www.zentyal.org/

http://doc.zentyal.org/en/

i would not mind seeing a zentyal-like admin panel for slackware as an option