scare of slack!!!!
 

i have been with linux (rh 8/9) for about 8 months...and successfully isolated windows for about 5 months... so far, i feel happy and hope to learn more about others distro... so, yesterday, i have downloaded slackware 9.1, and decided to have a try... burnt into the CD... and started removing my rh...

haha...i was scared when slack installation first loaded in front of my eyes... gosh... it was really a tedious one, no GUI at all, no GUI, meaning that, it would be something for gurus only......

and i have been trying to make it worked for about one whole afternoon.... i have not doing anything but, just sitting in front of the monitor and pressing "enter" key... after several hrs passed, i decided to give up.... now, i know "slack only for linux gurus"...
and reload my redhat 9... then, suddenly, i feel redhat has been so nice to the users, at least the installation is not such a difficult as what slack does...

for me, rh will do.. i am too ambituos to learn a new distro somehow.....may be i am still new...i still need to polish my knowledge....

conclusion: slack is really tedious.......

Yeah. Slackware was one of the first Distros that I tried when first moving over from Windows. I wasn't terribly happy with it and it seemed a bit over my head.

Right now I'm using RH9 and I have no problems. Everything (except for my printer) is working just great with minimal work on my end. My total installation was about half-hour and I didn't have any problems.

Conclusion: RH9 is my distro of choice.

whats the problem with your printer??may be we can sort it out....
and ofcourse,slack is not for newbies......

Ooh I've got an entire thread already going on my printer problem. I have an Epson CX3200 All-In-One (Printer, Copier, Scanner) which is natively recognized in the Print Manager Setup.

I have read and found plenty of support concerning this model & it seems to work for everyone else. I think I'm just missing something in my installation.

I actually tried to install some packages & drivers for it but I was told that I was missing some compilers (which I guess I forgot to install).

At this point, and only having installed 4 days ago, I'm about to do a clean install (including wiping my windows partition) and going full-blown RH9 with a COMPLETE installation of everything. I'm hoping that will solve my problem.

ya ya, this is a cop out!! Slackware was my FIRST and only distro.
what I did first was read the Slack essentials book and then installed. took a week to get everything down....IE edit scripts, learn to install Nvidia and SB live drivers properly, get gkrellm and mosfet's HP liquid going properly, BUT I stuck with it and I am glad I did.........One just has to be willing to Learn!! Don't make excuses on why you can't do it, excuses means failure.

Heh.. I used Mandrake long time ago.. for a month. Then I switched to RH8 and used it for more than six months. Then I switched to Slack 9 and had no problems with the installation process. If you used Red Hat like more people use winDOHz (i.e. only GUI, scared of the console, configurating all stuff only trough GUI applications..) then you will have problems with Slack. After I installed it, I felt in love with it. It is beautiful, it is fast, it is more stable than RH.. But it is all your decision.
If you want to use Linux - go with Mandrake or Red Hat.
If you want to use and learn Linux - try Slack.

Must say that i find the slackware installation to be very easy, and found it to be very easy 5 years ago.......

I admit that editing scripts aint the easiest part for everyone, but if you read the docs at www.slackware.com then you should get your box up and running in 1-2 days ;)........

I run slackware proudly on my Inspiron 5150 and i gotta say, i love it, and hope you will someday find the slacker inside of you :)....

all of the various linux distros has got the same things inside.the difference is in availability of configuration tools,good support etc.ofcourse,there are differences like apm-get and rpm.but still,i find all linux distros essentially the same.dont blame redhat because they are providing good configuration tools.it is the most widely used distro.and in my opinion,best sutable for a newbie.

Slackware 8.1 was my first Linux installation. Before that I had only ever installed Windows 2000, and I did that with help. I spent a couple days beforehand reading the Slackware book and looking up the specs for my hardware on the net. After doing that, the installation was fairly easy.

As far as I am concerned, Slackware is just like any other piece of technology. If you just read the manual before you try and use it you will save yourself a ton of grief.

Slackware's biggest "flaw" in its installation is that it forces you to actually learn something about your hardware. Once you install Slackware you've learned so much that any installation that's more user-friendly than Slackware seems almost trivially easy.

I'll admit that Slackware is different, and people often don't like different. They want the nice, familiar GUI, and for that Red Hat is great (though not the best IMHO).

You spent an hour pressing enter at the command prompt?

*finds a mute button*

Okay, now that I've regained my composure here. You're telling us that you jumped into a text based installer and you haven't even used CLI (command line interface)?

Besides the fact that it says in plain english that you should type cfdisk to partition your harddrive and then type setup...

I don't mean to sound like a Linux elitist or something, but at least do a LITTLE bit of your homework first.

-Artimus

The installation instructions on the Slackware website are very well written and helpful.

I know it sounds really cheesy, but once you go Slack you'll never go back! :rolleyes:

I always recommend dual/multi booting OS experiments.
No matter if you are moving from Windows to Linux or trying different Linux or *nix versions.
You will find you can be a little more "detached" in your opinions when you are not forced to spend hours or days to relearn simple tasks.
Then you can appreciate the real pluses or minuses and the usefulness to your own purpose.
Sometimes it is better to learn and sometimes it is better to drop.

i installed redhat 7.2 for about .5 months. on my 400 mhz box this thing was bloated, slow, and for the longest time i had the impression that KDE was linux. what a dumbass.

then i went for what people called the "hardest" distro to use and the distro for gurus...slackware at 8.0. slack was fast, simple, and it thought me to become much more advanced user in little time. it's not that you can't learn to operate a cli in linux in another distro like redhat but if you just switch to linux from windows (like i did) it's alot harder.

i learned to install software, set up a wireless network (countless other feats), installed drivers and from then on i could really switch to linux.

anyways you should try again, dont give up just because something seems hard. slack will make you a better linux user, like it did for me.

yup but i always say its better to jump in at the deep end ;) - the best lessons are those learned the hard way ;) and so on and so on
after a couple of months in slackware u will no longer be a :newbie:

I just conquered slack myself, read the docs on the slackware site and was up and running within an hour with slackware 9.0, I was a bit disapointed though to see that they now have support for rpm. I have been a linux user for about 2 years and wanted to get in over my head again so I tried slack, it looks at though I am going to have to start a LFS project.

Overall though slack is running a good bit faster than my redhat installs, the drive performance is much better, I am looking into building my next squid cache server out of slackware. I am leary to use slackware just yet for my other servers as there are not as many people running slack to get help from.