haven't posted to any mailing lists... I'm not realling stressing over it much... I was pretty determined to use LFS anyhow... was just checking out the latest slack on the way. Will have to keep an eye on it as I'd love to see it surpass some of the more well known distros... not for ease of use mind you, but for security and stability.

i recommend going into pkgtool and uninstalling the included gaim. after that just to gaim.sf.net and get the stable source tarbell and install that, it works fine after that.

I have to say I am disappointed with Slack 9.0. Compared to 8.1 the latest is an ugly dog. Everything related to Qt/KDE/GNOME is sooo slow. I do not care much about KDE (except may be gideon) and GNOME but I need Qt both to run apps and for development.
The installation went without problems. After updating all neccessary configs boot was also OK. Everything that was compiled against Qt 3.0.4 (or whatever library came with 8.1) was broken which is kind of strange but minor annoyance. But what happened after I recompiled all that I needed really made my day. Again I have to say nothing is broken but very very slow. I swear, it takes much longer to load licq then OpenOffice 1.0.2! I don't know may be people with fast boxes do not notice that but mine is pretty old (PII/300MHz/192MB) it really shows. Mind you wiht slack 8.1 everything was fine. Just for kicks I tried to start KDE and GNOME. It takes forever to load! At first I thought that that it was hanging but not. Eventually it would start but takes about 10-15 mins.
I usually do not go back to old releases. So for now I plan to recompile (at least Qt) from the source that comes with new slack. I just hope that when the slack hits the stores (I usually buy it even after I pull the distro from internet) these problems are fixed.

quite a misleading thread title.. 'why slack9 sucks',
and then one reads about system/user-specific
problems, which do not make the distro good or bad.

Hi, I to installed slack 9.0 . This is the fist time I installed slackware.
I did ran in to some little trouble.

1) "man" isn't installed. The man pages are though, but when I do "man <something>". It say's "bash: man: command not found" or somthing similler.

2) Vim isn't acting like i'm used to. Pressing the insert button does nothing. Mayby the keyboard isn't correctlly configured?

3) gnome is acting a little wierd sometimes. In menu's for example.

These problems could just be mine incompetance. I haven't had the time to set it up yet, so these are my fist impressions.

during installation you can select the packages
you want to install. man is one of them.

considering the list of issues people have been raising (in addition to my own) I would say that many are a little disappointed with Slackware 9.0, especially after such a stellar product such as slackeware 8.1. In addition what kind of an installer installs man pages... but not the man utility? This is similiar to how I installed dhcpcd, but no rc.inet1 script was created.

You're right, perhaps a better subject title would have been 'why slack9 installer sucks'. Because especially with the software requirements / dependancies that KDE and Gnome are beginning to incur as they grow ever larger... the installer has to be very complete and ensure that dependancies are not left dangling like what had obviously occurred with the libact for gnome. I don't mind having to alter configurations or specifying preferences at install time or after first boot... but having to go back and install packages that should have been installed because they were required by another package... c'mon.

Maybe slack9 was rushed... ? I don't know... I just know that (and it looks as if others may / may not agree with me) I am not as impressed with Slack9 as I had hoped... and if given the choice between 9 or 8.1 I would stick with 8.1.

I have installed the released Slack 9.0 distro at least three time now, and have not had any of the problems you have mentioned. I routinely use the man pages, and when I ran netconfig, the rc.inet1 file was setup correctly including the NIC module. Now my particular hardware I have tested with, has not had any problems with the new hotplug system. I guess just lucky me on that issue. But to date, the only *problem* I have encountered and it appears to be duplicated on many systems is the default umask on mounting vfat partitions and that is not a problem with the installer, because the default setting is correct. I have found Slack 9.0 to be reasonably solid, no seg faults or kernel panics, etc. Now it is still reasonably new as well, and more issues may arise as with any distro. That is why they maintain the patches directory tree.

I have had issues with compiling new software packages for it, mostly because of the new Gnome 2.2. The software available has not been updated as yet and does not want to use the new libraries. I am considering attempting to remove the new Gnome and install the older. Again though, this is not a problem with Slack 9.0 but with acquired software.

It is my desire here that a more positive post will help to encourage others.

Good. I am glad and I do truly hope that mine and the reported others are a minority and isolated incidents. I am not here to bad mouth ANY distribution, but merely to display the problems I had with Slackware 9.0 (and at least initially to vent my disappointment).

A buddy of mine is prepping his HP winblows machine to be freed by linux and to be perfectly honest I will be installing Slack 9.0 onto it. If only to give the whole thing another try. I'll let all know of the results when we're done.

man is installed. it depends on which install-mode the
user selects; if the user selects full, it will be installed.
if the user selects a different mode, it depends on the
user if man is installed.

The thing is, I did install in full. But I didn't get man. How come?

returning to qt/kde/gnome on slow machines. i found out that turning anti-aliasing (Xft) off speeds things up significantly (e.g. through qtconfig).
i am still puzzled though because i did not have this problem in 8.1 with anti-aliasing.

In my experience atleast KDE on a bare 8.1 runs MUCH slower than KDE on a bare 9.0. I got those results in the same machine, an AMD K6-2 350 MHz with 64 MB RAM and some generic ATI graphics card. Besides that, everything that didn't work directly after the installation of 8.1 worked with 9.0, things like sound and network. But, in 9.0 I have a (I think network-related) problem with X that completely freezes the entire system. All without warning and no kind of break is possible, leaving the lock-keys on the keyboard flashing in a disturbing way.

just installed slack 9.0 3 days ago , no problems everything works.
No KDE tested yet.

With Slack 9 nothing was really working as good as 8.1 for some reason, the was no real problems except that wine wasn't working right... so I just reisntalled 8.1 for now. Just compiled a 2.4.20 kernel, ler dropline gnome get me up to date wtih xfree, gnome, mozilla, gtk, etc. Either way i pretty much have everything that is in 9 in 8.1 but without the grief. I feel back home again, lol. If it wasn't for dropline i would still be using 9 because its sooo easy to get up to date with it. Plus the dropline gnome is super sweet. I can't believe that I have been using fluxbox this whole time. Been missing out.