Yes. That's a fair point. As much as I like Slackware, if someone wants a minimal install, I'd be inclined to point towards Arch or debian. It can be done on Slackware with some care, but the 'full' install is really the recommended way to run Slackware.

Slackware. The rolling release nature of Arch is too buggy and unstable. You could run Slackware as a production distro, Arch, I don't think so.

Thanks for the enlightenment, Eric :hattip:

chilebiker, brucehinrichs, naikon89

Thanks to all of you for giving informative replies :)

Which have you chosen?

I have chosen Slackware but still i am worried about the version i am having i.e. 12.2

I don't know whether it is very stable or not ?
I don't want to get in some mess at the very starting point !

Yes, it's stable. It's still maintained with security patches.

Eric,

Kindly explain in more detail the terms "high availability and redundancy" In what context you are talking ?

I think i have guessed wrong that's why i am asking !

12.2 rocks bro

just make sure you have SLackBuilds setup and src2pkg
what desktop?
xfce?

Thanks,

Off-topic:
When we say "It's still maintained with security patches.", is this related to viruses/hackers or unstable softwares ?

Ah, just remembered that you don't have internet access at home, so getting all the security patches for 12.2 may be tricky. What you could do is look out for Linux magazines giving away Slackware 13.1 on their DVDs, then you would be up to date from the start.

Thanks for replying,
I'll have to study about SLackBuilds setup and src2pkg before commenting on them !

I'll be using LXDE desktop :)

Thanks again,

The only Linux magazine i can find in India is "Linux For You".

and since 13.1 is released in June I'll checkout the July edition of the magazine !

Hello Anisha,

When I referred to High Availability I was referring to the structure one can set up in order to provide a better availability when offering services, like a webserver. If you have one server that serves your customers and that server fails for some reason, then your service is failing. If you set up two of the same servers, having the same software installed, and you install some High Availability platform on them, then if one server fails, the other one will still be offering the webservice.

Redundancy can come in a variety of things, be it in hardware (power supplies, harddisks, network cards) and/or their setup (RAID, Virtual IP) just to name a few examples.

Distributed storage means that you can combine various servers into one large(r) storage. A client system could then connect to the large storage and will see it as if it was a local filesystem.

I hope that clears up some things.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Eric :)

Hi Anisha,

You're welcome. Hope you get it working like you want to.

Kind regards,

Eric

May be a dumb question
 

I was just going through this thread once again so :
According to the above two quotes, Slack does have a package manager, but still we are required to take care of the dependencies ourselves, then what is that package manager supposed to do ? I mean what is the use of that package manager then ?

Slackware's package management provides:

• installpkg - Install a package and keeping track of what files get installed.
• upgradepkg - Replace a package (add/replace existing files with files from a different version of the package, remove existing files no longer required)
• removepkg - Remove all the files belonging to a package.

It's a simple tool for people who like to keep things simple. No dependency checking. No automated fetching of packages from elsewhere - just installing, removing and replacing of the packages that you tell it to.

If you're installing something from slackbuilds.org, on each download page, there's a README file, which will tell you about required and/or optional dependencies. If you get sbopkg, the whole process can be speeded up by using queuefiles.

Thank you Gazl for the clear explanation.

Thanks briany, though I don't know what is the use of sbopkg but I'll checkout soon.

It more or less automates the processing of SlackBuilds using a ncurses GUI, instead of the "manual" way (see the HOWTO page on the SlackBuilds site).

Alright, thanks for the explanation, but I think it is better to prefer the manual way to understand what is going on !