One of the reasons I did not try Slack was that cursed floppy thing :).

Happy to hear that it is going away.. or is it. There is no mention in that site that the cd's are installable ...

Actually, the slackware cdroms are BOTH bootable and have been for quite some time now.

I'm assuming you can't boot from CD, but on the first cd-rom in the rootdisks directory there is an image named "bootmgr.???" (i forgot the extension)

Just write it to floppy and boot from it and select "CDROM" when the menu pops up and you'll boot from the CD. It's a nice little workaround for machines that refuse to boot from CD.

Wow, thanks. From the slack manuals, I thought that you had to create two floppy disks, and being the *lazy* me, I didn't do it. So, is the slack cd just like the other distro's. Hmmmm... I now know what my next distro is :).

Well, I was going to throw in another plug for Slackware on this thread, but I see the "Slack Pack" beat me to another one. ;)

It's good stuff. I've managed to break every distro I've tried except Slackware.

It.

Just.

WORKS.

:)

Heh I think you've just put it PERFECTLY.

:)

Slackware has SLAPT-GET and www.linuxpackages.net :)

That is, if you prefer to use binaries :)

i'd say give gentoo a go - i'm going through the install at the moment, admittedly having some troubles but, hey, im learning.

the good thing about gentoo is that it has a *bsd style "ports" system for downloading/installing new software that resolves dependancies and the likes for you :)

also - unlike slack as far as i've seen through my very very small amount of research - gentoo has a kick arse amount of documentation to hold your hand through the install process and a reasonably good forum for question from noobs such as myself :)

gentoo.org

i like mandrake

I liked the suse live eval but for some reason the net install kept crashing so I went with mandrake

Try knoppix (debian)
 

Im a hardcore windows user and system developer that was asked to develop for Linux so I had to find
a disto that I liked.

After trying those regarded as Most used, I finally liked
knoppix due to not have to read tons of docs to do simple things.
It installed itself to the hd by using a script and no fiddling was needed.
It detected all hardware and have been very pleasing to work with
all in all. Its not a smooth as winXp, but does offer the same functionality and
its "dos box" (shell) is far more powerfull.

The only thing I wish for now is that hardware makers include drivers for linux
as they do for all verison of windows.

Hey guys. I too have a question/problem. I have tried: Redhat 9, mandrake 9.2, 10 rc1, fedora core1, and core2 test.

First off, my 3com nic wouldnt even work in mdk9.2 or 10rc1 so that distro is out.

Fedora and RedHat9 worked pretty well, but my radeon 9600pro wouldnt work with 3d acceleration because my VIA 400 chipset agp isnt supported, plus the package installer kept giving me error messages when I tried adding packages after the install.

I've tried gentoo and it works okay, (haven't tried getting 3d accel to work yet), but it takes forever to install and a long time to install programs using emerge and its just not the distro for me since I don't have lots of time to have my computer sit around compiling.

You guys have highly reccommended slackware so I'm downloading the two cds which I hope are bootable *crosses fingers*.

So my main question is: Does anyone know how to get the my via agp 8x chip to work and will the ati driver rpm work in slackware?

Thanks a bunch in advance

Slackware comes with a slick little utility called rpm2tgz.

You can download an rpm, open up a terminal, "su" and put in your root password and then cd to the directory you downloaded the rpm to. Then type and the output will be "whateverthefilenameis.tgz".

Then use the Slackware "installpkg" app to install it, like so: