Whats so good about Slackware?
 

I just downloaded the current slack, and tried it out for a bit and am wondering what is so good about Slackware? I am by no means saying it isn't a good distribution but I just don't understand why so many people use it. I installed what I suppose could be called 8.1 beta 2 on ReiserFS and it just seemed unresponsive and not as quick as I would have liked. I know people use Mandrake for ease of use, and RedHat for maximum "compatibility", and Debian for such frequent security updates and such, so I guess all I am asking is for you slack users to perhaps shed some light on what makes it "Slackware" your preferred distro because it seems I missed something while testing it

I use slackware for several reasons

1) it is the most unix-like distribution out there, so the knowlege aquired will be more easily transferrable if I ever need to deal with Solaris or other 'nixes.

2) Slackware has always favoured stability and security over the latest features (such as the time RedHad included the unstable gcc2.96 so they could claim IA64 support). While Slackware is not FreeBSD, it is frequently regarded as the most secure distro out of the box.

3) Slackware is not RPM based. RPM makes installation of sofware really easy, but this ease of use comes at a cost. Maybe I am just a bad administrator, but I find that RedHat systems are more difficult to manage in the long term, especially if you add and remove packages all the time as things tend to become cluttered. Also because RPM does not support overlapping packages - removing a package can break things you didn't intend it to break (slack's TGZ package system does not check for dependencies, but using it is always safe). Also some RPM dependent features of the OS tend to break if you compile packages from source, and don't install them from RPM.

There are other reasons I can't think of right now that should become evident after you use slack for a while.

You may not want to use slack if you want GUI admin tools, or want a Windows replacement, and although I have had a problem with adding functionality, this distro needs some patience. That being said, I love slackware and beleive any serious Linux user would benefit from is immensely:)

P.S.: at no point was this meant to be an anti-RedHat rant.

P.P.S.: if my information is outdated/wrong please correct me. Wouldn't want to misrepresent anything now would we:)

P.P.P.S: where exactly did you say your system was slow @responding? More than likely this is a configuration error on your part. That or you are using Nautilus (1.0.3 is extremely slow).

Thanks for your very adequate response, it was helpful and well worded. I at no time plan to be a SysAdmin or use BSD for any purpose as I am a Linux user through and through, as for response time I was not using Gnome or Nautilus as the environment of choice was KDE 3 which I know is in fact faster than KDE 2.X.X in most all aspects. But you are correct of assuming it could have been "configuration error on your part" being that I have never used Slack and was basically just a default install where I chose what packages to install.

Well I guess I have used BSD before, I tested NetBSD for awhile and it seemed to be an extremely nice distribution that behaved like one would expect.

I like Slack (although I don't use it too often) because it offers me a challange greater than my other distro (Mandy) does. It allows me to get in and tweak 'til my heart's content, and really see what is going on, without the need to do an LFS.

:) I´m testing Slackware current right now with kde 3.0 and all i can say is that i will probably install 8.1 when its realesed.

:eek: KDE 3.0 is wery fast n stable, i have already installt true type fonts with no problem from my windows hd so the websites looks human in mozilla

:cool: i´m a linux newbie but i dont wanna use a "newbie distro" i will probably learn a lot of the linux inviroment using slackware

:study: Does anybody have some pdf books about slackware and console commands ?

I chose Slack for my first shot at Linux because, like frig_neutron said, it's the most UNIX like w/o being UNIX. I have some background in AIX, so I figured that would help while working with Slack.

I haven't noticed any slowness in my system (specs below) except when I run anything KDE (not 3 - haven't tried it). I stick with Blackbox/Fluxbox for my window manager and rarely use more than 1/2 of my physical memory (under load).

Fuel - you should be able to find some info on console commands by checking for Bash HOWTO's at linxdoc.org

As far as Slack books/pdf's go, the online book at Slack's site is pretty much all that's out there that is Slack-specific.

j.

I found a slackware pdf file but i dont know how uptodate it is

i constructed a temp website and uploaded the pdf .. so you can check it out / download .. if someone is interested

http://www.northpower.nu/gnuman/

Fuel,

Thanks for the link to the pdf. It looks like it's the same as what is on the Slackware site (in HTML format). If there are any discrepancies between the two, I'd guess that the website has the most current info.

Nice to have the doc in a different format though.

j.

Why I use Slackware
 

I started out with Redhat then Mandrake.

I went to Slackware for these reasons:

1) Often those fancy install and administrations tools don't work correctly. Although this situation has improved, I found that it was a lot easier to fix a configuration problem with the much simpler Slackware then with Redhat and Mandrake. Since in both of these cases you have to get down to manually editing config files anyway.

2) The default installation of Redhat, and especially Mandrake loads up a lot of stuff on bootup that tends to use a lot of memory and slows the whole machine down. Although this is not a big difference, when installing on antiquated hardware, this little bit of performance hit really adds up.

3) I also never got along well with RPM. It seems I just had to upgrade the whole distro to get updated software working. With Slackware, I often install updated software in the simple .tgz format and usually have very little trouble getting it to run.

4) Slackware seems to have a reasonable development cycle. Not so fast that it leads to buggy distro's (like SuSe and Mandrake) but not too slow (like Debian). It seems just right for me.

As far as response problems, I agree that Nautilis and KDE will really slow things down. I havn't used newer versions of Nautilis or KDE yet. Are they really that much improved? I currently use lighter weight WMs like Enlightenment, and IceWM on my slower machines. I use Gnome without Nautilis (using older gmc instead) or KDE2 on faster machines.

This all said, I don't think I would recommend Slackware to Newbies unless they have a high aptitude for doing manual configurations. Mandrake, SuSe, or Caldera might be better choices.

well this is how i became a slacker.
I wanted to try linux so i loaded Mandrake 8. It was a while back on a laptop i got from school i had it for about 3 days then i formated it to load win98. I thought linux was cool so when i got a extra hd i loaded red hat because some guy that came in my job said it was cool. I loaded it and i thought this isnt so bad. I found this fourm and talkd with people about RD and they said that its really going to limit what i can do later on down the line. So i thought well try Man again i loaded it and it was liked RD all over i got the same issues. Then i saw RD 7.3 beta i loaded it and it wasnt anything speical so i saw this guy on the forum saying that slack is the way to be. I downloaded it and ran it and never went back to the other stuff. I will admit slack is a whole lot harder than RD and Man but i fell as if i am learning more about the OS. Also things like Mplayer, seem to love Slack more than RD and MAN. Also in downloading other apps for linux i saw that many of the installs said "if your running man or rd dont send any bug reports we know that it doesnt work well in those distos" So i guess you can say the apps made me do it. LOL

The simple answer is; of all of the distros out there (and I haven't tried them all by no means) slack is the most powerful, secure (check http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories), and stable. I like grabbing source code and compiling it for my machine, RH, Mandrake, and Suse are good for replacing windoze but I think I'll always use slack as long as it's available. I've administered firewalls, file servers, web servers, dns, and email servers on both slack and solaris; slack is more robust.

another good reason, didnt know slack could do all of that thou. :study:

Well i've used FreeBSD which i heard is very close to slack in the way packages are installed (through .gz's). I say its very good for someone needing a good stable distro to work with. I also try to stay away from GUI Config utils as they never work right..like someone said before.

Btw i love how everyone uses my sig idea :-)

I chose Slackware because they call you "Slacker" when you use it! ;)

HA...and I thought I was the only one :D

I'm looking to throw out windows once again and go back to linux. I've run different forms of RH (6.0, 6.2, and 7.0), and I wasn't completely pleased with them all. I like to jump in config files and do it myself, and I'm reasonably comfortable with the command line.
I'm finding a lot of you don't use GUIs. I'm interested in running KDE 3.0 on top of Slack. Is this a no-no because people just don't do it, or because there's lots of problems, or is it just that people on the Slack groove just don't use GUIs?

you should have no problem using KDE with Slackware..
Not sure what you mean with no no.. KDE is the desktop environment, configuring files you can either do manually or with a GUI interface tool.. in which with Slack or any distro, you can do manually.

Well, not a no-no, but maybe looked down upon.
Oh, yeah, forgot to ask. Seeing as how there's few differences between Slack and FreeBSD, which one should I use to run my intranet server?

KDE, is and always will be a huge kludgey monolithic beast.

So what, that's what I'm using as I type this. There's quite a few regulars on this forum *cough* *cough* acid_kewpie, that will bark at you for using a bloated window manager, but really I can wait that extra 1.2 seconds.

The one thing I don't understand is everyone's rush to run the bleeding edge goop when they don't need it. That's one of the niftiest things about Slackware, is that it is "beat it with a hammer for hours" stable. Then, if you need to go bleeding edge it'll run the 2.5.6 kernel just fine.

Cheers,

Finegan

Well, apparently the BSDs are more secure than Linux...but I suppose that all depends on how you configure your box, and how conscious you are about regularly updating for security problems. As for actually using them, I had some problems with setting up X for FreeBSD (that said, I have heard/seen many, many success stories), but it was a piece of cake under Slack. Oh, and I don't look down on using GUIs for Slack.He he! I regularly switch between SawFish (my preferred, sorry) and KDE under Slack. KDE is definitely easier to use because I've been spoon-fed Windows, but I do still like the slick-ness of Sawfish. I've never heard Slackware being called 'beat it with a hammer for hours stable'...quite a good summary though. :D

I think OpenBSD takes the cake for security - 4 years without a remote hole in the default install. But then again, it's not exactly Linux either :rolleyes:

I'll be installing Slackware for my first time this week, just nixed Red Hat 7.2 off my main computer, and if Slackware is good enough it'll be a toss up between Slack and OpenBSD for my server (currently Red Hat 7.2 as well).

It's awesome to see a Slack forum here, I hope things go well because I'll certainly be finding a second home here :)

Well done AUSSIE, yuor efforts are paying off!;) :cool: :D

Thanks Daffy, how are you m8?, and welcome to LQO

Upgrades
 

Thought it was about time i posted:o I've upgraded and sold a lot of gear, hdd's included. So i have Mandrake 8.2 ready to go.
Very busy with Uni and stuff, hope your well;) :D

I've been a slacker for a few months now, and once a slacker... always a slacker :)

The primary reasons for me choosing Slackware:
1) The "I'm using a non-GUI configuration Linux system" :)
2) Almost everything compiles from source with a little tweaking. I never enjoyed compiling stuff under RedHat.
3) The "under the hood"-feeling, and the endless possibilities of system configuration.

So why choose to become a slacker? Because Slackware is stable (and that doesn't have to imply slow), and behaves as it should do.

IMHO anyway =)

count me as the third person to confess to thinking that being called a slacker is cool... ;)

well, honestly, i really got used to using slack... but for a time i couldn't get the sound to work, so i switched back to rh ( i really tried) ... meanwhile, i'm poking around to see how things work. i'll be back on slack when 8.1 is released so i can try once again...

it's too much trouble and time to switch now. i'll have to redo too much stuff. ain't got the time. so i'll wait for 8.1

#4 that likes being called a slacker. :-)

when i first got into linux i was using redhat with kde... then my cousin introduced me to the wonders of slackware. i first installed redhat over 2 years ago and in the 6 months since i've started using slackware on most of my boxes my understanding of the linux OS has significantly increased.

i love working under the hood and actually configuring the system myself. it really gives you a sense of accomplishment when you get build something from scratch (or as close as you can get). redhat, and those "fluffy" distros, while good in their own respect, don't require the understanding and knowledge slack does.... everything doesn't come pre-configured in slack, which is nice cause i love to do everything myself.

in short, slack's more of a hobby distro... for the person who just has fun doing this stuff. :-)

.. and this is the exact same reason I chose Slack ... besides being able to officially call myself a Slacker. I want to tinker, I want to edit with the command line (although I have problems with VI. It and my terrible memory do not mix very well ...), I want to hone and fine tune, in much the same manner as I do to my truck. :D
You'll probably be seeing bunches more of me in the near future as I learn how Slack works. Suggestions on good books I should pick up, or perhaps website with Slack-oriented help files? It'd probably save me a bunch of trouble.

Oh, one more thing, how much will it hurt me to NOT have a working A: drive? If things go south, I can always just have LILO re-write the original boot sector and go back to NT ... right? :rolleyes:

It depends on how south things go. If you can still boot into slack, then yeah. If you can't boot aat all, a floppy drive is great to have so you can boot off a bootdisk and fix tings. There are other ways around it I suppose with the install CD but i'd rather a disk drive to make things a tad more simple.

The coolest thing I recently saw a .5 gig used for?

A friend of mine has a 4 drive system that puts my penta-boot to shame. There are something like 40 gigs worth of un-partitioned space on the bloody thing right now. /dev/hdb is an old .5 gig that doesn't live on the fstab of any of them, with a base install, X-less, of Slack 8. Its his parachute. If anything goes kazoo, he changes the BIOS boot order to it... and fixes the problem from there. Nifty eh?

Any more news on 8.1? I've been punching through the usual userlocal, linuxpackages, the slack site, /. and there hasn't been anything since that 8.1 beta 2 announcement. I really should get over my mailinglist block.

Luck,

Finegan

honestly, i can't wait... it'll give me a good excuse to do another fresh install :)

does having tiny linux qualify me as a slacker?:D

because really its slackware 4.0, and is this version old and bad, or is it still ok

New to Linux, chose Slack
 

Hello, I'm new here and new to Linux in general.

I recent put together my new system. Athlon XP 1800+, Soyo Dragon +, 512 MB DDR. Nice machine, eh? Anyway, I was looking around to find an OS to run. I've used WinXP. I hate it. I can't quite place it, but something about it is just so wrong. But nevermind that.

The point is that I chose Slackware Linux. Why? Well, I can't really say. As a newbie, I can't even begin to speak intelligently on the subject. Right now, I'm running ZipSlack with Win98. Win98 is the was the last Windows I didn't hate, but even now it's wearing thin. Depending on how much I like Linux, I may dual boot with it.

Now, tomorrow I intend to try X Windows and KDE. I'll also create a Linux partition and move Slack over there. I figure that'll be "real" Linux. I shouldn't have any problems using ZipSlack as the basis for all this?

So, now that I've told you my life story, do you have any advice? Warnings? Tips? Any ZipSlack-related issues to look out for?

Just being a newbie I could be wrong, but, I always thought one of the great advantages of Slack was that it runs on a FAT32 partition....There fore it's a rather simple install for those who fear the dreaded partition....:confused:

You can install a lot of distro's on a fat32 partition, it will make it run like a dog though and won't give you any idea of how good linux can be.

ah yes... as a person who went through it myself, the process was not pleasant, but i took a cold turkey treatment from MS and i forced myself to learn something about linux. well, no regrets... :)

take the plunge and try out linux... it's good fun... and i believe you'll be suitably impressed

I've just partitioned and installed RedHat 7.1. As my name suggests, I'm a total 'nix newbie so standby for some pretty lame questions....


Anyway, I'm getting a little off topic so I'll leave this thread alone........

geez i'm not reading things right... i posted some rubbish here... sorry... pls ignore this post.

-To learn how does Linux work.
-To be a hacker;YES--Hacker but not a Cracker!

hmmmm
 

Thinking about using slackware...
I am a total newbie and have never used linux before
Is slackware to hard to start with?
I really want to be a "slacker" ;)
:newbie:

Re: hmmmm
 

well, its a little more difficult than the newbie friendly distro's .... but if you really want to learn how to use linux and you start out with slackware.. you will learn, just don't give up and you'll learn.

Slackware, compared to the other distros is: harder to install, harder to configure, you don't have to do everything by source, there is pkgtool, but most people don't use it too much, X is a headache to set-up, sound is usually done by hand, and no matter what, within the first week, you're going to want to re-compile the kernel... basically: masochism breeds competence.

And on a side note, I think Tricky just won best sig:

A good friend will bail you out of jail, but your best friend will be the one sitting next to you saying "That was fscking awesome!"

Cheers,

Finegan

slack is lluuuuurrrvvvly...

Well I must say you slack users stick together in a mannor that would surely impress most anyone, myself included. Thanks for clearing things up in such a friendly and light-hearted mannor, I know that if ever I decided to change distro's there will be a place to get answers here on LQ from all you slackers :p

ive been using slackware and im stucked in using it hehehhe
well, if using linux is related to shakespeare, than Ill be the ROMEO and SLACKWARE is the JULIET

hehheh....

I use slack simply because I use Linux on my laptop. Ive tried allmost all the distros and have found many of them to be buggy on older laptops.

Currently I am running mandrake 8.2 because i needed to help a friend get his system configured.

As soon as Slack 8.1 comes out i will be installing it and then doing an LFS build so i can optimize slackware even further for my system.

I dont use KDE, Gnome or any of the other shiny fluff GUI's. I use blackbox for speed and a nice clean desk top. I use lots of command line because it is much less resorce sucking.

under Mandrake or RH you must fight the GUI to use commandline. In some cases you must fight the OS to install the apps you want Or remove the extra junk from the system. This sort of difficulty is absolutly unacceptable on a lap top with the changeing demands I place on it in many other enviroments.
With slackware i do not have this problem unless i am remiss in my configuration.

Sides I love the look on a sysads face when i sit down with my laptop and plug it into his net work, get my reading, call up a text editor and suddenly i am on the system. I tried this with Mandrake and it failed miserably.

Please forgive my spelling.

To answer your question what's so good about Slackware: VERY LITTLE!

I'm sick and tired of command line fanatics (no names given :D) who for some reason don't even want to have the option of using GUI setup tools. The command line is a truly great tool to have available from time to time, but you have that in whatever Linux distro you use. What is so freakin' bad about being able to choose??? In Red Hat and Mandrake you can choose, in Slackware you can't, that's the end of the story.

If you for some reason need a very slimmed down distro, then Slackware does serve a purpose, point taken, but otherwise there's nothing good about it.

I have had Slackware installed for some months now, and here are some negative remarks I have:

* Slackware uses BSD type configuration as opposed to System V configuration which is the common Linux distro standard. So, remember, whatever you've learned by configuring Slackware may not automatically apply to the rest of the Linux world. Is that the best way of learning Linux?

* As a direct result, you'll have a lot of trouble installing some programs on Slackware cause certain configuration directories and/or files will simply be missing.

* The required use of boot and root disks during install feels very ancient and really deters me from installing it ever again. However, I'll admit that the install process itself is very good for being text-only.

* Sound detection! Want Slackware to detect your sound card? Forget it! You'll have to do it yourself! And they don't include any Red Hat like command line tool for that purpose if you expected to have any help. That's I guess part of the "learning process", but I'm the type of guy who wants to learn things by using and exploring the OS, not by force or necessity before I even get started. First getting all to work, THEN exploring the system. You can do that in Red Hat or Mandrake, not however in Slackware cause you get stuck right away in the start...

But for everyone up for a challenge, and still thinking about Slackware, why not try FreeBSD instead? It's not "Unix/BSD-like" like the Slackware author calls his distribution, it IS Unix/BSD, the original itself and apart from the BSD kernel (as opposed to the Linux kernel) most things are the same (same shells, although different default shell, same desktops and window managers, etc). You even got Linux binary compatibility for running Linux programs on BSD. The installation is somewhat messier than for Slackware, but then you don't need any boot or root disks and it's SO easy to install additional packages from the net during install...

Oh, and I forgot to mention the ultra-cool little red FreeBSD daemon which Slackware doesn't have :D

Although I do miss the true SysV init scripts that provide a standardized method of starting and stoping services, I've had very little trouble finding my way through Slackware's init scripts.

I do think that Slackware (and most everyone else) needs to move towards complying with the Linux-Standards-Base, which includes SysV init.

Funny, I actually have more trouble with this sort of thing with other distros. Of course this is another case for the Linux-Standards-Base compliance.

The CDROM image IS bootable. What other ways do you want? It is true that Slackware doesn't have a MS Windows installer mode (like Caldera) but this sort of thing just seems morally wrong to me.

Granted I tend to have odd sound cards, but it is very rare when RedHat's "sndconfig" actually configures my cards correctly, Just last night it mis-configured an old Cardinal DSP 16.

(Side note: Last night I tried out the latest "Virtual Linux", It's a version of Mandrake 8.1 that runs entirely from a CDROM. Since Virtual Linux has moved to compressed file systems on both the CDROM and the Ramdisks, it really speeds things up where it is not much slower than running on a real hard drive, as long as you have a decent amount of memory. It was a very usable system once I dealt how the sound, video, and keyboard got mis configured by the installer. You know, all the kind of things that brought me over to Slackware in the first place)

Nothing wrong with FreeBSD except the kernel is less versatile, and you have to compile a lot of the apps yourself. Installation is not really much of a challenge either, you just have to find and read the docs. Which is pretty much what you have to do with Slackware.

Of course the beauty of this opensource world is that nobody is trying to force you to use Slackware. If you would rather use Redhat, go for it. Based on your complaints, I would recommend SuSe and Mandrake and LycOS/Desktop (formally Redmond Linux) as well.

GIVE ME A FREAKIN' BREAK!!!!

Ok, so you've installed Slackware to see what it's all about and found out that it's "different" from most of the others out there! Oh no, what to do? Well, if you were to research a little bit, Slack is the only distro outside of a BSD to still comply with the TRUE linux standard that originated from the BSD kernel. So you say why not try a BSD? Slack is very BSD-like. OK that's the first contradiction. You say that Slack doesn't use standards that make it harder to install programs, yet you suggest using BSD in which you need to compile most things yourself. There's the second contradiction. I'm guessing you've used RedHat religiously and when you tried something different, you didn't know what to do. Calling Slack worthless and good for nothing is one of the most childlike, un-thought out responses i've ever heard. I can do everything and better in Slack than Redhat or mandrake. Yes I DO use a GUI and no i'm NOT a commandline freak. But then again, that is where things originated. If you want something to configure your sound for you, detect all of your hardware, then sit like a paralized monkey on your desk, go buy Windows. I suggest a little more research and depth of understanding before making such statments.