getting a bit of the old advertising in there, ey martinultima

I personally don't like the name slackware, but I wouldn't want it changed (nor the logo for that matter) for the world. Why? It is well known, within the Linux community anyhow, people have respect for slackware / the slackware user, it is the oldest going distro and requires an intelligant person to maintain and keep their system updated when running Slackware. Change its name/logo it loses it's identity.

Also the saying goes something like this: 'if it ain't broke don't fix it', there is nothing wrong with the name/logo it isn't politically incorrect or offensive, its not violating any copyrights/patents, theres no reason to change it.

Yeah, I can never resist a bit of self-promotion... (don't worry, I'll tone it down, I don't have enough time to constantly reply every time someone posts something... that's why I have a sig )

I happen to like the name. The whole Subgenius thing I have to admit is a bit offensive, but Slackware I think is a good name, and kind of appropriate seeing as slacking off is all you really have to do once you've done a bit of initial configuration... when I built my new system a couple months ago it took about maybe an hour to set everything up with my distro, and mostly it was spent copying files from a slower disk to a faster one... and I have a lot of files, several gigs, including development work - and don't forget extra packages like VMware and TeX that I don't have in the distro itself because I only need them for the one machine.

As for political correctness - or should I say the process of attempting to ensure that any non-specific word phrase or other form of communication is acceptable likely not to everyone but at least to the majority of a large group of people of all different backgrounds and cultures? - there's no such thing

You know something wierd? Everyone always makes some connection between J.R. "Bob" Dobbs and Slackware. . . yet you don't see him ANYWHERE on the Slackware site. Is Pat part of the Church of the Subgenius, or did he just come up with that name or have a Subgenius suggest it to him?

There are references on the site, in fact - look under the propaganda section - and Wikipedia explains that there is a connection. What it is I'm not sure either, you can e-mail Mr. Volkerding and ask. [He's a pretty nice guy from what I've seen - I asked him a question about Firefox a few weeks ago and he responded rather quickly, and was more than happy to explain everything.]

maybe an interview can help ?

http://theage.com.au/articles/2002/1...?oneclick=true

egag

from slackwiki.org:

"As for the relationship between Slackware Linux and the Church of the SubGenius: Patrick "The Man" Volkerding is an ordained Church minister. The term "Slack" itself stems from the SubGenius phrase "Slack." This was the intent of Slackware: to achieve "Slack" through ease of use, reliability, durability, and the rejection of unnecessary, mainstream "flash and sizzle" utilities.

The Church of the SubGenius has long endorsed and promoted Slackware."

id say thats a good explanation of the connection.

BTW, I believe it's SubGenius as in "sublime genious," not "rather stupid." When I was a kid, my brother, a few friends, a cousin and I diddled around with the Church of the Subgenious a bit, some of us even became ministers, but we never took any of it seriously. It's interesting to find that something I beleived to be entirely satirical for so long may be someone's actual religion.

Who said it meant "rather stupid?" I certainly never thought it meant that. And I think the "Church of the SubGenius" is more of an "anti-religion" than an actual religion (in other words, it promotes not worrying about whether or not there really is a god rather than worshipping the same god.

If it's not some sort of mock-up of other religions/cults, then I think the point of it is to achieve a greater together-ness than other religions by not really worshipping a god (or worshipping one you know probably isn't real) - as opposed to other religions/cults, where people try to achieve a greater together-ness by worshipping the same god. If this is the case, then I think it's anything other than "rather stupid".

Well, it certainly isn't a contraction of that, although exactly what it does refer to seems to vary depending on whom you ask. It does refer to being below genius, but that doesn't mean its members have to be dim, rather it represents a rejection of pretentiousness.

I like Slack for one reason: it works.

I've been trying to use Debian now for a week and it's nothing but hardship. First, I was stuck in a stupid 800x600 resolution till I looked up the command to setup X, since it wouldn't let me edit XF86XConfig-4 in a simple text editor. And now I've discovered that it doesn't come with ALSA (at least, not on the first two CDs), which means that I can't get sound till I find a way to get it on my non-networked computer.

On the other hand Slack starts up at a nice resolution of 1024x768, and has ALSA installed, which means I have sound. In fact, the only issue I had was my CDRW drive not working, but that was taken care of relativly easily.

I have learned for 8 months on Fedora 3/4 and SuSE 9.3. I successfully installed Slackware, configured it, Xorg, sound, etc. It was really simple--I just followed the guide provided on the Slackware site.

So, I listen to music and love amaroK. I downloaded the source and ran ./configure. No problem with xine but for the life of me I could not get gstreamer and the plugins to compile/make/and install. I was using kde as my desktop. I also tried using slapt-get and suaret. I just couldn't get it working. I thought I had all the required dependencies but no go. So, I became frustrated and I gave up.

Clearly, it is really slick and fast and tailored to the individual--awesome. It had all I needed and I probably gave up too early.

Most of the pkgs you need are already at Linux Packages.
Just do a search for what you are trying to locate.

Hi Xian--

I did that actually and downloaded amarok 1.2.4 and the dependencies. The only dependency I could not find was libflac.so.1 or 6 can't remember now. All pkgs installed fine and amarok crashed every time. I know it was me not the pkgs or Slackware. I asked for help here in the slackware forum and it just didn't work.

I use slackware but there's nothing really special about it if your happy with Mepis than i would stick with it.
Most Distro's are the same anyway the biggest difference is the command that's used to install software, some distro's the devolopers did a lot of hard work into the distro so that it will detect most if not all hardware and just works when installed like a distro should, those are called newbie friendly distro's when i think they should really be called user friendly.
Than there are distro's were the devolopers really didn't put much work into it before being released and they don't even detect some of the most common hardware but alot of people like to use those because they think it's fun to figure out how to get everything working i on the other hand would never encourge devolopers to just slap something together and throw it out there and say here you figure out how to get things to work right.
Besides there seems to be alot of followers in linux a group of people go from forum to forum saying how good a distro is so a bunch of people will install it and wonder why everybody likes it so much but they think it must be great because all these people say it is so they turn around and say how great it is even though they don't really know why because they don't like it that much and it goes on and on and on,so if you like the distro you use you should stick with it because you won't really gain anything by switching distro's.

Bill

i do not get your point. so, do you like slackware or not?

also, i would not say that slackware's developer (pat) did not put much work into slackware just because it does not work with some hardware or you need to get your hands dirty to get some hardware working. slackware is designed to be stable. if that means that i need to recompile my own kernel or mess with config files, then so be it.

it is better that i install slackware which is very stable and then break my linux installation rather than i install an already broken distro (those that you say are user friendly) and then try to make it stable.

speaking from experience, after a lot of distro hopping, i do not use slackware because other people say it is good and so on. i use it because i like it and it is the distro that works for me.