Hey folks, I just reinstalled slackware 11.0 I had been running current all this time and never realize the big deal, but it seems Slackware 11.0 has turned simple into no so simple anymore. things that should even be an issue are an issue. Here are the things I dont like about Slackware 11.

Kernel 2.4 (yes I know 2.6 is on the cd, but even then you have to go through every script in your rc.d directory and fix things that should even have to be fixed.)

Udev, I can't even begin to say whats wrong with it on slackware, no wait I can, the whole thing is seriously f*cked up! Slackware no longer picks up any mice I have on my system and in X nor does the keyboard work, like I said I donno what pat did to udev, but its borked and borked badly.
lsusb picks up my mice, but there are no entres in /proc/bus/input (this is using the stock kernel and a modifyed kernel 2.6.18.1)

/media, I donno if I am slow or what but, why on earth is there media and a mnt directory? there is no need to be. if I wanted 20 million mount directorys I would have made them as soon as the install finished.

pre-extisting device nodes, like really what is the point of having udev of you are going to have static device nodes?

Lack of dbus and or hal, it's only been out for 2 years now, Pat choose KDE and KDE is using dbus and hal for features that are very awesome that now no longer work.

I guess Slackware 11.0 motto is not keep it simple, keep it slackware. But Keep it borked, keep it slackware!

Now before one of you attempts to take a swing at me, I have been using slackware since 9.0 and I loved 9.1, 10.0, and 10.1 but I f*cking hate 11.0. Before someone says "thats easy to fix" consider the time it would take to fix all this and probly more! (I just havent found it because this is already too much) and compare this to building a whole LFS and BLFS system, to me there is not really any differnce here, because the time it would take me with 4 virtualterminals to build LFS and BLFS would probly be the same as trying to fix Slackware in its current state.

I think it's time for this slacker to send his copy of slackware 2> /dev/null and either install another distro, or build LFS.

I won't give you any of the traditional arguments because as an experienced slacker you've probably given them to other people before. If Slackware and your view of an "ideal distribution" are drifting away, then indeed you should consider another distro. I'd be interested in knowing which one you choose.

I have been using Slackware since 10.0 and I must say that 11.0 is the best one yet for me. udev works nicely after having disabled hotplug, I run the 2.6.17.13 kernel, /media is an FHS thing that some applications expect to find, and AFAIK you need the device nodes in order to boot up before udev takes over. I guess there's an explanation for each and every point you mention, probably even in the Changelog.

For me it works extremely well, I love the inotify feature as used by KDE and udev, I love the seperate freetype package (because I always use a bytecode interpreter enabled version). I haven't missed hal and dbus because none of the applications I use have complained about them not being there. Why do you think they should be present, which are those features that are not working?

I don't understand why now, Slackware has been using /mnt for ages, if its an FHS thing then why do we need /mnt? why not just have /media? why do we need 2 places? I thought the idea of slackware was to stay as close to UNIX as possible and not have everything so cluttered up or messy!

You only need a few device nodes to boot up, Slack has static device nodes for even vmware, I donno how it knew I was going to use vmware but since vmware is not installed I don't think they should be there. And whats with all the mini usb devicenodes in /dev (I have an mtp MP3 player and I know for a fact you don't need 5 modes devoted to that, considering that libmtp comes with a script that edits udev's config for you.) The nvidia ones are a pain too (yes I have an nvidia based card) but what if I had an ATI card? Same with a floppy drive, but backwards, udev detects it and makes a device node, but one already exists... it just seems that one can actully argue about the perpious of slackware, half of the stuff you are supost to do yourself slack now does for you, what happened to keep it simple?

Slackware is turning into suse (its starting to do unessary things) slack was suppost to provide the user with a base which he/she/it can configure for themselves.

As for the KDE not having HAL and DBUS if you buy alot of music cds (I happen to) if you use the media bar in konqueror you can rip your cds to MP3's very quickly, since pat decided to patch KDE to fall back on fstab support this no longer works anymore.

If you read what Distrowatch says about slackware half of that stuff isn't even remotly true anymore. It's like slackware is not even slackware. I remember slackware as a stable system because it allowed one to do some tuning to it that suits the users needs, now we have symbolic hell, look in the /etc/rc.d/ directory there is even a symbolic link from .rcmodules-2.4.xx to rc.modules now.... WHY IS IT THERE FOR? I see no clear reason to have symbloc hell (I am actully suprized Pat didnt make a symbolic link to /mnt and called it /media then I could just say pat has gone sym-link happy but thats not the case.) Even the installer is alittle wacked. there is a 2.6.x kernel in the setup, so why can't I turn Udev on before the system is actully bootes up? why are things like pcmica serives enabled by default? I am sure every PC has a card bus system setup... To me that option should start unchecked why? because I dont see a server or a desktop or some embedded system having cardbus slots!

There has been so much wrong with slackware, its like pat took all the sources and everything he has been doing for the last 14 years and threw it out the window, I can tell ya this much slackware 11.0 is NOT slackware.

It's hard to satisfy everyone, for example, I have used mozilla
for a long time, and I see it is in /pasture now. But I tried
firefox finally and I prefer it, it is really faster

Also, for the /media thing, I think the /mnt is supposed
to be the mount point for temp things like mount iso files,
and /media for the removable media hardware. For my part,
I even use an additionnal /net mount point for nfs shares.

I didn't noticed the rc.modules symlink but I upgraded with
slackpkg though

Quick answer: It's just you. :-)

Long answer:

I don't see Slack 11.0 as any worse than any of the other versions. I think I first used 3.9 or something (so I was a bit late to the Slackware game) but I've used every version since and I don't see it getting any worse with this new version.

It's not perfect (it can't be perfect for EVERYONE, that's impossible) but it's taken some very careful dipping of toes into the "cutting edge" water and emerged relatively unharmed.

Udev works flawlessly for me (and with my ageing hardware, that really IS saying something). If you have mice that are not picked up by udev, complain to the udev people (my guess is that your hardware is weird) and get it fixed, then upgrade udev (packages usually appear on Linuxpackages.net shortly after each update). That's hardly Slack's fault.

I've hotplugged every USB device that I own into my Slack 11.0 machine and each one has been detected and used flawlessly (except for an IRda adaptor that has no Linux support at all) - that's a few dozen devices of very variable age and quality, including gadgets like a QX3 microscope, cheap-io webcams and digicams, as well as the serious stuff that I use day-to-day. It was one of the first things that I did before contemplating replacing an existing 10.2 system with 11.0, even though most of those devices will never be used on 11.0 at all.

/media? So what? A single dir on a single inode in a place that you're hardly EVER going to browse and that only has about 10 entries anyway. Plus, it's required for certain standards and isn't "special" in any way. All this will do is help those who use FHS-compatible systems to adjust. If you don't like it, rm it.

KDE not compiled with HAL and dbus? Probably for exactly the reason you have problems with your mouse. To stop bad hardware from messing up EVERYTHING. HAL and dbus are relatively new (by a Slack definition of new) and still have a ton of problems. As you sum up masterfully: "it's *only* been out for 2 years now". If you want to live on the bleeding-edge, choose a bleeding-edge distro or DIY.

Static device nodes? To allow simplicity of booting and to let people disable udev (why would you want udev on a server that will not undergo hardware changes, for instance?). That was a plus in my book - I could choose to turn off udev without any hassle whatsoever and just revert back to my static /dev. I didn't need to but the choice was there.

There are some MINOR problems (and I do mean minor). rc.pcmcia was a bugbear of mine but it only took a single command to stop it permanently and it was quite obvious what was going on. I imagine that with the amount of wireless kit around (for which PCI cards are usually PCMCIA adaptors and a PCMCIA card bundled together), it was decided to pick up everything by default even if that meant a boot delay.

Don't forget - Slackware isn't built for desktop-specific use. It's built to be solid, stable and reliable. It's primarily used on servers, not desktops (although I myself run several Slackware desktops). There's no "middle ground" you can choose for both a desktop and a server - they are two different tasks. This is why it still uses a 2.4 kernel - it's VERY well established. But it also tries to support 2.6 and it does a damn good job of playing middle-man to both kernels.

To be honest, the problems that Slack 10.2 -> 11.0 caused me are much less than any previous installation or upgrade and a billion times less than trying to make an LFS system to cater for my needs (that's just a silly assertion). I booted 11.0, turned off rc.pcmcia on the first boot and changed to a 2.6 kernel of my own compilation. That was it. Everything after that was non-Slack software installation/upgrade and the system's been running since the release and gets used for HOURS every day, doing everything from server-tasks to being my primary desktop. Considering that this same machine starting off with 10.0 and has been incrementally upgraded each time, that's a damn good record - it still runs Gnome properly and that's not even been included in the last two releases!

You may have had a single bad experience, due to unusual hardware and a lack of understanding on very minor issues such as an extra directory in your root, but it doesn't mean that Slack's going downhill.

A lot of slackers in my LUG went over to gentoo for similar reasons.

Which makes sense, since Gentoo is a metadistribution and not a distribution. You have complete control over what you install and how, at the expense of having to invest (much) more time and not being able to assume any stability because your specific combination is probably unique.
It's a choice, there's no right or wrong.

Right now I am using Kubuntu (I am not too crazy over it) I might just stick to LFS until some of these issues are fixed. Then when my LFS system is horribly out of date I will resinstall slack if it every gets fixed. if I had the time I'd rip the sources off the DVD and "fix" the slackbuilds and scripts so it's not such of a mess.

The transition to 2.6 kernel is rather painful.
Hopefully by the time 11.1(12.0?) comes out Slack will be much cleaner again.

It's not even that, back when slack 9.1 was ready i use to always use a 2.6 kernel and it has always worked, it just seems like now with all the extra crap that it's starting to break. I just don't get it. even some of the scripts dont make any sense. like the scanluns scripts if I wanted to scan all luns of a scsi device I would compile that feature into the kernel rather depend on some software to do it externally. Maybe someone can explan the 70 mount points in /dev/ that all seem to point to one or two cdroms or dvd devices, I dont need 20 symlinks points to 1 device, i think that is rather stupid. Since I have yet to see a dvdrom drive that cant play cds I dont understand why we just can keep the legacy symlinks /dev/cdrom /dev/dvdrom
noooo we need /dev/cdrecorder /dev/dvdrecorder /dev/cdrom1-10 /dev/dvdrom1-10 no one has 10 cdrecorders that happends to be running slackware...and if they are they are speical, and should have to add more nodes or symlinks.

My hardware is not at all odd

AMD Athlon64 X2 +4400
DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR
Creative Sound Blaster Audigity Zs Platnum
BFG GeForce 7800GTX PCI-E

I don't see anything out of the ordanary here, yes I need to recompile my kernel so the tsc timer actully works properly but thats no sweat, it never has been.

Yeah, If the transition was faster, you would be even more unhappy. Part of your problem is trying to use UDEV and 2.4 together. In my mind, UDEV and hotplug has essentially abandonded the 2.4 kernel line. And don't get me started on how much I dislike DBUS and HAL, and how much I like that Slackware left it out.

Its there because 2.4 kernel is still the default. 2.6 kernel does not need rc.modules and the sym-link is to help tell you that this is for 2.4 kernel not 2.6 if you upgrade to that.

I agree that 2.6 seems to be tested and stable enough to be the default but Pat isn't as sure as we are. He has always been very determined not to release and unstable distro and I believe he is still maintaining this outlook. I have been using Slack since 7.1 and have tried a multitude of others in the process. Each time I come back for the ease of use.

I know its easy to voice your opinion when you don't understand something. But perhaps a better strategy would be to ask why first. If you don't like the response then possibly explain why you disagree.

Because I'd installed kernel 2.6 and modules from /extra AND during bootup it's loading 2.6 modules then I knew that it's working.

Next, I then saw the symlink of rc.modules for the 2.4 kernel.

I changed the symlink to point to rc.modules_for_2.6.xx for the 2.6 kernel. But it made no difference since the 2.6 modules had already been working before I changed this symlink.

So, I got that rc.modules is not needed for a 2.6 kernel from /extra.

But I didn't know how the 2.6 had been getting its modules loaded.

How does this work with such 2.6 kernel, the getting of these modules loaded?

--
Alan.

2.6.x series kernels auto-load and auto-unload modules on demand, according to the present and detected hardware

IMHO, Slackware 11.0 is the very best version available. For me, it's flawless.

/media is there and doesn't hurt at all, I just don't use it because I have my fstab properly configured and everything goes to /mnt but I don't want that something could break because of /media missing

HAL and DBus are not needed for a *nix system to boot up and run, I don't need such "features" and neither Slackware does. Anyway if HAL/DBus where shipped by default, I would hunt them down and disable them; the less processes running, the better (have you guys noticed how few processes run at Slackware's startup? It's just gorgeous to see such few of them and everything still works fine )

About the bunch of symlinks in /dev, those are created and managed by udev you should know that. Tweak udev if you don't like them. Those work perfectly for me and if they didn't exist I would add them anyway (I was amazed to find a /dev/dvdrw already available when I was looking for one with such a name )

A problem is rc.scanluns? What's with it? I don't know, as I don't have an array device with SCSI disks and a dual optical fibre conection, but was nice to see that kind of hardware support available for storage servers. Just disable it upon installation, you have the option to do that. It isn't such a hassle, is it?

Slackware isn't turning to SuSE, both are really different distros intended for really different markets. I know they once where like brothers, SuSE being only the plain german translation of Slackware. But that was a long time ago. Now SuSE supports by default (out of the box) XEN virtualization, XGL/compiz desktop, both Gnome and KDE window managers, the yast package/everything manager, HAL+DBus with automagical things that mount themselves (I would freakin' hate that in my system), automatic online updates and a growing community able to compete with Red Hat and Debian, just to mention some things that SuSE has/does; and with all due respect, Slackware can't do that nor that I wanted it to. I just love the way Slackware is.

Long live to the oldest and the best distro in the world