i keep seeing my nick posted... seems like a hot topic for debate...
for example:

anyway, i understand how linuxfreak feels about how an OS should work for you first (although i did not have the same reaction. i tore my own hair instead of burning LQ's slack forum ). i was lost on slack initially. didn't know what to do after the install.

and i didn't learn EVERYTHING from slack. i had redhat, mandrake AND slack...

but at the end of the day, i just picked slack. it's just a matter of taste for me. i like the way things work here. and yes, like Aussie, i love being called a slacker yeah, i'm friggin lame .

i think standards are cool. when something gets this big, i think they help to bring some sanity. but for linux, i think there'll be a lot of friction if everyone is forced to adopt SysV per se. i mean, is that such a big issue?

Man what a long thread, wartstew I never had any problem with you and still dont m8

what's so hard about configuring a soundcard manually anyway? just insmod and go. The only requirement is that you know your hardware speck.

as far as the entire commandline freak accusations go.. you sort of have to be able to do *anything* on the command line to be a good admin. Ever tried to do any serious administration using a remote X session on a 33.6 connection? Not to mention the security risk in doing so? I'll just stick with my ssh thankyouverymuch.

And if anyone tries to correct me by saying you can run X remotely over ssh, please allow me to reiterate: 33.6.

hm... to be honest, i think it's easier to learn stuff on slackware than the other distros other things... it seems better organised... just my view. eg. the start-up scripts. and they're very well documented...

I started using Slack from the May 1995 InfoMagic Linux Developers Toolkit CD Set! Before infomagic started to ship RedHat.

I use it for all my intel linux boxes at home. I wish they'd kept going on the Alpha stuff as I have a number of them also.

Slack is (IMHO) the easiest distro to maintain. Mainly because it leaves it all up to you to maintain it. There isn't a whole bunch of files all over the place, scripts doing weird funky stuff that takes ages to troll through to find out it just prints [ OK ] in green etc.

It uses rc files in a style very similar to BSD's although it's still a SYSV type of boot with runlevels etc. They're simple to read, and understand, and easy to add to. (NOTE: difference between SYSV and BSD is that SYSV supports runlevels. Slackware supports run levels, therefore it is a SYSV Init. It *doesn't* use a separate directory for each run-level with specifically named soft-links to each and every script which needs to be stopped/started in each run level. Just one script per level. Which kind of makes more sense when you think about it. How many times do you want to change your run level? Usually it's in multi-user mode (level 2 or 3) or level running X as a workstation (4 or 5). Rarely do you change the run level of the machine once it's up and runing, and if you do, slack's method is fine. I do like the idea of having a script which accepts start|stop|restart for each precess you want to start, especially when you're playing with a new service or trying to debug a current one, and slackware could easily use such scripts and have its init files remain effectively the same, something I've been considering doing for the past 6 months. This turns out to bee a long NOTE. )

Using it for a GUI box is also good. Configuration issues? That's an Xfree problem, not a slakware problem. (Something else I like about slack. They include standard products. Standard kernels, standard X stuff, everything is the way it comes from the authors.) But you can ask slack users and they will be able to tell you how to fix or get around the issue. I can't wait for Gnome 2.0. Just to fix all the silly little things that are issues in Gnome 1.x. Heh, someone mentioned using lightweight WM's like Enlightenment. I remember when Enlightenment was the most resource hungry thing you could run on Linux.

I use slack 8 for my internet gateway, dhcp server, web server, MUD server, database server, and everything else you might use any sort of linux distro for. At work we use mainly RedHat, but we have a couple of BSD boxes the occasional Solaris/SunOS box. To be quite honest, administrating these boxes usually requires you to get away from all of the built-in scripts that come with distros like Suse or RedHat, and frequently, it's easier/quicker to type "ifconfig eth1:3 xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa netmask fff.ggg.hhh.255 up" (adds an IP alias to eth1) then it is to start linuxconf, find the network section and expand it, find the ethernet card you want, fill it all in, then apply the changes and quit. Besides linuxconf then saves that value, and if you don't want it kept forever, you have to go back into linuxconf to disable it again, as opposed to "ifconfig eth1:3 down" Horses for courses. If you don't know the command line tools, and you're setting up a box that when set it gets left (set and forget) then I guess Slack isn't for you. If you're working on a linux box that is used for software development, or in some sort of live environment, you sure want to know your command line tools! And there's no better incentive to learn than "if you don't learn it won't work"

I think Slackware has it's followers because it was such an early distro (the first distro to be widely used actually) and in those days, Linux freaks were actually students and professionals alike who got to use Unix at work/school and wanted it for home, but couldn't afford the huge licence fee involved. When Linux came out, these guys embraced it and made it what it had become by the time the world started to notice it. They didn't have nice scripts to install it for them. They had to do things the hard way! What we think of as hard now (ie no auto detection etc) is really pretty advanced. I think having the "it doesn't detect my sound card automatically so it's crap" attitude shows just how little you care for learning about Linux/Unix and more that you're in it because it's 'cool' or 'free' or some other more peer-pressure related reason. Which is fine I guess, as "it takes all kinds" and you're always going to get people who will point out the shortcomings of any distro, but it's probably better to compare the differences of features, and say why you prefer one over the other, and let the reader decide As far as I'm concerned, all those scripts (and that's pretty much all they are) are really only relevant when you first setup a box. (And what happens when those scripts fail or are broken? You have to know the command line tools then, and once you know them you tend to keep using them. Unless of course you want to go off and rant at the distro maker for not making the script bug free and demand your money back. Oh wait! You downloaded it for free cause you're too stingy to pay for it! Damn shame that ) On-going admin tasks generally don't use them. Software installation also tends to avoid packages. For security reasons, or to get the feature set in a program you want (and disgard the ones you don't want) you generally get the source and compile it yourself, unless of course you are getting a commercial product, for which you don't have access to source code I'd really like to see more people making Slackware packages of their commercial software, or install scripts which 'like' slackware.

Slack is the best distro out (IMHO), 'cause it's easy, robust and clean. It gets my vote

tifkat

hey... i'm curious... i've never run servers before... all i have is my lil ole desktop machine. until i get more my hands on more machines some questions:

how do things work? say i want to run a web server or mud server...
doesn't that mean i need a static IP? how is this done? do i have to go to an ISP or what? and if i get a static IP, do i need a domain name as well? do i have to buy this from some organisation?

Ok, running any of these services doesn't require a static IP address. They will run just fine.

The only reason you'd need a static IP would be to offer the services to the world.

You could get away with telling your friends whatever your IP address is everytime it changes, but that gets a little hard when it's not just friends who want to know, and you're trying to make something of it.

The idea of DNS is to represent the IP address as a "human rememberable" name, like yahoo.com. How many people would remember 66.218.71.112? Only us geeks But yahoo.com is probably a well known address. DNS is simply a service which a computer asks "What is the IP address for the Domain Name yahoo.com" for which the reply is "66.218.71.112". Your computer then goes and happily connects to 66.218.71.112, and loads the web page. So, you only need a domain name if you want people to remember your site easily. You can just make one up, technically speaking, although it won't do you much good for anyone not within the group of computers you can configure for internet access. If the DNS server at your ISP gets asked "What is the IP address for xyz.nothing.fig" (a completely imaginary domain name that you made up) it will ask the server which is it's "parent" If the parent doens't know, it will ask it's parent, and so on until you reach the "root name servers" These servers are a group of servers which keep track of corporations or orgnaisations who host the 'registry' for valid domains. They say "for the .com.au domain, go ask the Melbourne IT server xx.yy.zz.aa" (where xx.y.zz.aa is the actual IP address). Now if they are asked for the .fig domain, they will answer "That doesn't exist" and the lookup will fail. If you use fictional.domain.com.au, the Melblourne IT registry server will say "That doesn't exist" and it will fail (because you haven't registered the fictional.domain.com.au with them). Thus you have to register your domain with one of the organisations who host the Top Level Domains (TLDs) like .com, .net, .org, .com.au, .co.uk and so on. Or if you want to start a new TLD like .pron for example, you have to convince InterNIC that they should let you host it, that the world needs it, and that you can offer the necessary infrastructure to offer a registry to the world, (cause you'd have to have a machine which all the world knew about, hosting a registry for the .pron domain, so they could query it for IP addresses) and so on. No mean feat!

So you want to register a domain, but it's really expensive to get a static IP address, or infact a number of them (if you want to have more than one "machine" available as servers to the internet). So what can you do? There is a DNS service offered for people who use dynamically assigned IP's. You run a client on your computer which notifies their servers, and they change the DNS entries for you. That way, people can just enter in a DNS name and it will resolve no problems. Cheap and available rolled into one. Of course if you're a business and you want to have a permenant internet presence, you're probably better off going for the next and final option.

Finally, you can pay for a static IP and host your own DNS as most of the publicly available services do.

All of my stuff is only for "internal" use anyway, so I'm not concerned about DNS or static IP's. If I ever 'go pro' then I'll consider getting a static IP

Hope This Helps.

tifkat

wow... that was lengthy! but hit the nail on the head. thanks!

Unless your on telstra bigpond and then it just fails for any url on a depressingly regular basis.......