Most of the OP's points have been well addressed, but I'd like to mention something else with regard to question #1:

You should understand how slackware is put together, because, I would say that it is one of the distributions least likely to contain security holes. Pat (almost) never patches packages, but waits for reliable and stable versions from upstream. There are no slackware developers mucking about with the upstream code. So any holes would have to be from the upstream software, and so would be present in all distributions using that software, unless they themselves patched without notifying the upstream team of the security problem. (I think this is one of the reasons also that compiling packages on Slackware is so rarely problematic.)

Brian

Sorry? Last time I checked Slackware uses the available software that any other distro uses. Firefox, KDE, etc, therefore if you were running debian, you would still be at risk anyways. Plus Linus is responsible fore the kernel, so, I guess all Linux distros are backdoored then, huh? OMG, Pat is a black hatter! LOL!

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Is compiling really that much of a pain? I compile stuff all the time on my 8 year old desktop just fine, and doesn't take that long (of course it depends what I am compiling, but actually I rarely had to compile a lot of the software I have) So assuming your system is much faster than mine, compiling shouldn't be an issue. Plus I don't see you or in fact anyone compiling anything major (unless they had a real special reason to) such as a heavy DE like KDE, or GNOME, or even a web browser such as Firefox.

yeah I though that first part is merely a myth but I'm abit paranoid about computer security so I needed to be sure... ok so I'm pretty convinced that Slackware is good but I still have three questions, first, is there any way to install Slackware without formating my data? my home folder in particular, and use it as I did in Debian (or atleast being able to have it as a folder and not a user) I assume that there might be "configuration collision" so everything except /home must go. and now the second question, how does slapt-get works? is it like apt-get (connect to the serves from the /etc/apt/source.list and downloads from them) or does it work diffrently... whats its "data source" is it big?. and can I get support for *.deb and *.rpm files?

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Jeebizz. I dont know why but compiling a simple prog is like half an hour per program for me, although my 3GHZ 512RAM, And yeah its really a pain... especially because 60% of the time my compiling results in some error (Like the Error 2 in wine)

How do such ridiculous rumors spread and why ? Bah, I guess there are even dumber things that people believe or spread rumors about ... What can I say ... believe whatever you want.

Half an hour per program!? First to be fair, I don't know what you are trying to compile that would take that long, perhaps a 3d rendering program like blender, or perhaps wine (though I never compiled either of those), and although my system is ~100MB less than yours and a MUCH older processor and compiles stuff just fine, perhaps it could be another issue. Since compiling is also intensive on not just memory but hard drive as well, have you made sure that DMA is enabled on that system? Plus, if you compiled your own kernel, does it really take that long too? I usually can get a kernel compiled in a little less than a half hour, because the kernel itself doesn't take long anyways, plus I compile modules that I need only. Just a thought anyways.

That's quite a broad sweeping generalization that you've made there, rickh. I can assure you that I encourage and support the use of FOSS. Slackware is indeed a distro worthy of your consideration. My other two favourite distros are Debian and FreeBSD.

Yeah, I agree, it is a very broad generalization ... and I think an incorrect one as well. And even if it held some truth, what would it matter ? As long as you fight for it, what does it matter if others do or don't ? There's nothing (AFAIK) on the Slackware CD/DVD that is not FLOSS, Is there ? (java is now under GPL, so I can't think of anything else that might be)

FOSS will never win if there will be only things which are not against the law or only GPL'ed. Simple users don't care if mp3 format is licensed, or not. They just want to play music and watch videos whenever they want. So removing mplayer and other binary_blob codecs from OS doesn't do any good.

BTW, bios is still not reverse engineered. Why is everybody so quiet about it?
No way to start? Yeap, because it's f*cking closed under NDA. So we must pray for that our bios support Linux. I am sure that Microsoft devs have full access.

you may be right about the first thing, and btw http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/2/21/490 :P

Wooohoooooooo, these are the greatest news which I've heard in these 4 years in Open Source community. Similar one was a project at MenuetOS community to reverse engineer bios, but I believe it haven't succeeded (yet?).


It's great that there are such people like Yinghai Lu, who does such things.
Like there were poeple from demoscene who had shown a way how to use Unreal mode (32 bit Real Mode) in computing.

Now only open x86 is left (openSparc and openRisc already there).

Slacky packages are great.

And if this post about linuxpackages is correct, how do the admins of linuxpackages know from what source did the user got the ISO? And how do they activate this unwanted package, which destroys the data? Remotely? And what if I download their ISO and put it into p2p? Sounds a little paranoic.

one of them is wine and theres others like kguitar/Tuxguitar, and some other program which I already forgot (since I found their *.deb file)

err,I dont even know what DMA means....

Err I never compiled my own kernel since I'm always afraid of messing up my OS (which I still always manage to do so)... and generally install modules that I need but theres also a few which I'm only experimenting, and theres a few that are sitting there to provide an overkill of security (like a deamon which takes log of any incoming/outgoing traffic in a detailed report and also prevent IP/Port vulnerability scans). I know its an overkill and simply a waste of resources but I really am paranoid about my comp.

p.s.

Can anyone tell me how to install Slackware without hurting my current /home folder? (but still erasing everything else)

If your /home is on it's own partition simply choose to not format it. If it's in the / partition you just need to back it up to a cdrom, flash, or other storage medium. You really can't selectively choose to format only a part of a partition.

well, I never said format... I said erase/delete... prehaps its possible to boot with a live-cd with root, erase ALL the files (inc. the invisible ones) except /home and install Slackware on it... the question is will Slackware modify the /home and erase my data?

I don't know what will happen if you overwrite your home dir with Slack (it might be/might be not that it will overwrite it), but why can't you make a backup and then after installation copy it over Slack created home dir.