In general, does Linux work and play well with SSDs? In particular Slackware 12.2? Are there particular brands of SSDs I should be looking at?

Sure, you can even run systems off them, look at the growing NetBook market, they generally run from an SSD. You should have support all ready built into your kernel, too.

Thanks a bunch for the reply! Just the answer I was hoping to hear as I'd really like to play with this technology.

You get the odd worry/panic about the number of writes you can expect from an SSD, so before someone jumps in and scares you off: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit has some good stuff on it.

I will certainly read that article (after Thanksgiving dinner, of course). I've already done some reading and it's sounding good for the SSD drive.

Oh, that'll be why the forums are so quiet

Yes, we here in the USA tend to take Thanksgiving seriously, crowding the airports, interstate highways and relative's homes for the privilege of eating way too much and complaining afterward. It's been that way since 1621, I think, when the Pilgrims and the local Native American tribe shared a feast celebrating the fact that the Pilgrims (most of them, anyway) actually survived their first year in the New World (with considerable assistance from the aforementioned Native Americans, BTW). It was also probably the last time that the Native Americans were happy to see the new arrivals.

Maybe ... I wonder what proportion of LQ users are off-line because of Thanksgiving. Many of us do not have that holiday and many users who do have that holiday are personal Linux users rather than professional users, taking the opportunity of an extra day's enjoying Linux as their preferred way of using the holiday

Read this and the previous post, for an example and some of the tweaks that should be considered.

Unfortunately, it also attracted some bad-natured stuff in the comments by people who half-knew the subject and wanted to call the original author out on it, but the original post can be taken as reasonable if not extensive on this subject.

Thanks to all of you I'm learning there is much more to this subject than I realized. I'll be doing much more reading and note taking as a result!