Newbie thinking of Slackware
 

Hi all. I'm fairly new to linux. Been using redhat 8 for a few months now and am looking to try a new distro. Slackware sounds interesting, but my question is, is Slackware gonna kick my ass at the command line? I know a decent amount about the command line but i prefer a gui. So anyway, is slackware a good choice for a newb like me or should i look elseware for now?

You should be able to handle it. Maybe get your video card info from RH and use it to manually setup your video, other then that, Slack is not as bad as others make it out to be!

It does use GUI on most installation routines, and it have other gui for other aspects of it. Just take your time and follow along with the screen.

I had used SuSE 7.2 & 8. RH 8 & 9. And a little of Mandrake. SuSE is the easiest. RH looks the best and is the most compatible (rpm's are common for it). and mandrake has about nothing going for it. They all had one problem though. They were all so slow. Slower than when that same machine would run Windows. Slackware however is fast fast fast. I love it. Its my favorite Distro. I just installed it yesterday. I spent all today setting it up to suit me and I'm almost done. But if you want speed (like me) you have to not use gnome or KDE, which makes things more command line because Window Maker and other don't have all of the GUI stuff that GNOME and KDE have.

Have fun with Slack. I highly recommend it.

I made the transition from Win2k to Slackware without much trouble. Going from Red Hat to Slackware should be a relatively easy changeover. I recommend you give it a try.

I guess it depends on what you want out of it. I used RH for a month or two and didn't learn a damn thing about how Linux *really* works.

If you want to learn Linux be prepared to do some reading and get familiar with the command line and your text editor of choice. Slackware does not have a 'Control Center's' or 'Management whatever'. Some may see this as a fault but I take comfort knowing what file does what. If and when I get to the point where I don't want to edit individual files anymore then maybe I will have a GUI do it for me. In the meantime...Go Slack!

its not that serious as people make it out to be. yeah you gone be in the CLI alot, only if you plan on doing alot of configurating.

like directly after installation, you need to reconfigure the files in /etc/rc.d/ to to uncomment unneeded services and to make your system a bit more secure. you need to grab the kernel and recompile it. so before you install slack, make sure you know your hardware, or maybe check out your kernel config and see what modules you have there. maybe even make a copy of your XF86Config file(in etc/X11/)

but most stuff you can learn quick if you read the slack book or post here. good luck.:)

A common question
 

Hi,

A lot of people don't try slack because of command line fears. Installs are menu driven. Don't ask us, try it.

If I can do it, anybody can.

md

Hi,

I had the same worries, I had heard it was hard to install and run, but about 2 weeks ago I got absolutely fed up with having windows 2000 on my laptop I decided to upgrade to Linux, tried Suse 8.2 which I run on my main PC,this worked well but didn't enable the battery monitoring properly, so I gave Mandrale 9.1 a go this did the same, so then I thought of Redhat 9.0 tried this but it gave me a flickering display on install which didn't look as if it was doing my screen much good. I got the same with Morphix. SO i thought what other distro's do I have lying round, found Slackware 9.0 and thought Nah too hard.
Then thought what the hell, I've got nothing to lose trying so I threw the disc in and started the installation. It installed a dream it was surprisingly easy to configure as the files that you may have to edit are well commented and is quite plain as to what you need to do.
Also this is the first distro that I have been able to log onto my on-line banking with Konqueror, change the browser identification and not get a unsupported browser message.
So in my opinion YES go for it. Although I did have a few initial problems which I posted to here and elsewhere, it gave me a great sense of achievement when I sorted them out and I certainly wiser for it.

Richard G.

backup your current install and give slackware a shot, dude!

if you don't like it you can restore your system...

you could install slackware next to your red hat if you have space...

you could even play with a live slackware cd while you make up your mind:

http://www.slackware-live.org/

=)

good luck!

Install KDE with slack so you can have GUI configurator (The KDE Control Center).
You may need it for the first time.
After that, I believe you will kick their ass and go directly to CLI :)

Cheers.

Hello people, I am thinking about trying a different distribution as well. So far I have only used rpm based distro's, mainly Mandrake as I didnt care for Red Hat. I was wondering how much of a pain it is to get packages installed that aren't included in the distro.

One main reason I want to try something different is that I've heard it runs faster. I was wondering if someone could elaborate on that. I mean will the kernel be compiled already for a i686? Or is there a big difference between compiling for i586 and i686? I have a P3-733.

Another reason, is that I have become way too dependant on Texstar and PLF. right now kde 3.1.4 is out and it looks like they've fixed the start kdesu thing so, I wanna try it. Problem is, I haven't tried konstruct or tried to compile it and I bet its gonna be a pain. (Guess I should try it first eh?) Looks like Slack packages are already out there for kde 3.1.4 and tex probably wont put those out for mdk 9.1 since 9.2 is coming. Whata you people think?

Hey, I forgot to ask, are pre-compiled packages for xmame, gxmame, xine and others available readily? I dont wanna spend weeks compiling all the applications I use. Especially since I'm still relatively new.

I've thought about gentoo, but there's no way I can tackle that right now..

try linuxpackages.net

IMHO

Command line comes with time> Iwas like you but eventually had gotten to the point where I wanted to control and not defer to someone elses default install and configurations. Took awhile but now I'd say that I spend more than half my time using mc instead of konqueror for a file manager because its quicker. I use mcedit except for some real heavy editing/pasting for the same reasonnad BTW you'll be surprised how fast you can copy very beig directories with cp while waiting for the same thing that was draged and dropped in konqueror

With regards to slack being faster. I think so. Its a pretty spartan install and you then start enabling only the services modules you want. Not allot of extra overhead.

I started slacking with 8.1 and was surprised that 9.0 was even quicker. I had mdk-8.1 set up for family while I got used to slack-8.1. One night my 9 yr old daughter got on my slackware box and she immediately noticed the difference and asked me to give her an account.

With regards to packages there's somewhat less precompiled available but if you've moved to slack your probably online to start compiling your own before too long if you can't find what you want.

Cheers

If you can't find Slackware packages for something at linuxpackages.net or elsewhere and don't want to compile them yourself, Slackware provides tools to convert RPMs to tgz