The big thing about torrents is that even slow uploads help. It's the sum of many uploaders that do the trick.

I continued seeding the previous versions for several months, with a limit on the upload speed so that I have some bandwidth left for normal browsing etc.

Why stop at slackware?
I seed dsl, mint, ubuntu, puppy, slackware and off course debian.
It runs in the background, at a low speed.

My first computer was ZX 81. My brother used it to play simple games. I used it to write simple programs. My first PC computer was PC 286 with MS-DOS 5.0. My first computer with Windows was PS 386 with Windows 3.1. My first computer with Linux was PC 486 with Red Hat. I used all these machines first of all for editing texts but I spent a lot of the time on improving the configurations of these systems. When I used MS-DOS and Windows I wrote a lot of batch files. Some of them were really sophisticated. When I use Linux I write a lot of shell scripts. Thanks to the great shell and the additional tools it's a lot easier to write shell scripts than DOS batch files. I always installed all my systems using expert or custom mode. When I saw that option for the first time I simply stated: ``If you ever don't try the expert mode you'll remain novice forever''.

When I install a new system or buy a new device I always try to explore it's possibilities unaided. I reach the documentation when I'm domesticated with at least basic functions. To install Linux' systems I always used ncurses installers. They are simpler, faster and more reliable than graphical ones. I always wanted to know how my systems work. With Red Hat I have to run different wizards and then investigate the configuration files to find what these wizards changed in my system. It was somewhat tiresome but acceptable.

In 2000 I stated Red Had goes into the bad direction. During boot procedures instead of the system messages I saw nice splash screen. I was aware that I can turn it off but I was also aware that in the course of time I'll be forced to turn off more and more unwanted nice features. So I decided to try more serious systems such as Slackware or Debian. I started with Slackware and I continue to use it until now.

My brother has two machines with Windows and two game stations. He uses them to play. I manage with four machines: three mine and one owned by my friend. On all of them I installed Slackware. My brother has technical education. I have humanities education. In my opinion the background is irrelevant. Motivation and attitude are relevant.

I used different scenarios when installing the system. With Red Hat I tried once to determine what packages are really necessary. So I installed just the basic set of the packages and then I added one by one package to suit my needs. It was instructive experiment. When I started to use Slackware for a few years I installed with the installer only A set and then I added the rest of the carefully selected packages using my own scripts. Now I install everything because this is the recommended way of the installation. With Slackware 13.0 I gave up with my update scripts and I started to use standard slackpkg. What's the best in the case of Slackware you can rely on system's solutions or you can put into practice yours own solutions.

I don't try to change your opinion. I just express my own.

A lot of users use CDs because they have only CD-RW drives. I manage with four laptops. Three of them have CD-RW drives and one of them has CD-ROM drive. So I downloaded three Slackware CD's ISO images and now I'm seeding them.

Well, I did torrent it for a while, but then found a good mirror and got it from there. From the torrent it would have taken a few days ... but if anyone is still downloading I might try to write the iso back to my HDD and use that ... not sure that would work.

What port does bittorrent run on, I'm behind one of those little linksys routers so it looke like I need to open a port to allow uploading.

WRT slackware installing, I've tried a few different distros and I think slackware to be the easiest, I put a new (bigger) drive in my laptop every 1.5 to 2 years and install the latest distro each time and its 5 minutes of creating a couple partitions in fdisk and stepping through the menus to select all the software and install, then go away for a while and come back and hit enter a few more times to let it install lilo and reboot. Simplest installer I've used. I suppose it could automatically like parition like the RH/fedora distors but I don't like their partition scheme since I'm on a laptop I just make one os partition rather than seperating out like you would on a server.

usually UDP/TCP 6881:6999

Forrestt, I think I can agree with you here about the installer not being user friendly. Regardless of whether you pick Expert or Novice to install it is still not clear enough which packages you need just to have a running system and if you go for a complete install you've got a lot of cruft you don't need. I also think it would be nice to have a back button but personally I also don't like X based installers, it seems to take some of the procedural method out of it which I think helps with an installation process. I have noticed you are a Fedora user too. Everytime I try to install Fedora (I have three completely different spec machines) I get as far as selecting packages then have many problems. The package installer (during install) completely ignores my selections on two machines and it's not clear which packages rely on each other (same issue in Slack i guess). On my other system, if I try to do anything other than accept the defaults the installer crashes. So, I just feel your statement about stability and the Slackware installer may not be so unique to Slackware.

I have used Slackware since 1997 and I too think the installer could do with updating a little, but just with some clearer options and the 'back' button would be great.

niels.horn, I use Slackware on a Sony Vaio PCG-505 laptop (rock-solid, still working strong, 3 hours battery life) and this won't boot up from DVD. Only option is CD. Funny thing is I develop on this machine because it seems to work faster than my C2D E4400 and I've no idea why. Also had to use a boot floppy the other day to reinstall Slackware 11 on a Pentium 2 file server when the hard drive died.

adam.ec, When I install a new system I like to install just the base (plus base KDE) and then add packages (w/ yum in the case of Fedora) as I come across things I'm missing or want. This was also what I wanted to do w/ Slack.

Also, I don't recall saying the Slack installer was unstable, only that it isn't user-friendly. It didn't crash on me at all, and I'm sure it did everything I told it to do and nothing more (as is the methodology behind Slackware). It's just that it expects me to behave in a certain way that I guess I don't behave in. That being said, I also don't have much experience with Fedora or Ubuntu installers being unstable (not saying they aren't on some hardware, I just haven't seen it), but they are more user-friendly.

Fedora will ignore you if you tell it to not install a package that another package you wanted needs as a dependency. Slack doesn't do this, it does what you tell it without complaint (as I found out when I just assumed that grub was there somewhere and stupidly chose not to install lilo (I prefer grub)). I was also installing in a VM and didn't have USB support turned on in that VM, so no usb key to boot from either. No big deal, I'm learning and I understand these things and just booted off the dvd and tried to install lilo which didn't work so I attempted the install again.

I understand that Slackware is set to allow you to shoot yourself in the foot, but this methodology is what is called "user-unfriendly". There is nothing wrong with that, but you can't have it both ways. A "user-friendly" system goes out of it's way to prevent the user from doing bad(tm) things. A "user-unfriendly" system does not. These are definitions I did not make up. User-friendly systems tend to be annoying to people who know what they are doing and what they want. Examples of "user-friendliness" include Windows when it asks if you are sure you want to put a file in the recycle bin or Word when it automagically corrects what it thinks is the word "forest" misspelled when you type "Forrest" (as you can guess, something I do a lot). It IS being "user-friendly" it just not what I want, and therefore to me, annoying. The more expert the level of user, the more annoying user-friendly systems tend to become. However, there are often small steps toward user-freindliness that are not annoying (e.g. putting in the back button you mentioned) because they never get noticed unless you choose to use them, and even at an expert level, you can see the benefits of having them vs their intrusiveness.

I hope this helps to explain my earlier comments so that you all realize I am NOT attacking Slackware.

Forrest

It is a common complaint against Slackware that it is not friendly to the user. However, this is the market Slackware is aimed at - someone who wants to get their hands dirty and also someone who doesn't want their hand held at any step of the way. This is why Slackware is, usually unfairly, described as "for the very advanced user".

One thing that I will say is that for all it's failings, anecdotal evidence suggests that once someone is used to the Slack way of doing things, everything else becomes really hard. I tried Kubuntu, but hated the super hand holding the distro does for you. I am on Debian now because it's a distro that sits squarely between Slack and the *buntus - does a lot for you, but will let you fall over. I installed it for speed's sake, but will go back to Slack.

Sort of off topic but the moral of the story is to each their own. I love slackware, but I couldn't even get gentoo running with any of the install options and live help.

As far as seeding slackware, it really was unnecessary . A single peer slammed an 8megabit/s feed down my throat and my share ratio is .15 after a couple days.

Not to be beaten I've decided to seed some other distros. I have 6mb/s up, might as well use some of it for once.

I will respectfully agree with the 'unfairly' in the last part.
Slackware isn't "for the very advanced user" IMO. At least not more advanced than Debian, or Gentoo or any other real Linux distribution.
User friendliness doesn't get measured in mouse clicks and eye candy.
On the contrary, simplicity and intuision in terms of design do count as user friendliness. And Slakware has both.
Slackware is different and does a mighty fine job doing exactly that.
I agree that Slackware is certainly not for everyone. I also agree with Slackware being the most unforgiving distribution.
But user friendliness is a subjective term.

Well I will say one thing about the installer. In this version (13.0), it seems that if you try exiting the installer by pressing ctrl-c, it doesn't really exit to the cli, it just suddenly fills the screen with blue, still showing the rest of the installer, and you can still choose 'continue' or 'cancel', though nothing else happens.

Hi, i still download the CDs ...

And many months later I still can't find a seed for the 64-bit DVD

This late in the game it's probably easier to just download from a mirror. Torrents are useful when a new version is released because the burden on mirrors is heavy, and using distributed downloads helps ease that. However, it has been some time since Slackware 13.0 was released so downloading from a mirror should be hassle-free and shouldn't cause the mirror too much grief.