Ok, this isn't really a question. But I recently switched over to Slackware linux from using Windows XP [and never even touched linux]. I did the switch because my XP filesystem became messed up and I didn't have the cd anymore to install it again. So I installed Debian, and didnt like it.

A [gentoo user] friend of mine said that he has heard good stuff about the newer slackwares. So i download and install. The installation process was pretty much painless. The only problems I can into were setuping up my DSL and my usb house. This was early August, and I havn't used Windows since! I am in love with this OS, given I havn't tried anything else but Slack and Debian, but whenever I mention to people that I'm using Slack they go "ooooo! the hacker OS" which makes me laugh.

Also, I was wondering why all of you switched to Slackware [and from what OS] and how was the switch for you?

So far I would recommend Slackware if your planning on installing linux.

Thanks

Regards,
Nitzer

i started with slack after a while using debian which i didnt like either , now im using gentoo and slackware as dual boot system as both are great systems.
my first slack experience was long time ago but it was since the first day is used it my first love os..
oh and so far everything quite works painless excepting my cd-writer /hp cd-writer 7500 external on parallel port/ but ill get this to work as well ...

Hi nitzer_slack

This probalby doesn't count as an answer either 8-)>, but it may if of interest to any others thinking of starting on Linux by using the Slackware distro.

Although my computer experience is considerable, I consider myself a Linux newbie. I've used all versions of DOS since 3.0, Windows since 3, I still have my Apple 2c (tho' it hasn't been powered up for about 6 years!) and a BBC micro!

This year I decided to make the switch. I have some experience with Unix workstations, and once worked on a network with a mix of Mac, Unix, SGI & NT workstations and Unix & SGI servers (film resolution graphics) so the making the change depended on wether I could still do the work. My current main job is designing, & managing websites, and running a virtual hosting service (I live in London, UK and my servers are in Huntsville, Alabama, US!). I need to be able to produce and modify graphics, for which I have been using PhotoShop, and to write HTML, Javascript and PHP, for which I have been using HomeSite.

So two weeks ago I spent a couple of days researching what was available to download, lurked on a few forums (like this one) and used Google a lot. I had previously tried Red Hat (a friend lent me the install CD), and one of my clients has been testing SuSe for servers & workstations.

In the end I picked Slackware for the following reasons:

1. The information on the website was very clear, and it looked like the install could be done without having to understand some of the more complex bits of Linux. Between the FAQ, the Help pages and the Book I found everything I needed to know.

2. The way the download site is organised makes it very easy get the packages you need. I have an ADSL so the download times weren't prohibitive.

3. Since I didn't yet have a working Linux box, I would have to do all the downloads and preparation in Windows. This would include burning install CD's

After some playing with PartitionMagic I took the plunge and Eureka it worked first time! I now have a desktop with Win98 & Linux, and after about 2 hours I changed the boot priority so that Linux was the default (I'm using BootMagic to choose the OS, and LILO to boot Linux)

After 2 days with Slackware 9.1, the KDE desktop, Open Office and Mozilla 1.5, I found that I had no need to go back to Windows. Gimp does the job for graphic needs, and Quanta (part of the KDE install) is nearly a match for HomeSite (it lacks only the Tag editor wizard function - CTL+F4 for any of you who know HomeSite - not a big deal).

With Windows I would get a frozen GUI 2 or 3 times a day, and if I tried running PhotoShop and HomeSite and 2 browsers and an FTP connection all at once it would freeze after an hour - I have had no problems with Linux apart from when I tried some "illegal" settings for the graphics card.

Next week I intend to resurrect my old Compaq laptop and see how that goes, and also experiment with customizing the tagfiles so make the install fully automatic. With a bit of luck I may be able to produce an "idiots guide" to replacing Windows 98 with Slackware by Christmas.

This forum has also been a great help, and I suspect I will spend as much time here as I used to spend on Compuserve nearly 10 years ago (PC286, & DOS 3.3!).

I think the biggest obstacle for the Linux beginner is the command-line, but with PartitionMagic, and a bootable Slackware CD, it looks like that is no longer a problem.

Stay tuned and watch this space!

Heh, I got dissapointed with Red Hat 7 which I was using since 5.0
Then went to LinuxFest ( http://www.linuxfest.org.yu )and got Slackware 7 and never looked back since. I think it was in year 2000.
So I use primarily Slackware since 2000. plus some of the *BSD's.
Neat, I just love it.

Slack has [so far] treated me very well. I originally started using Macs (we're a Mac family) and although I really like them I couldn't possibly afford a nice Mac so I bought a decent Windows Box. Windows XP just didn't cut it for me, and then I started hearing about Linux. I was fairly interested so I bought a Red Hat 9 for Dummies book and installed it alongside XP. I fell in love with Linux right there. All the learning I went through to do the simplest tasks was fun unfortunately, my install of Red Hat was a little clunky since I didn't get everything right the first time around. I was thinking about switching to Slack because I've heard many good things about it, so I jumped on the Slack bandwagon and needless to say, I haven't even thought of looking back yet

I was at my fathers house one day, he had Redhat 5.1 laying on the coffee table, and I asked him what it was. He went on to explain many of the possibilities that this OS could achieve. I looked though the book, and thought..Hey, this is cool! I asked him to loan me the book and cd'd and he just smiled and said...boy, I been trying to install that for a month and I dont believe you can do it if I cant. Well, needless to say, 7 days later I sent him an email...Dad, Redhat 5.1 up and running, eat your heart out Ha!. I really disliked the RPM Hell I was in, discoved Slackware at a store, I bought it, and have used nothing else since. I believe it was 7.0. It works, it works, it works....period!

sadiqdm, thats how I installed it at first (but dual booting with XP). I got Partition Magic, made the proper partitions and stuck the cd in.

GT_Onizuka, hehe. Alot of the fun is learning how to perform simple tasks like mounting other filesystems, tinkering with services and such. I'm learning something new everyday I use [slackware] linux, its great.

I'm glad im not the only one who's left Billy's world for Slack. I do alot of coding and I never really used anything fancy to do it. So I write my code just like I would at work. Via SSH and nano! :-D

I also found out that the linux command line is WAY more powerful and helpful [man pages!] than DOS has ever been.

First tried slack while putting together frankenstein (see my sig) and just found it to be a breeze. It just seemed to make so much more sence. My first Linux experience was Redhat 8.0, but it always seemed a bit.......ummm....bloated. Slack was clean, fairly simple and straightforward, and did not use a modified Kernel. Frankenstein is really not THAT outdated, but I think slackware made best use of it's somewhat limited resources. I have since moved to slack on my main system (specs in sig) and haven't looked back. I don't miss redhat at all.

slight

Similar experiences in some ways.

I tried Mandrake and Suse, both of which worked fine, but I didn't really learn anything about how Linux works and how to configure it.

Moved to Slackware a few weeks ago. I was mostly very straight forward to install, even with the difficulties imposed by an nForce2 system. I have Samba running proving file sharing to both a fixed XP machine and a laptop, hung off a wireless lan.

Still have bad days - Trying to attach a USB HDD for example still eludes me, but on the whole a very positive experience.

I've been using Slack 9.1 now for about 48 hours and already I feel like I've learned as much in two days as I did using SuSE for the last 4 months. There were a lot of things that drew me to Slackware ... the fact that it shipped with an unaltered kernel was a big one. Plus, Slackware 9.1 comes with the 2.4.22 kernel which FINALLY gave me the laptop battery monitor I've been SOOO longing for since leaving Windoze behind.

As an added bonus, I finally wiped all traces of M$ off of my hard drive. Now it's just 40 Gb of Linux. I wasn't sure about the Slackware package management system after dealing with Yast in SuSE, but honestly, it's been pretty easy to learn and I've managed to install almost all of the programs I had while using SuSE 8.2. In some ways it is even easier.

Using Slackware has really forced me to learn about not only the hardware that is on my machine, but also the various parts of the OS and filesystem. I just didn't have the same level of motivation before. I agree with Kevlong -- there are definitely days when things don't always go right, but with persistance and that desire to learn how to do it right, I've been able to accomplish more than I ever thought I would.

i started using slack in 97 was slack 3.2 i think ... had just started working for a company and one of the other guys showed me his setup. This was back when win95 was coming out, well was out but win95 any questions? i had used DOS since 3.1 i think was the version so i hated winblows with a pashion but had no other choice. He installed linux on a box for me but made it boot to X which sucked back then. I figured just a cheesy new windows want-to-be. I was messing with it, crashed X and he showed me how to get to the console so i could "restart" X. when i found the console i fell in love. spent about 2 years working with just console before i ever even looked at X again. now all i run is linux at home and at work. I love it and wouldnt go back to winblows unless you paid me a whole bunch of money.

tried some other distros but always come back to slackware either becuase of rpm hell or just having to learn how the other distros set stuff up. I like slack better then them because its easy, its fast, its reliable, and i can read english so configure files never gave me to much difficulty.

I have been using linux since RH 5.1, I guess. I tried SuSe and Mandrake along with RH up until Slack 8.1. At that time I was getting tired of the overhead that the big distros were starting to use. Plus RH bastardized Gnome and KDE so much that you could not recognize them with bluecurve. It also seemed like too many packages did not even work properly that were included in the distros. I was also looking to learn more about the under the hood parts of linux. I think also the reputation of Slack being tough to install and configure intrigued me. I've also since installed Debian, Gentoo and FreeBSD but I like Slack the best. It seems like all the rest have something about them that I do not like.

Welcome to Slack! Me, too. When I was first experimenting and reading up on Linux I thought Debian would be my main distro. I did finally put it on this box, but I don't use it.

From what OS? The full answer is a lot of OSes but the simplest would be to just say Windows XP.

Switching to Linux in general is a complicated question, but switching to Slack specifically is a little easier. In my playing-around-stage, I developed a quick dislike for commercial SysV, rpm-based distros. I liked Basic best of all that I could get on my 486SX and I like Vector best of all that I could get on my 586 - until I tried ZipSlack on it, having realized that, if Basic and Vector were cool and both based on Slack, then Slack probably was too. I had a blast with ZipSlack so decided to put a complete Slack on a 686. Because of HP screwing around with my hard drive, my losing my 'product activation' code, and having all my stuff on my 686, I was still too nervous to try Linux on that. For once in my life I had some money, so bought a used Athlon and put Slack on it. It's now the only box I use. Now that the 686 is expendable, I'm looking into trying LFS or Gentoo on it, but suspect Slack will stay my main distro. I saw someone post elsewhere that they couldn't explain it but Slack just had a 'feel' to it. I can say 'BSD scripts' this and 'no bloat' that and list all kinds of technical stuff but it really is just a feel. Slack feels good. - Like kevlong and Tino say, there are the 'argh!!!' days but it's worth it.

I was walking through walmart one day, had about thirty dollars on me, and saw Mandrake sitting on a shelf. I decided, what the hell, and purchased it on a whim.

I took it to my friends house and convinced him to install it on his computer...if it was going to screw up a computer, better his than mine.

It did, in fact, screw up his computer. I think it came with a demo version of partition magic, but we for some reason decided to use fdisk, or diskdruid or something like that.

I decided to run it on my computer anyway. It was an old computer with a 20 gig hard drive loaded in. The bastard BIOS didn't support anything over 8 gigs though. I installed mandrake on all 12 gigs that the BIOS couldn't see, and it booted up and read the entire hard drive just fine. I was hooked on linux after that.

I moved on to a better computer, and eventually got rid of windows completely out of pure hatred. I later moved from Mandrake to RedHat, as it was better supported.

The thing that caused me to switch to slackware...yesterday...was the damnable RPMs. I like compiling things from source better, and I was informed that Slackware was better at this task than most other distributions.

Well...there's my life history for you.

Cool!

Yea, I've had a few argh days. You guys are right, it just feels right to be on this OS. I still have a 30gb drive with windows xp on it (the bad file system drive), im not sure if im just going to clear it and use it with my linux drive. probably will