hey.
i'm kinda young (only 12) and live in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. my first distro was Fedora, which i used for a few months over the summer. then i tried to set up suse, which i decided sucked. i wiped it recently to go to slackware. i have a long history with win, and wanted an alternative without buying an Apple. so, a friend of mine who dual-boots (he uses suse 9.1 pro) reccomended fedora. I love slack, the community is great, and most people know how to spel.

hey yall!

hoo-rah! starting on slack young!

hmmm... but you got y'all spelled wrong...

Glad to see you are using Slackware. I'm about to take the plunge into Linux and I want to start with Slackware, either 9.0 or 10.0. Any feedback on either of those?

Why did you choose Slackware over SUSE, Mandrake, RH, Xandros, etc, etc??

10 is more current, and i'm a fan of current...

i've run other distros... but i prefer slack -- it's not a matter of researching before downloading. I suggest people to try what intrests them, and find what they like.

but you asked for [my||rusty's] opinion, so...

-- "most unix like" -- i don't like to be babied... when i want to hack my system, i don't want some propriatary crap getting in my way.
-- slack has a package system, but is primarily designed for source-compiling to install software. Even with debian's apt, lots of people have lots of problems with packages...
-- and if i ever really ran a system just with a package manager, i would REALLY prefer the linux community to adopt a standard of publishing, so that when you installed a software package, it was actually current, not just as current as the guy who packaged it had time for...

What you said about preferring Slackware because of your preference to avoid proprietary cobwebs makes a lot of sense and is a strong reason for choosing it.

As for "most Unix-like," I'm sure that is good but my appreciation for that will come later.

Thanks for the input.

John

dude, i'd say that some aspects of slack are great for noobs, but fedora and suse were great to start with. i think you should try one of those to have someone to hold your hand through the config and install befor you jump in to slack. with fedora, they give you the parts for a linux system and show you how to put it together. with slack, they give you the parts and hope you figure it out yourself.

cheers!

Thanks for the thoughts. I've already bought the Slackware CD set and am in the process of preparing the computer for a dual boot setup.

I'm sure that a lot of other distros are more user-friendly than Slackware and even MS Window-ish (such as Linspire) but I want to make a break from the non-thinking mentality that MS cultivates in its users of "click this, click that but don't ask why because it is proprietary."

Since I've been using MS for so many years, it will have to be a gradual break, thus the dual boot W98/SW.

great job john

go ahead and e-mail me if you run into snags... i'd hate to see you give up.

that's exactly what can happen with FC... it can get you started in linux pretty easy, and give you a nice little sandbox to play in, but when it comes down to it, the system isn't quite the same, and they'd prefer you use their propritary GUI applications rather than manually configging your system yourself... sure it's easy, but what have you learned? and what can you make your system do, beyond internet and word processing? is that really the reason people swap over to linux?

here, peruse this: rute

Thanks for the help.

Progress hasn't gotten too far. Am hung up waiting for Partition Magic, "Searching for recovery markers...Please wait..." and haven't done anything to begin installing Slackware yet. The waiting occupied most of yesterday, in between reading explanations of Partition Magic's error messages.

Still have the W98 partition on that computer to boot into but PM seems to have lost its grip on the rest of the HD, about 3.0+ GB which it has given several error messages for.

I'll post more when I actually get to the Slackware part, but may have to get a new hard drive. (This one is several years old, so the problem may not be with Partition Magic, but with the drive.)