I'm glad you don't put me in the *buntuverse. Though I did at one time use Dapper Drake. It was actually my second Linux. My first was Red Hat 6. That shows you how far I go back! After Dapper, I distro-hopped a bit, tried Gentoo and Arch but didn't like either. Then someone recommended Crux and I loved it. But when Crux stopped supporting 32-bit, I switched to Debian. Then I got my present 64-bit machine and decided to run Crux and Debian in parallel, adding LFS in due course.

I wouldn't want to use any of the *buntus now. They have all the complexity of Debian without the stability. And if you mess up your sudoers file, you are sunk unless you boot from something like SystemRescue. Universal sudo is quite nice for day-to-day working but I do like a root account as a backstop. Also Ubuntu holds your hand much too much. Lovely for newbies, just irritating for me.

AntiX I respect in its field. It's wonderful for old or eccentric hardware. I use it on my laptop, which has only 1 GB of core and a Via Chrome graphics chip, and it's the only Linux distro I've ever used on that machine which allows the screen to wake up gracefully from sleep. But I'm not sufficiently taken with it to have it on my main machine.

So I'm still leaning towards Slackware.

Slackware will straighten you out post-haste - there's very little lean left with a full install.

I've also made good on my donation "threat": because of this thread, even if you forgo slackware, someone will adopt it.

cheers,

C'mon Hazel. I'm rooting for ya. At least just burn a Live Slack CD or USB stick and check it out in an hour. Reading about someone elses views is no substitute for your own. Or... better... just go ahead and do a Full Install. It'll cost you maybe 30GB of hard drive real estate and for a vet like you an hour tops to get it installed. Try it for a month and if you don't like it, format the partition in what? 30 seconds? Doesn't that seem potentially a small investment with high likelihood of substantial gain?

BTW as an aside, it isn't wise to discount the importance of Rednecks and Hillbillies. According to a growing number of finds and DNA studies every branch of our evolutionary background tree includes "cousin f*ckers" ;) - https://www.ancient-origins.net/huma...s-today-004151

LMAO...Ahem, most of the Royal families still do that.

Thank You, going to use that for wallpaper and lilo. ;)

Great post man. Well done. Agree on all points.

Slackware users are a broad cross section of society, united mainly by our choice of operating system. There are no guns or tobacco in my house... but I do have scotch, an American V8 engine in my car, and a bicycle or two.

The flexibility of Slackware is what caught me early on. After using it, nothing else made sense. The non-conformist in me hated every other distro I tried. They all want you to do things their way. Slackware makes no demands. You can do things whichever way you like. In some cases, Pat goes to great lengths to ensure that this can happen. The pure-alsa packages are the perfect example of this. I'm sure there are other examples.
Mine too! You have my sympathies. But I only used Red Hat for a few weeks before someone in an online user group suggested Slackware. That was in 1999. I have tried many other distros since then, but none have ever been able to supplant Slackware as my daily driver.
My advice would be to try it in a VM. It's very easy to do these days.

I started my Linux adventure with a long dead distro called Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 in 2002. I moved to Red Hat 9 after that. I'd like to thank Red Hat for killing off their free versions and moving to RHEL. This prompted me to move to Slackware and I started with 10.0 in 2004. Like you I tinkered with a lot of distros. No other distro compares to Slackware.

"Stable, consistent, boring, gets the job done." +1

"No other distro compares to Slackware." +1

Also, it's fast, light on resource usage, and has sane defaults.

There's a slogan which says something similar to "Once you Slack, you'll never go back". Sounds far-fetched but it's actually true.
Slackware is a great tool; in the best case it adapts to you like a second skin, and it can accommodate an enormous variety of workflows.

Moreover, it mostly stays under the radar. You don't notice it (it's like second skin/second nature). But when you have to use anything else, oh boy. You will experience sever withdrawal symmptoms ;).

Anyway... I wish you the best with whatever distribution you choose. But you should try Slackware, and you have a community of friendly experts here (I'm not one of them, I'm just a simple user) who will try to help you in case of need (but RTFM :D).

Another remark on the community: Here you will find all kinds of people, but the Slackware Crew including The Man himself (PV) usually checks this forum and contributes to it. They are approachable and humble. PV's demeanor (and that of most Slackware gurus) are a brilliant example that humility is a mark of true greatness.

I already see I have a big problem. The Slackware installation dvd is 2.6 GB. That's pretty close to my 3 GB monthly download limit. Add a month's normal browsing, email and software updates and I'd be in trouble.

You might ask why I have such a low limit. That's because it's a low-cost deal. I pay 13.87 GBP per month (without VAT) where most people pay twice that. The only other person I know who pays as little as me has a special package only offered to people on benefits. And normally 3 GB/month is ample for my requirements.

I wonder if I could build Slackware up gradually over several months. It's unorthodox but I think I have the know-how to do it and I would learn a lot in the process. Sort of "Slackware from Scratch". I have a spare partition I could use. The first packages in the "a" set I would have to unpack by hand, but once I had enough of a system to chroot into, I could use the proper tools to reinstall those packages properly, then install the rest.

Good Lord, just PM me your address and I'll throw a USB stick in the post.

Lysander666 is closer to you than I am, hazel. I live on the North Coast of Canada. I am very happy to send you my Slackware 14.2 DVD if you wish. PM your address and I will send it your way.

@Hazel,
Well, heck, I'll burn a -current DVD and send it to you. Might take a while to get there, but it will be worth the wait.
:)

That's more than generous of you all! But do you think my way would work?

So how would you persuade me to use Slackware?
 

Yes, you could make it work that way... but in all honesty I'd take up the offer from one of the posters above... and if none of them follow thru for whatever reason, I also offer to send you a physical copy of whichever version you want.

It depends on your goals and what you need running on your system right away.

There is a small installer that only contains the setup program and needed things for installation except for packages. It is 25MB. It can be found under the usb-and-pxe-installers/ on your favorite mirror.

As for getting a bootable, networkable system, the easiest way would be to install the a/, l/, and n/ series of packages. a/ is considered the base install, l/ is for libraries, and n/ is for networking. You could definitely slim it down much further as forum member nobodino has it down to 26 packages for a base system (although, this doesn't include networking, which would add another 5 packages -- and another 7 to be able to use slackpkg).

Now that looks like a really smart way to proceed and certainly easier than what I was suggesting. I've just been reading the usb boot text from a mirror site and it looks like a simple job. I've got a spare usb key that I can use; I last used it to install Crux 3.3 a few months ago. OK, I'll try that. Should be fun.

The sets I had written down provisionally were a, ap, d, l, n, x and xap. But I'll only need some of ap, xap, d and n. I know by now which networking programs I actually use and which development tools I'll need. You get that knowledge if you use LFS a lot. I'll take all the libraries though; saves trouble with dependencies later on.

PS: Image captured. But I'm not copying it onto a stick late in the evening when I'm tired. That's asking for trouble! Do it tomorrow.

My proposal is to change the thread title "How would you persuade me to use your Linux distribution" and just move this to Linux general. The lack of sense is just overwhelming. I have no idea what is "debian complexity". I used debian - don't think it is more complex than any other distro. I am using mainly Slackware, but as well I can use Debian, CentOS - just any other Linux distribution. Just please don't overemphasize the differences between Linux distributions. There are not different kind of species. Persuade OP? Hm, I would make promise once OP decide to use Slackware it will obtain T-shirt with Slackware logo. I hope I am enough persuasive.

Salix installer is much smaller, since you have that limit.
https://salixos.org/download.html

You could try downloading AlienBob's Slackware Live Xfce Edition (32-bit/670 MB - 64-bit/692 MB). They fit in a CD-ROM. If I remember correctly, AlienBob's Slackware Live has a 'setup2hd' script which installs the Slackware Live edition to the hard disk.

So, with that installation to hard disk, you can move on later and complete the full Slackware setup.

This is the only Slackware Live version that doesn't offer the setup2hd script. Darth Vader did some work to allow it to be installed to the hard drive, but it is not supported by Alien Bob.

@Hazel,
A salesman at my work many years ago now showed me Slackware running on his laptop, It impressed me greatly.

More to the point, I had dialup at that time and NOT even 56K so bringing in a cd took ages. What he did was bring a spare hard drive in to work and use their high speed to bring in the iso he needed. Then he put it on the drive and took it home.

You have a thumb drive so is there a friend that will make the download for you?

Perhaps there is a LUG close at hand that can help you make the download?

http://lugslist.com/

Good luck on your quest, hazel. Do keep this thread updated with your progress.

If one defines 'complex' as the opposite of 'simple', it makes a bit more sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_p..._of_Simplicity

Exactly! "simple" is like "free": it has two completely different meanings and that causes endless confusion. We all know how difficult it is to explain "free software" to people who only use proprietary software but often get it "for free" from pirate websites.

Now the word "simple" originally came from the Latin simplex, meaning a sheet of papyrus or parchment that was written on without being folded. I suppose nowadays that would be called folio or foolscap. If it was folded in two before writing on it, it was called duplex. So simple in this sense means uncomplicated (or what an earlier poster in this thread called "no f***ery"). But "simple" is often used today to mean "easy".

These are not only two different meanings; they are actually opposed. An OS is easiest to use when everything is done for you and you can use it without thinking. But that isn't possible without a huge amount of internal complications. Someone has to do the work! If you're not going to do it then the software must. Conversely, the more simply the software is put together internally, the more work you have to do.

Debian is indeed easy to use. It's a very good-tempered system that seldom goes wrong, and that's why I have always liked it. But it certainly isn't simple inside. It's simpler than Windows (because any Linux distro is simpler than Windows!) but there is still a lot in there that I do not understand the workings of. And that bothers me.

What I call simplicity is to understand exactly how my software is put together, because even after working with computers for 30 years, I still don't trust them.

I am by no means simple person but I don't understand this 'definition'. Actually this 'definition' does not meet requirements of what is 'definition'. Basically 'definition' should refer to notions already being well-defined. Otherwise it is logical error. And this 'definition' is good example of such senseless statement. But it looks cool, sounds cool. So let be it. And is sooo complex - for sure it gave great pleasure its creator to state.

Warning - can of worms irrevocably opened
 

The only requirement of a definition is for the subject to be defined, there are no qualifications as to the extent or the simplicity. If a reader does not understand a defintion, this can either be because the subject is not in their sphere of knowledge, lack of linguistic cognition or poor wording on the part of the author.

Let me give you some examples. For instance, here are the current Wikipedia definitions of a lepton and a radical:

Without further research, I have no idea what these mean. But this is not because they are bad definitions necessarily, but because they are not in my area of knowledge.

Now, let's look at the definition of C:

This may make a little more sense to you, it does to me, because this is closer to my area of knowledge. However, there are some parts I don't understand. To the uninitiated though, it may look like complete gobbledygook. I'll try something a little close to home for me, see what you make of it. This is the definition of Çârgâh makam:

Now, I completely understand this, but I imagine a lot of people on this forum wouldn't. It isn't a bad definition because it's accurate and it covers everything nicely, but it may make no sense to you because it's not your area.

The point is that sometimes the notion of "explaining everything to an individual like they're a five year old" doesn't carry much effectiveness, since in order to do so one has to omit so much detail that the essence of the subject is lost. There are certain technical terms that must be employed for the subject to be covered accurately. For instance, there is a Youtube video where a researcher tries to explain blockchain to a small child, and all she's able to transmit is that it's a way of trading on the internet. But that says nothing about blockchain specifically. It doesn't say anything about hashes, ledgers or peer-to-peer, it doesn't even say anything about authentication.

The Wikipedia definition of the simplicity of the Unix philosophy is not a bad definition in my view, because it is not wrong, it is also a simple definition which is straightforward and sensible. It is also quite a good definition of Slackware. I would venture, since I know you are quite an experienced Linux user, that you just don't agree with the statement, but that does not make it a bad definition. Additionally, if you think you can provide a superior definition which retains sufficient meaning while also being more widely-applicable, you can always edit the article appropriately.

Oh dear! I dd'd that image to my memory stick and it copied over without reporting any errors. But I could not get it to boot, despite selecting usb boot from the BIOS boot menu. Actually from my experience with installing Crux from the same stick, it ought to have booted even without that; my BIOS seems to give priority to usb drives. And before anyone asks, yes I did copy to the whole drive (/dev/sdg) and not to a partition. After all, I've done this before a few times though admittedly only with iso images.

I've just mounted it in LFS out of curiosity and checked the visible contents and they are what I would expect. The syslinux.cfg file shows that I should have got a welcome message followed by a menu of three kernels plus memtest. Instead I got taken straight to my LILO menu on the hard drive.

There were no reported boot errors. The drive was just ignored. I notice that it has an EFI boot directory on it. That makes me wonder if it presupposes EFI and doesn't use the MBR.

dd it again? Sometimes I get a bad transfer and it works on the second go.

Done that already! It was the first thing I thought of. But I've had another idea that would be worth trying: suppose I copy the kernel and initramfs to one of my boot directories and add them to LILO? Then I can boot and run the installer from the hard drive.

You could also try Alien Bob's mini iso. It's a little over double the size and I'm not sure what's different between the two, but maybe this will work better.

http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackboot/mini/14.2/

OK, done that. I'll try it in the morning.

This brings up an experience that may or may not have anything to do with your project.
With the last few -current .iso-s I've burned to DVDs, I've had to use the efi option to get it to install.
Let me explain.
I would hit F8 to get the BIOS boot menu. If I picked the DVD drive containing the iso, the installation would start, but eventually fail. It would just stop somewhere along the line.
After a few tries, as I've always done in the past, I noticed the last entry on the BIOS boot menu was for a...
forgotten exactly, but it was labelled something like uefi/name-of-the-DVD-drive-containing-the-iso.
I went with that and the installation was successful.
When it present the elilo menu option I told it to create a standard lilo boot configuration and install it to the MBR.
The installation booted correctly and that is the procedure I've been using every since.
As previously mentioned, this may have absolutely nothing to do with what you are trying to accomplish.

I don't think it works that way. You can't just dd an image to a USB stick and have it boot.

Eric has written a script called 'iso2usb.sh.' You can find it here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak/

I was surprised to discover it can indeed work that way. Blew my mind.

It wasn't Eric's Slackware Live, it was a usb boot image provided by Pat on the install media. The instructions specifically state to use dd.

And you can use dd on the Slackware Live images, the usb stick will just be read only, which means any changes won't survive a reboot. To enable persistence, you would need to the script you mentioned, iso2usb.sh.

You could also use the usbimg2disk.sh script in the same directory, which was also written by Eric.

I've had good success with it in the past.

That's not been my experience. I've dd'ed many an ISO image to USB and it booted just fine. The command I've always used was:

NOTE!!!! Do not use partition numbers; for example, /dev/sdd1. dd has to be able to access the entire stick to be able to write the boot code in the MBR, therefore use only /dev/sdd. (These device names are just examples; use whatever device name Slackware assigns your USB device).

I went and dd'd it to a usb stick and boy does it ever boot slooooow. After a good long time it finally ended with kernel panic so no joy here with that one, Just had to check and see for myself

Depends on the bios and the boot device block size. The provided dd scripts never worked properly on my machine, because wrong block size.
So I format the device with FAT that starts @64 (not @2048 or @4096), install syslinux on it, copy the kernel and the repository, and it boots fine, loads fast, and has extra storage space.
I figure my boot device is too old to support the default block size, it takes 20 minutes to boot if I use the usb2* script to make a filesystem.

Well that was an interesting afternoon.

I got Bob's CD burned on the second attempt. Don't know why the first one failed; maybe because I was root and wodim doesn't like that. Or perhaps it was just a bad disc. The second time around I used a new disc and worked as myself (I'm a member of the cdrom group on Debian).

I booted it up and spent a long time playing around with it. It's a nice friendly little installer, but it took me a bit of exploration to work out where the software actually comes from. Turns out I need a local repository. I will create one on my data drive where there's plenty of room; the manual on the CD is very informative on the directory structure you need. The nice thing is that I can download the actual packages needed for a skeleton Slackware (a and some of n plus links, which I assume is in ap) at a pace that suits my Internet package, then run setup again when I'm ready. The result should be quite similar to a freshly built LFS.

I'll build it on my spare partition (sda8) and get it up to full working order over a couple of months, then say goodbye to Crux and copy Slack over to sda1.

Interim thanks to everyone who has helped me so far.

Please post how things work out, and any adventures in Slackware you might have.

I have Slack! It's a bit spartan at the moment, but I have got it to boot using the generic kernel. First time I ever made an initrd and it took me two tries. The first unsuccessful time, I went by the README file in /boot. But DDG showed me a thread in this forum that referenced a script by Pat for generating correct mkinitrd arguments and when I used that as a guide I got an initrd that actually worked. Maybe it's a bit cheeky making suggestions when you are so new to the distro, but I think that /boot/README.initrd should point the reader to this excellent script (which is located in /usr/share/mkinitrd).

I managed to get the network up by copying a script from Crux (which also uses bsdinit) and running it by hand. The rcM runlevel script expects a pair of scripts called inet1 and inet2 (one to bring up the interface and the other to launch dhcpcd), but I don't yet have those for some reason; I'll have to find out where they live.

This is going to be fun.

PS: found the scripts! They're in a separate package called network-scripts.

It's not a Slackware experience if something doesn't go wrong when you're learning.

The screenshot thread is that way >>> [hint]

Don't be daft! I won't have a desktop for ages yet.

If you have slackpkg set up, you can use slackpkg file-search $FILENAME or you can use the online Slackware Packages page and you can change the "Mode" dropdown to "content" and then search for filenames. Keep in mind, the search won't show you beyond the number set in the results drop down, so if you have it at the default of 10 and you don't see the file you were expecting, it may just have more than 10 results, so I'd recommend changing it to 100 or 1000.

:hattip:Congratulations hazel! :thumbsup: I'd like to point out that you can eliminate initrd altogether unless you encrypt your filesystems. For most people (and please do forgive this silly pun) filesystem support is the crux of the biscuit.

Well, whenever you get round to it then!

And unless you have multiple internal drives.

Only if those drives are prone to changes... and even then, AFAIK, you should be able to use PARTUUID without requiring an initrd.

This box has 4 internal drives and several external drives and I never create nor use an initrd. FWIW I use lilo and only some of the 4 drives are hard assigned with LABEL in /etc/fstab as well as two locations in /mnt for USB thumbdrives that error out to no effect until one is plugged in. I just want a defined location where the routinely important ones go. No problems to report at all.

Edit: Oh wait that isn't perfectly correct. One of the many externals is a small, powered eSATA enclosure housing a 2TB hard drive and a Plextor DVD burner and recently I destroyed the partition table on the hard drive because of a perfect storm combination of stupid errors, one by Legacy Bios partition requirements, a silly lilo error, and a huge foolish mistake on my part trying "fix-table" in lilo. Anyway ever since then if I boot with the external enclosure powered down and power it up in KDE, the system hard freezes. So I have to drop back to runlevel 3 when I power that enclosure up but Im reasonably certain that has nothing to do with a lack of an initrd.

it worked fine before my stupid action so once I have a solid day to try to recover data from the wipe and can then recreate the partitioning, that minor inconvenience should again disappear.