Ok, I know its apples and oranges but I am debating of switching from RH to Slackware. I don't trust Red Hat anymore. Fedora seems to be like an abandoned sheep and I don't want to depend on them too much.

And now with Novell buying Suse, I don't know if can trust Suse either.

I know Slackware is a little bit more down to the metal in its install and that concerns me even though I am pretty comfortable with CLI (I used to install CPM and DOS)

I have a couple of questions:

1) Does the install detect your hardware?

a) NIC cards
b) Wireless cards
c) Video controller
d) USB stuff
e) Printer setup

Or do I have to know the fine details of each one? RH did an excellent job with this.

2) Does the installation disk come with say X Window and KDE and Mozilla or do I have to download these and other basic software from each site?

Thanks

Costas

a) likely
b) possibly
c) nope - you'll get VESA
d) not really - hotplug will probably load the drivers,
but that's it. No mountpoints, no webcam setup, nuttn :)
e) Nope.

It's all there, and if your graphics card supports
VESA extensions you can use X immediately after
install by typing startx :)


Cheers,
Tink

Hi

First things first, I'm one very happy Slacker (Slackware 9.1), so expect my arguments to be a bit biased in one direction. :P

Having said that, I'd recommend that you switch to Slackware, if you wish to know a bit more about how your computer works. If you don't, stick with Fedora.

Thinking about it objectively, Fedora does seem a bit abandoned, however, in the interests of objectivity, I'd like to note that many RedHat developers still do work on Fedora (just not officially ). As for Novell buying Suse, I don't think we have much to worry about on that front - they will be crucified and burned at the stake if they decide to muck around with the Suse distributions in an unfavorable way.

(Though, in complete honesty, what prompted me to switch to Slackware was exactly this business with RedHat and Suse, as well as the fact that Gentoo crapped out, _badly_.)

1) The install does detect your hardware, to a degree. As I have more or less a standard setup, it was able to get most of the info about my computer right off the bat, on its own.

2) The installation disks do indeed come with all those things, precompiled for your slacking fun. They come with a ton of other useful stuff too.

Slack 9.1!

did we mention www.slackware.com

This might sound like an old-timer's babble... but this is not my intention and please bear with me for a while.

Sure, Slack's install is not flashy graphics... But for God's sake, it's just an installation screen which you see err... once! And it really is not hard at all to navigate through.

Just give it a shot, and I'm sure you'll be alright

Try both Fedora and Slackware, and use them both for a few days. After you've become familiar with them both, decide which one suits you best, and stick with it. That's what I did, and for me, Slack was the winner. But decide for yourself -- J.W.

Hi, thanks for the encouragment.
I just got a new computer and installed RH9 on it which worked better than Windows. I am going to be brave and remove it and brave into Slackware. The computer is a spanking new Gateway with XP Home. I already partitioned half with partition magic. for RH. I guess I can keep the same partitions. Any advice on what I should look for before I start? Conf files I can save from the RH installation to make it easier?


Rant
-------
I dont care if the install looks like DOS. I can handle FDISK (I've done a few of those in my DOS days). In the end though, I would want my:

KDE and X, Video in Hires, Firebird, Samba, Network, Opennoffice, USB, mouse. I dont even care about GNOME. My intention is to show people that Linux can be as good as Windows on the Desktop.

I can handle command line when needed, but GUI is still much faster in doing mindless work. (this is not a flame and I have to make a living). About the only thing that I dislike is vi cause most of the keys don't make sense.

Not really, unless you have some very complex
routing going on, or are running a DHCP and DNS
server :}

None of the above is hard, none of it will be done
for you automagically. Freedom in terms of slack is
not "free from" but "free to" :}

Heh ... there's that dicussion about "intuitive" coming up.
:}
Personally I don't like vi, either, but that's just because
I've started out with EPM (OS/2's enhanced editor). Well,
actually my FIRST editor on a PC was edlin, but I
never came to like that one ;)



Cheers,
Tink