Hello

I'm a citizen of Poland (which is on 5th place for searching info about slackware at google - I don't know why).

Well, there is one's more explanation of that result - Slackware OS is one of the oldest linux distro, that still alive.

In my country, this distro was hevli used in academic servers due its stability and security. But at this time, this distro is mostly in use by some maniacs, like me Most of peoples, that are using Linux, uses debian-like clons (Debian, Ubuntu, and so on), or RH-clones.
Maybe with Slackware64 v. 13 it will change, 'cause many peoples I asked says, that they don't use Slackware, because it doesn't support 64-bit platforms.

And I cannot agree, that Poland is the home of hackers, but yes, we have many excelent IT specialists, and programmers

Best regards!

I'm American and I started with Slackware years ago. I tried RedHat after its IPO (stock offering) and didn't like it because it constantly crashed and never did what I wanted it to (perhaps it was my fault).

At my California cousin's insistence, I tried Ubuntu and didn't like it at all. Too cutesy and I'm not into African themes (not our style, no offense intended). Also prefer to "shell out" rather than to "sudo" everywhere.

While we're talking about Ubuntu (not the boy from the "Goode Family"), what is "Islamic" Ubuntu? Does it shut down on Ramadan? All right... to be fair.. Did you know that the original Slackware version included "Redneck" as an official language? It was hilarious!

I tried Fedora 2 and it did all right for awhile, but I went back to Slackware 12.0, and have followed it through 12.1, 12.2 and now to v13 (both 64 and 32 bits) depending on my machines.

I have completely dazzled many of my Windows friends with Compiz graphics and they want to learn Slackware now!

Slackware is resource-lean (except for KDE4, which works well on my big machine).

I can honestly say that this version (13.0) of Slackware 64-bit, with multilib 32-bit to compile 32-bit versions of software, cx-office 8.0 to run Office 2007 and some office programs, is ROCK STABLE and does everything I want!!

This is the best distro yet and I'm very happy with it.

Oops. Sorry. The topic was which distro is most popular in your country. I got carried away praising Slackware. I am not a member of any local users groups so I wouldn't know what's popular here.

The location of various linux by geographical area has no plausible explanation except for the apologie of key users who spread his word. It is the explanation that comes to my mind.

Comment that in my country, I feel alone using slackware, and I surrounded on all four side for ubuntu.

few slacky marks from chennai and from my home town in kerala ( more than 10 of my friends are using slack in kerala).
recently i am suggesting everyone to use openSuse.

in india many people (atleast in scientific areas) use REDhat varients, means Fedora, Centos, Redhat etc..
but now there is a bulk of people started using Ubuntu,
the popularity of ubuntu is not increasing because many machines are stand alone PCs. (no connection to internet).
whoever has internet connectivity the net is very slow.

as far of now, i never met any slack freeks in india. but many debian lovers !!!

I'm slacking from Las Vegas, Nevada.

I'm very close to being the geekiest guy in Las Vegas but that honor goes to one of the lvlug guys.

I'm also a slacker and from India. Most people here don't even know anything except Windows, and most of those who know Linux uses Ubuntu. I've also met some OpenSuse Lovers but I was trying to convince some people to get their old laptop back to work again (with Slackware). And slow internet connection is a huge problem here

That explains it...

When you get Debian you can get the Full Distro... 5 DVD set... meaning that you can deploy a complete system without connecting to anything...

With Ubuntu, the thing is similar, but more difficult... there are very few mirrors hosting the full set od 6 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for example...

With Slackware it is different... Once uou deploy a working system, that holds all your required apps, you can slackbuild what you need, and in case there's no slackbuild for it, you can src2pkg it , and pick all your /tmp/*.t?z stuff and burn it in a DVD or several...

In case you need to redeploy your system in another machine, you can use your package DVD set and reinstall everything you need, regardless of the order of install ( IMHO... am I correct here Slackware ppl... ? )...

Some thing as simple as

#cd /mnt/dvd/MyStuff
#installpkg *


You will have a full and complete working system in no time... provided you install everything your system was built of...

Sure is less than 24GB like in Debian...


BRGDS

Alex

PS With a small difference... you build your packages with the optimizations you want ( Compiler selection (gcc vs Intel ), flags of compilation libraries to link with... )

If you know what you are doing, your <whatever>.tgz will be "thinner" and snappier than <whatever>.deb or a <whatever>.rpm... because it has more recent source code, and was compiled with different flags and linked to more efficient versions of libraries...

Compare a Bentley Arnage ( Debian ) with a Koenigsegg (Slackware, Crux, Arch. BLFS... ) you would not take your family for a comfort ride on a Koenigsegg, but then again... there are some things that you can do with a Koenigsegg that simply are not possible to a Bentley... :-)

hi `Underclass Hero'. -- Welcome to slackware LQ.

many people had taken slack cd from me and installed. the most succesfull one was a college professor and he was doing clustering at that time (with fedora). when he got slackware he replaced all fedora and installed slack and infact he had made some softwares and modified slack a little. last year i got one live cd from him based on slax, dedicated for scientific applicatons in astrophysics.



Alexvader, yes
the standalone pc problem is the main problem,
earlier we never had any full multimedia support( with slack 13 we have mplayer and more) so i suggested suse (+100mb multimedia pack) to my friends. they have hell lot of package shipped in their dvd.

as you said debian had a full set of packages. but with slack we only have third party scattered set of package, including openoffice. otherwise one has to compile a full set of `trusted set of packages'-like from alien,rworkman etc. and put it in one repo.

there is a huge move towards ubuntu since they are giving cds free. i found many teenagers from my place started using ubuntu. they always like to follow `intall - format - install another os ' mehtod

use slack, struggle with slack and the satisfaction is yours. nothing more than that

regards rkrishna

PS: we are expecting a small cluster, and i am eager to try slack on that

Similar story here -- 99% Windows and the only other Linux users I know use Ubuntu. I did see a government-supplied school or college system with an IBM-sponsored distro (forget which) and heard none of the teachers knew how to use it as they only knew Windows.

I'm a slacker and i'm from Portugal.
Ubuntu is very popular here. Slackware and Gentoo are considered "more geek like" distros.

The people that use the irc network irc.ptnet.org in the channel #linuxhelp are funny and call Slackware "Oldware" and call Pat Volkerding always by old man. But that guys are always joking with everything...