Installed 9.1 for the first time last night and to be honest it drove me nuts. I'm new to linux but installing GUI installs was a breeze with Mandrake10, FedoraCore2 etc... I felt the hardest was partioning the drive right. I finally popped in a bootable Partition Magic 8 CD and did it that way, much much easier IMO. From there I finally got the friggin thing to install after 3 attempts. I finally figured out that I never set the partition as bootable and I was 1 second from giving up slackware all together but I stuck in the CD booted and typed in CFDISK and made the partition bootable and voila it worked. So excited and after I found out about startx I'm ready to go on my crappy dell latitude. I"m gonna take an image of my hard drive so I can monkey around with it and do a quick restore if need be. I'd like to compile a kernel for the first time and I know I'm gonna blow it up. Anyway so far so good, can't wait to get home from work and try it some more!

in contradiction to most other posts on this forum i can say that slackware has caused me less problems than any other distro i've installed, out of the box (desktop computer). Post install configuration only needed for system tuning. I am still somewhat of a linux newbie (4 years) so i might not detect any "holes" in my install. For my server though, i use redhat. I've encountered alot of problems with slackware when used on my server. I mostly think i use redhat because of old habit. I started out with slackware on my old server which only had isa slots and found the networking to be a *itch to install. now with my new server i suspect slackware would work just as good as redhat does. and i like slackware organisation better than i do redhat's.

I go back all the way to Slackware 3.0 (kernel 1.3.x), the first Linux I recall successfully installing. After this, RedHat versions 5 through 7.3 (kernels 2.2.x through 2.4.x) took much attention away from Slackware. Then tried both Debian 3.0 and Slackware again (9.1 and now 10.0).

IMHO, RedHat/Fedora has a much more polished install interface but can be somewhat bewildering if one does not know EXACTLY what the purpose of the PC will be. Nice fancy icons for the various package groups though ("disk sets" in Slackware terms).
Debian 3.0 Woody's installer seems very user-UNfriendly for me. Came to its package selection using dselect and spent way too much time going over modules lists and intricate package detail; definitely NOT for newbies. There is a Debian Sarge installer in beta-testing which is supposed to hold promise for a better installation.

For Slackware v10.0, similar to v3.0 way back, its 1) read Pat V's documentation on install disk 1, 2) partition drive(s), 3) run full 'setup' 4) reboot and do any extra configuration and editing, and voila... working workstation or server from the start!!!

Slackware was my very first distro. I have been using it since version 8.0 (I know not very long). I tried Suse for about 8 minutes, because I heard of YaST (installer) great hardware detection. So after installing I thought I would see how well it detected and configured my video card. I type "startx" and it said command not found, I rebooted with Slack Disk 1 and never looked back.

-tank

I totally agree. I installed other distros first like Mandrake and Red Hat and then Fedora, following the advice of some ppl that these are the distros for the newbies. Not true: 2 weeks ago I decided to give slack a chance: never been happier: sure it needed some tweaking at first, the x server wasn't starting and when it did it had no 3d acceleration. But with some googling and some reading everything is working perfectly now. I learnt more in 2 weeks of slack than in 1 year of other so called user-friendly distros. And it is extremely fascinating. If you wanna learn linux I think slackware is the way to go.

installing Slack is alot of HW trouble, and since a few months i think that's ok, in fact it's a fine encouragement
to learn something about the pc. itself. ( learn before you drive....)
so....Slack might just be the best.
( but don't think that. when everything works fine, you know it all)

egag

I never said that I knew it all because everything works fine now. I consider myself a newbie. What I am saying is that is not impossible for a newbie to install slackware: just some will of learning and some googling. that's all. knowledge is infinite and noone can claim to know it all.
giana

well,....seems we got the same opinion. .. and i did not write about a specific person ( maybe myself ??? )


egag

my apologies: I thought u were referring to me. my bad

You just described my exact situation. I have been a user since 1999 using any distro I had time to play with. I kept passing up Slackware due to the stigma of it being difficult. Recently I made the switch from SuSE 9 (which does most things for you) to Slackware 10 and it has been wonderful. I love it and I love the learning. When I read a guide on how to do something in Linux it works in Slack...I cant say the same about SuSE.

I love to learn...some other people dont feel that way....

I too have been using Linux (on and off) since 1999, I came up the Mandrake 6.1, 7, 7.1, 8, 8.2, route in desktops
mandrake 9, 9.2 & 10 absolutely refused to have anything to do with my laptops.
Then I discovered MEPIS (sept 2003), which blew my mind and it really reignited my passion for linux it was so easy to use and configure it was awesome.....

THEN,,,,, I installed Slackware 10 2 weeks after release, and I learned more about Linux in that first weekend than I have in the whole 5 damn years I have been pissing around with mandrake....

Everything just fell into place with my Laptop (which is an HP) I have been using Slackware full time since then and Im never over in the dark side of my hard drive any more (I only need it for Autoroute which I very rarely use)

Anyway getting to the point of my novel
I personally think that Slack is perfect for a beginner who has some experience in Linux, I dont think its an ideal first choice for the average windows refugee straight from XP.

That being said IF I had dscovered Slack way back in 99,,
I honestly dont think I would have found out what what windows 98, 2000, or XP looked like.

Slack isnt hard to use or install for that matter, you just need to pay attention to things and want to learn how your machine and distro work together!

[EDIT]
Of course,, there is also the prestige of saying your'e a Slacker

After coming from a Windows background to linux my first distro was Mandrake 7.1, but just couldn't see why everyone recommended it to me, because it seemed to me like it was just an attempt at a clone of what I was trying to get away from. After I heard the word slackware linux mentioned by a few local guru's I decided to try it out...
After staring at a bunch of text on-screen instead of a nice GUI immediately gave me the sense that this was going to be one scary ride, but instead it was much easier than I ever expected, after the installation was done and I was logged in to my slackware console, I knew that this was the something I was missing from linux all along. Sure I made loads of mistakes in the beginning, but learned an awesome amount out of it!

If you are a newbie wanting to learn, there is nothing better than slack, I would without a doubt in my my mind tell you to go for it and don't be afraid to make mistakes :)

- jiyan

The only thing that gave me a hard time - if you can call it that - when I first tried slackware (8.1) was the permissions. Things that worked out-of-the-box in SuSE and (to a lesser degree) RH, did not work in slack because the permissions are more restrictive initially - sound for example. I was then left thinking I had missing drivers or something because the other distros did not force me to learn this stuff.

The thing that makes the slack install so simple is that you can just choose to install everything, and it's still a fairly slim package. With SuSE I was spending a considerable amount of time removing crap I did not want installed and installing things (like mc and locate) that did not get installed in any of the pre determined package groups. How do you not install mc by default!!! How do you live without mc? Now I just say "PV knows best" and I have everything I need.

The first thing I tried was Debian, on an old machine of mine. Scary. The installer went past me and I didn't know the command line, yet was dumped to it after reboot with nothing to do. I spent a little bit learning some commands, and then tried Slack 9.1 on that same machine. I loved the system, but had a nasty hardware issue that I thought was the software's fault. Yet, I learned how to compile kernels, use the terminal for all matter of everything, and do goofy things, all on a 166Mhz computer.

When I bought my new machine (Pentium 4 2.8Ghz) I figured I'd use Mandrake, since I wanted things to work right away, since I'd use it for more than just a learning machine. It never caught on. I tried Red Hat and liked that better, but it still didn't stick. So, I installed Slack 10 and wondered where I was for the past few months. Thanks to the hotplug script, I didn't have to manually load my sound card, and everything else has been just fine.

I won't put down any of the distros I've used and there have been many. I've picked-up something along the way from everyone of them . But for a newbie I would still suggest one of the friendly distros if only because it keeps them with linux. And that's what you want.

I remember my first foray into this wonderful world of linux. It was horrible! Boy did I screw up my Win box! But Mandrake and SuSE made it easy. From them I got results and that kept me coming back looking and probing and playing with Linux. So, as far as the 'mainstream' Linux distros; nothing wrong with them. They fill a niche. And like someone said, most folks just want their OS to work. I don't blame them. Do you?

I'm now at a point where all of my experience is coming into play. I now know how to ask questions (very important) and what errors messages mean (kind of). Or what they might mean. Without my previous experience, installing Slackware would have been a nightmare. Slackware is expanding my knowledge beyond what I've learned so far. I'll give it credit for that.

I have now installed Slackware. And you're correct in saying Slackware is not difficult to install. Jumping into the 'deep end' was not really at all that bad. But only because of my previous experience. If it was the first distro I tried to work with, I wouldn't be here.

A side bar if I may: Fedora Core 2 is what I consider my main OS at the moment. Great distro. But who knows, maybe Slackware will take it's place one of these days. Just might.