My own smallish yet simplish review of Slackware 14.0
 

I figured I'd do an in-house review of Slackware 14.0 rather than let some two-bit website say stuff.

Slackware 14.0 is the latest release of possibly one of the last of the oldest distributions of GNU/Linux by it's maintainer Patrick Volkerding. For this review I'm using roughly the following machine:

AMD Athlon X2 5000 2.5GHz
Nvidia GeForce 9800GT 1GB PCIe
ASUS Xonar DX PCIe
4GB DDR2 RAM (Dual-Channel)
500 GB Western Digital Green series hard drive

1. Setup and Installation

Slackware's setup is very primal but attempts to amount relying on heavy CLI usage. Most of the installation is very similar to how FreeBSD is now installed using NCurses menus. For some newbies to Linux this might seem a bit daunting, but if you read the documentation beforehand, it all makes perfect sense.

Slackware's install is very basic even for a full system and the whole system is fairly much up and running after about a good 20 minute install.

Slackware still uses LILO for it's boot manager, though for my own usage I skipped this and performed a rescue boot and installed GRUB2 from SlackBuilds.

2. Initial boot and basic Configuration

The boot time has been sped up a good bit from the last release, even with the Huge kernel. Normally with Huge my system on average took at least 25-35 seconds to boot to the Login. On this version, this has been cut down drastically by at least a 13-17 seconds boot time even with the BSD/SysV Init script system used by Slackware that some less than honorable developers would say is took slow. In fact this is one of the fastest boots for Slackware I've ever bore first hand witness to. I would dare to estimate using Generic and Initrd would shave off even more, but for me, this is fine.

ALSA lacks the alsaconf configuration script, but ALSA fairly much loads without need for this. A simply setup using alsamixer and alsactl to store the settings and no problems.

X11 is still fairly painfree to setup. Xorgsetup still exists which makes auto generation of an xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 fairly painless and is now really accurate at setting the correct driver. OpenGL acceleration through Nouveau was acceptable but was replaced for the Nvidia Binary Blob as I do require the added power of the official driver.

3. Initial usage.

For my usage I took on Xfce, my bread and butter WM and UI. Xfce 4.10 is very system resource friendly and is very configurable. In fact Xfce is probably one of the more modern style UIs that is system resource friendly. While KDE has it's fans, often I find KDE a bit much even on my fairly well-powered system. Sometimes simplicity just works.

I only had one gripe... Mousepad is gone and wasn't replaced. Luckily Leafpad was available on SlackBuilds and was a very nice drop-in replacement. Perhaps this would be a nice future addition for Slackware to be considered?

The lack of Java was negligible. A quick visit to AlienBOB's website and after installing OpenJDK and IcedTea-web, and problem solved. I'd honestly prefer if Patrick did one day decide to just include OpenJDK and IcedTea-web in the /extras folder and call the issue done and over with. If Oracle wants to play hardball, they can just go play with themselves (no pun intended).

The default Xfce interface was a bit different, but easily remedied with some customizations to give it a more familiar Windows-ish style I'm more used to as I often switch back and forth between OSes often throughout the day.

4. Conclusions.

Overall Slackware 14.0 is a very professional distribution that not only is fast, but very reliable, stable, and very well crafted like top quality ice cold beer. I've used other big brand Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and even OpenSUSE, but Slackware by all regards seems so clean, refined, and possibly the highest professional grade Linux distribution out there.

Linux distributions come and go, but often it it said, those who stay true to their roots, often have the best blossoming of their fruits. For Slackware having stayed simple, small, and clean has allowed Patrick and crew to give a great distribution that not only has stood the test of time, but will continue to withstand the sweeping changes attempting to turn the GNU/Linux OS on it's head.

5. Side-note additions:

One oddity I'd bare mentioning... GMPlayer could be easily excluded from the MPlayer build and MPlayerplug-in removed and replaced with the GNOME-MPlayer which uses the Gecko-MediaPlayer as a web browser plugin. Perhaps another consideration for the future.

Also as mentioned OpenJDK could be effectively added to /extra and all mentioning of the Oracle package just excluded. Something more license and distribution friendly just needs to be worked out.

I also haven't even taken the time to consider multilib as practically I don't find I need it, yet. While there are those who might require packages for 32-bit, I often have found I don't need these packages for any reason, but as always, thank you bunches to AlienBOB for providing these for us when we do find we need them.

Eventually, LILO is going to have to be replaced at some point in the future as the default bootloader for Slackware. Grub2 is well designed and easy to use with 3 simple commands. Overall it would be a worthwhile replacement for LILO with the upcoming usage of UEFI systems and GPT partitioning methods. Perhaps Grub2 can be eventually added to /extra.

Overall I have to give Slackware 14.0 an 8.9 on a scale of 1-10. I deducted a few points for obvious shortcomings mentioned, but overall the OS is just extremely well designed, built, and made, I would have easily given it an 11.

If there was a Linux distribution that is meant for everyone, I'd have to say, Slackware is the Linux Distribution for Everybody. Every new release always feels like a shiny brand new penny that just happen to find.

A toast! To Patrick and to Slackware 14.0 on a job well-done!

hi thanks for sharing. are you aware lq has a section for reviews? you should enter it there too. I enjoyed reading, wasn't sure of the grub2 remarks but everyone's allowed to have a preference.

Interesting though I don't agree with your assessment of replacing lilo with grub2. grub is over complex and has a an excessive amount of dependencies. It would involve less package additions to include elilo in addition to lilo for efi based machines. Alternatively syslinux is very nice and very simple. It is included in Slackware already and they are planning efi support.

Grub has the other downside of requiring an extra "BIOS boot partition" (partition type EF02 in gdisk) when using gpt with MBR. Syslinux does not need this.

By the way you, when you booted with the rescue disk did you mean a USB boot disk created by the installer? If so you could have just used your install media to boot first time if you wanted (maybe I misunderstood and that is what you did). An even better option would be to just chroot into your new install after setup has finished and then compile, install and configure Grub, saving yourself a reboot.

LILO is one of those components - like the Slackware installer, pkgtool, slackpkg, SlackBuild scripts, BSD init - that reflects Slackware's KISS philosophy:

• Bone-headed, so what?
• JustWorks(tm)

:cool:

I disagree about Grub2. Someone's designed a utility so you can change the default order of the entries (among other things).

That utility would not be needed if Grub2 were easy to use.

Another LILO fan here. My mind revolts somewhat at the thought of using a 6 megabyte loader to boot a 4 megabyte kernel. Also, anybody else notice that after more than a decade of hearing from the GRUB camp how burdensome it supposedly was having to run 'lilo' after editing the config file, not a peep of complaint about having to edit a config file and run 'grub-update' for GRUB2?

I am a little disappointed that Slackware 14 did not include GUILE version 2 (it still has v1.8), though it should be no trouble building v2 from Mr Volkerding's Slackbuild since all the required dependencies appear to be met.

Like I've said before: if lilo was inferior to any other bootloader, it would not be the default in Slackware.

I agree that OpenJDK should be added.

Just thought I would add, for those who don't know it:

Earlier, OpenJDK was the GPL-ed version of Sun/Oracle's JRE/JDK, but since Sun didn't own all the code, they couldn't release all of it under the GPL, and some parts of it had to be replaced. This is probably why OpenJDK used to be more buggy than the official JDK.

But OpenJDK is the official reference implementation now. Everything in OpenJDK is in Oracle's JDK; Oracle just adds extra features to their version of it.

The way I see it, OpenJDK is less bloated (without Oracle's additional features -- Java should fix its problems, not add new ones, and it's already huge as it is) and less restrictive (being GPL-licensed), so there's no reason to use Oracle's version. If you can't even ship it in Linux distributions, then what good is it? It's like asking that it should go the same way as OpenOffice.

Grub (0.97) still works best for me.

Though I prefer lilo, I don't mind legacy grub, but having experienced grub2 recently on Fedora (installed only to keep informed about what the other distro's are doing) I think I would rather have my nuts chewed-off by a rabid squirrel than see it in slackware.

According to the following tests, Slackware is almost performing the worest one! ( I don't know what the tests meant actually, I don't care)

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...xdistros&num=1

There is another thread about that review.

That should say its. The word it's means it has or it is. Overall an excellent review. I do prefer lilo.

The comma after "but" is not correct. And you should have quoted "its", as I just did. (Sorry, I couldn't resist. It's (!) really important, when correcting someone's grammar, to get your own grammar in order. I've checked this message carefully to try to be sure I didn't blunder, but if I did, I'm certain to hear about it.)

Fixed. Thanks. :)

An interesting "benchmark" test would be: how well do $DISTRIBUTION users cook? I'm sure the average Slackware user makes a better paprika chicken and a better homemade lasagne or bolognese than the average Ubuntu, Fedora or openSUSE user. Granted, there's the LFS and Gentoo folks, but they're so busy studying organic chemistry that they have to order chinese takeout in the meantime.

The beautiful thing about Slackware I've also found is, regardless how it's setup using Grub, Grub-legacy, LILO, or SysLinux, Slackware caters to everyone by just simply working well in all regards.

I prefer Grub2 because it's showing to be more future-minded with UEFI, GPT, and 64-bit addressing friendly. I actually have no issues with LILO from my own experience. LILO is still a great bootloader for CMOS and MBR PCs. Time will tell if UEFI and GPT will be added along with 64-bit addressing, but if and when, I'm fairly certain Patrick will address it and see if an update is needed.

One good thing I've noticed with Grub is it doesn't have to be reset every time you change the kernel even if the kernel is the same version and namesake if you use the symlinks in grub.cfg (which can be edited with script editors like KATE if you know what to program in).

Personally, real usage trumps benchmarks in every regards and not all benchmarks duplicate real usage.

But the good thing is, with Slackware, you know what you get, and you know what you want for the system, and with the right tools, it can happen.

Nothing special, Syslinux does exactly the same but doesn't have a horrendous configuration file format.

Even in the case of Lilo, all you need do it srun the lilo command once to update after the change. Not sure how this can be considered a big deal.

Althought its GPT support with BIOS requires you to have to introduce extra complications like a special boot partition because it is so massive.

Very true. However, most Linux distributions by default recommend using a separate /boot partition anyways. With hard drive space being plentiful anymore, one could create the required /boot partition and not have to worry about size. Most /boot partitions for distributions I've seen that use them all recommend using at least 50-100MB anyway for /boot with a basic file system like EXT2/3/4.

I am surprised at them moment Patrick hasn't added eLILO yet for GPT systems as it is one of the only other bootloaders I forgot to mention that works with GPT partitions and UEFI systems without penalty.

I also noticed someone said GRUB2 has a lot of dependencies... well so does every other piece of software anymore. The dependencies for Grub2 thankfully are very small in size on disk, and should be the least of worries.

FWIW There is a utility with the Slackware installation disk that does allow one to deal with a GPT partition. I had to used it. I don't remember the name. (I'm at work)

Slackware comes as a working basic OS. It come with just about everything one needs to get a working server or desktop. From there we have SlackBuilds.

PS I always set aside a /boot partition for about 256M

-JJ

Slackware 14's installer includes fixparts, gdisk, sgdisk and cgdisk as well as a manual page for gdisk in man8.

And Slackware 14 ships gptfdisk in the a/ series:
PS http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ is worth reading.

I wasn't talking about a /boot partition. I was talking about the fact that Grub2 requires a "BIOS Boot partition" (partition type EF02 in gfdisk) on GPT setups with BIOS. This is entirely different from /boot and is used only by Grub. Other bootloaders that work with GPT on BIOS (e.g. Syslinux) don't need it.

The "BIOS Boot partition" can be as small as 30 KiB but the general advice on most websites I looked at seems to be that you should make 1 MiB because future boot loaders might require more space and many modern disk partitioning tools have 1 MiB partition alignment policies. The purpose of this partition is that on GPT systems under BIOS, the lack of post-MBR embed gap on GPT disks makes space a little tight. Grub2 works around this by having the first stage of its bootloader look for a "BIOS boot partition" where it stores a second, bigger file. This second stage file includes support for a large set of filesystems. Extlinux however has a different solution. Since it supports fewer filesystems, its first stage is still small enough to include ext2+/btrfs support. It can therefore have the second stage on the /boot partition directly. Of course it still needs to know which partition is the /boot partition and this is done by marking it with a special attribute, which you can think of as being similar to marking a partition as bootable in the MBR world.

@ReaperX7 you tried setting up a Slackware system with GPT? If not check out this thread for more information on GPT and BIOS setups. If you try setting up a machine to use GPT under BIOS you soon realise that extlinux/syslinux is much less hassle. No extra dependencies to be downloaded configured and installed, no extra partitions, a saner config file format, etc. Furthermore the 'advantage' that people claim Grub2 has over Lilo (about not having to reinstall it after each kernel update) is not valid with Extlinux (plus the fact that I don't really consider that an advantage).

The only thing that Grub2 currently has over Syslinux is built in EFI support. However the Syslinux guys are working on EFI support right now. Also Grub2 isn't great on EFI in any case. The EFI/GPT Guru, Rod Smith has this to say:

It also ships with parted, and that too can handle GPT. ;)

I prefer lilo by far over grub2 and this is one of the reasons,as you update kernels it writes it to the start-up menu. When you dual boot windows it lists windows along with the recovery partician along with every new kernel and before long you have a dozen different choices, At that point you have to figure out a work around just to get rid of those old kernels and the restore partician. It is not a problem to add to the start-up menu but try to delete, that is where the fun starts!

By the way I did enjoy the article it was very informative!

LILO is dumb (RAID issues, etc)
GRUB is bloated and unnecessary complicated

Solution: SYSLINUX
Use it on all my PC and servers for few years - works like a charm (can boot from Raid, LVM and so)

I have a pure LVM setup with a LILO bootsector on the first sector of the LVM PV (Type 8E). It loads the kernel and initrd from the root LV. How is this supposed to work with SYSLINUX?

Create a first partition about 100 to 200Mb just for booting. It is ext3 filesystem with SYSLINUX there.
This way you can easy boot the weirdest configuration one can ever imagine.
On my servers it is LVM on top of RAID-1

The partition table is already full, so there is no space for that. With an extra partition, you can also use GRUB Legacy, GRUB4DOS or whatever you like. The point in using LILO is, that it doesn't need that. Just 512 bytes of a bootsector, map and kernels reachable by BIOS INT 13h and you're fine. You can even partition a 3 TB disk using GPT and boot it just fine with a LILO in the protective MBR.

I thought syslinux used a DOS FAT filesystem?

Syslinux is a collection of bootloaders, including extlinux (which can read Ext2,3,4/btrfs partitions). Also you do not need to have a separate partition for extlinux if /boot is already on an ext or btrfs partition.

Great review! How long did it take you to install? I like Arch because you install it once. Would you even compare the two and if not, why choose SlackWare over Arch (not saying you did)?

thx

My /boot is on a ext LV. Does it count?

@jtsn: Not sure, never tried but you could use btrfs and remove much (or all) of the need for LVM. As a side note Lilo will not reliably boot kernels from btrfs and this the most likely filesystem to supersede ext4.

EDIT: I did some searching and it seems the current answer is no, extlinux cannot currently boot off an LVM partition so for that you would need a separate partition just for extlinux.

I don't consider btrfs in the foreseeable future, because there is only one GPL-licensed implementation (thus Linux-only) and it originated at Oracle. Ext4 is way better supported.

You might change your mind one day. Ted Ts'o (ext4's maintainer) sees btrfs as the future.

http://arstechnica.com/information-t...-kernel-panel/

ReiserFS is the future, btrfs is the future, systemd is the future and so on...

I stick to the KISS principle, especially regarding file systems. Once bitten, twice shy.

Comparing btrfs to systemd seems relatively silly to me. Additionally we are well off topic so I think I'd rather just drop out of this thread.

sorry, my mistake, I should say EXTLINUX (which is part of Syslinux suite)