I´m interested to know if any of you slackers use Rasbpian on your RPis, and how the system compares to Slackware from your point of view. What you find Raspbian useful for, or more useful than Slackware ARM, etc.

The reason I ask is because, after reading a blog on the Raspberry Foundation website regarding updates and changes to Raspbian relating to security and enabling SSH, I´m laughing my ass off and at the same time shaking my head in disbelief. I´ve used Raspbian desktop environment for various things in times gone by because sometimes it´s just quicker and easier. That´s where it ends for me personally.

This is not meant as an opportunity to berate Raspbian. I genuinely am interested in learning about other people´s experiences and thoughts between the two operating systems.

When I got my rpi3 I tried rasbpian and thought really? naw that's ok, dug around and found fatdog, thanks again!

I feel the love <3 thank you. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The SARPi project might have been my idea originally but that´s about all I can take credit for, and that in itself is just the result of combining various other people´s work, ideas, assistance, and advice. The real thanks goes to Pat and the Slackware Team, for their continual efforts in giving us the best Linux operating system available, with a large amounts of ´jaffa-cakiness´ to Mozes, and others responsible, for the ARM port.

So, I´m guessing Raspbian wasn´t to your liking. What I´m really looking for is a little enlightenment on why Raspbian is useful, or fulfills a purpose, more so than Slackware ARM.

Incidentally, what was/is it about Raspbian that doesn´t suit you personally?

I have two Raspberry Pis, one Raspberry Pi 1 B revision 2 running Raspbian and one Raspberry Pi 3 running Slackware ARM 14.2.

I think the difference is not huge. Having run Slackware since version 9.1 on my desktops and laptops I am feeling "home" at Slackware of course and like the way it just works. Being familiar with the system at once is a great plus, but it depends on what other experiences you have of course.
I would not try to compile certain pieces of software though, compiling QT or the kernel is nothing I seriously consider doing on the Raspberry Pi.

The only three things I missed on Slackware ARM:
- I installed the vc stuff that is installed on Raspbian, AFAIR I used it to read the CPU temperature or something similar
- fake-hwclock: This sets the clock to the last known date and time. It is a nice workaround to have a reasonable time and date set if you have to reboot it and for some reason ntp wasn't yet able to get the current date/time.
- something to set the wifi's regulatory domain (the same is true for generic Slackware)


Raspbian on the other hand is much better then I initially feared. I don't experiment much on the one running it, though. It is acting as an email server on my private network only. I have not run in any bigger problems until now and of course it can come handy to have many precompiled packages ready to be installed if you just want to try something ad hoc. It is also convenient that many google search results will give an answer for Raspbian, and many blog posts are about doing things on Raspbian. The downside is obvious, like when Ubuntu users might think that the whole world consists of Ubuntu machines or everyone running Linux will do a "sudo ..." night and day.
Luckily I was not forced to dig trough binary system logs. And the systemd stuff just feels very unfamiliar, but hey it's not too surprising if I'm mainly running one of the few systemd-free distributions.

BTW I think the ssh configuration change you mentioned is quite reasonable. Raspbian is the mass product for Raspberry Pi (maybe only met by KODI?) and not every newbie is sensible enough to at least change the default password or default user. If those have to enable it intentionally I hope this will heighten the chance that they will RTFM.


TL;DR
In the end it comes down to comparing two (from my experience) rock solid distros, the first feeling okay and the other one feeling like home.

Thanks for that titopoquito. Very interesting. I agree that being familiar with the system is very much beneficial and that´s something I am decidedly not regarding Raspbian. Slackware does feel different to other Os in many ways. As you said, it just works and keeps working in a way that makes sense to me personally. Again, perhaps it´s that familiarity that makes it so. I have 8 Raspberry Pis in total but only 7 of them are active, all of which run Slackware ARM.

The temperature thing; I started to write my own bash scripts for this. While doing so I discovered that Raspbian already included some commands/functions to achieve it. It didn´t stop me from continuing with my own scripts. Part of the enjoyment and pleasure I get from Slackware is doing things myself and being successful. The added bonus of researching, learning, and understanding what you are doing, and the process behind it, is something you don´t get from using a pre-defined command.

Ah yes, the hwclock. Now when it comes to acurate time I´m slightly OCD about it and where RTCs come into play I´m a bit of an addict. I must admit I have lots of RTCs of different designs which I keep buying and testing and playing with on the RPis. One of the first notable things I read about the Raspberry Pi was that it didn´t include an onboard clock. ¨GREAT!¨ I thought, because then I was forced to do something about it and went about trying to locate the best one. So far that´s been the ChronoDot v2.1 which is accurate to within a couple of seconds per year. I require all my RPis to have a RTC installed because they aren´t always Internet connected and, for my own purposes, accurate time is of the essence. I am not an avid supporter of the fake-hwclock, and never will be!

I think this is quite important. The change to the ssh config is not so much reasonable as it is essential. With that I could not agree more. It´s not the change but the way you go about it. As you´ve quite rightly pointed out, not all Raspbian users will already be aware of the implications of security, or how to address it. This is where my experience is somewhat lacking with Raspbian, because as a Slackware user this is something I picked up very early on as I mostly always work remotely by logging in via ssh and so learned and understood how to enable/disable and configure it. Yesterday I read this blog on the RPi Foundation website that raised questions in my own mind about Raspbian and the use/configuration/maintenance of it in comparison to Slackware ARM. Now, I know Slackware is considered by many as ´too old´ and/or ´too hard´ to bother with in this modern age but realistically I find the more I know/learn/understand about it, the easier it becomes. One of the real benefits I get from Slackware is that it rarely changes from one release to another and therefore I´m not re-educating myself every time there´s a major update. That again, could be due to my familiarity with the OS. ¨Am I missing out?¨ is the question I am trying to answer in my own mind. As a friend said to me recently, ¨Why do you care? What does it matter if someone else changes the mats in their car?¨ Well, if my car mats aren´t doing the job they are designed to do I want to know why, and then I want to know which mats are best suited for me personally. lol

I consider myself very fortunate that Slackware is what I know and love but I don´t want to be feeling or thinking this ignorantly, having not nearly as much knowledge about other Linux distributions. So this is one reason why I ask the question. I want to learn and see things through the experience of other users. I hope that makes sense.

Edit: I forgot to mention systemd. Now whenever it comes to systemd I recall something AlienBOB once wrote: ¨Slackware has no steenking systemd¨. Amen to that!

Most of the time I've ripped the boot stuff from raspbian when fatdog's images were not booting.
I've only ever used raspbian once just because I wanted hardfloat to make the best out of the PI1 where I needed a desktop environment ... well it's sluggish anyway. Slaxbmc would probably have been a better choice.

I think it has to fit to your style. I'm quite sure if I had stuck with FreeBSD (that I tried around 2005) I would be more familiar with that and think of it as the right distro. Although I'm also sure that Ubuntu would never feel like home, even though I have used it (and have to use it) on my work laptop for nearly a year now. There are just too many things that don't fit my style.

Sometimes I like to tinker with my systems and sometimes I just am happy if they just work and don't come in my way. Reading out CPU temperature etc. is just not motivating me enough to fiddle with it. Finetuning my mpd server is much more rewarding

Since I decided to use a hat-on sound card from Hifiberry and don't like to solder it to death (what I surely would do) this has not been an option until now although it looks like fun

If my mats would hinder you in some way I bet you would care!

Yes, absolutely. I can imagine that Raspbian or even Ubuntu and other distros might feel right for others. They can be quite convenient. If I would be a total newbie I would stick with Raspbian for sure - being able to follow most instructions on the web about doing projects on the Raspberry Pi without learning the basic system first is a legitimate position. If I would just like to learn basic electronics with the Pi or just fiddle a bit with Scratch I would definitely not choose Slackware ARM if I hadn't used it before. In the end it's a tool that ideally also feels like a toy, and too steep learning curves can be demotivating regarding the latter one.

Well, I am fortunate that it didn't come in my way until now (knock knock knock). As long as it stays like this it may reside on my first Raspberry Pi. The day it will do this, I will need the fatdog site to be up

Exaga

what was/is it about Raspbian that doesn´t suit you personally?

What titopoquito said

the first feeling okay and the other one feeling like home.

When I got my RPI3 I first used NOOBS/Raspbian. Ugh.

I am a Linux dumbo so being able to put Slackware onto it was a great gift and put me back into a familiar environment where I can configure most things with a bit of Google and pico.


Many many thanks to DrMozes, Pentux (sp?) Exaga, louigi600 et al

In case any of you ever find yourselves on Phuket the beverages of your choice is on me.

The feeling I get from Slackware is most likely very subjective. The fact that Slackware needs to be installed from scratch and it´s me who chooses which packages to install, services to run on start-up, and it´s me who´s configure the system, etc., enables me to be fully aware of what´s installed and running. This in itself is a huge +Plus. I could go on all day about the benefits of having to do this but, suffice to say, Raspbian is somebody else´s idea of what my system should consist of instead of my own.

The NOOBS name still makes me giggle every time I see it. However, we all know and have experienced what´s favourable regarding Slackware. I´ve asked what´s interesting/better/easier with Raspbian, more so than Slackware ARM. If at all there is anything worth mentioning and there doesn´t seem to be, to be quite honest.

I´ve ripped the boot stuff from Raspbian loads of times too, Louigi. I´ll agree that it was one useful aspect about Raspbian back when you had to configure the firmware settings yourself for different Raspberry Pi versions. Not so these days though.

Convenience and ease seems to be the main points between using Raspbian and Slackware ARM. With Slackware ARM you do not get the convenience or ease of writing an image to a SD card and away you go after a reboot. With Raspbian you don´t know what the hell is running on the system or which packages are included until after you have installed it. There are benefits and drawbacks to both systems, of course, but it just boils down to personal preference.

After a few days of testing Raspbian, reading about things, and learning a little about the system, I don´t like it. As a desktop it´s quite convenient but for anything else I just find the entire structuring of the system to be more complex than it ought to be. Running a Python script at boot from a cronjob, for example. I mean, come on, wtf?!?!

If I didn´t know otherwise and Raspbian was my only option I´d probably be chewing on rusty razor blades by now, instead of Jaffa cakes, because it really would be less painful. Without intentionally wanting to berate Raspbian for what it is and the way it works, in comparison to Slackware ARM, I´m finding it difficult not to do so. I´m going to leave it there, for now.

First a big shout out to you Exaga for your work on SARPI. Acknowledging that other people worked on their projects and that you worked specifically on yours, of course, does not lessen your efforts.

I am not a real Slacker even though I often have Slackware installed on the side. I had been more of a Debian user lately until systemd.

I did install SlackARM 14.1 on a RaspberryPI using the SARPI site quite a while back. Although my RaspberryPis are mostly for fooling around with stuff the two main scenarios, for me, are A full GUI desktop that could be used in an emergency and a minimal install that can be tailored to a project. Correct me if I'm wrong but I was unable to use a browser with the full SlackARM 14.1 install on the RaspberryPI. I started looking at compiling something myself but never did so. That would be the main reason Slack was sidelined for the full GUI use for me. The issue of the minimal install may be easier to solve. Is a "minimal install" still a choice from the installer? That would partly solve that issue, even though I would still be downloading the entire ARM disk sets or manually downloading a custom subset. Did I understand one post I read that the Slackware installer would not complain if my sources only included the files I wanted to install?

I know you have tried to ask about having Slackware featured as RaspberryPi distribution. Personally I have to suggest that can't realistically happen until there is a working image that can be downloaded like most other RaspberryPI operating systems. Of course that is a bit of a catch 22. If you have an image people want to install a different subset than the image. If you tell people how to install the OS themselves they want an image.

For me that's a yes/no ... I've never actually done a Slackwarearm installation as I've always started from a miniroot on my ARM systems so that's only partially true for me ... I start from minimal images I can write to the target but then it takes a little tinkering to make them fully functional for whatever I need (which in turn has pros and cons).

To be honest I find the newer debian derived linaro linux much more pleasant then raspbian (for a desktop environment)... but I don't think you can get linaro RPi image ready to rock&roll (and the IFC6410 is so much more powerfull then a RPi1 that it's probably not a comparable experience).

Overall I find that raspbian user friendlyness creates a fair amount of slugishness on the older RPi1 that pretty much defeats the benefits. I've never tried it on RPi2 or better, but we now have hard float Slackwarearm-current for those: I don't think I'll ever want to try.

I'm firmly convinced that the over all difficulty of system administration is pretty much constant. If you make some stuff more user friendly you're probably making some other less common tasks inherently difficult. Slackware just has that perfect balance of getting you the base system functional and reliable and leaving you a vanilla playground for whatever you might want to build on top ... with debian derived systems you can just apt-get install almost anything you need, but after that you might have a fit over the package maintainer decisions and/or man pages telling you irrelevant stuff to whatever was packaged LOL.

Enough off topic babble ... if I was doing whatever I did on the RPi1 running raspbian for myself I'd have probably taken the time to start from softfloat miniroot (or a full blown slaxbmc image), but it was not for me so I took a dirty shortcut.
After having used the dirty shortcut for a while now I regret not having started from slaxbmc image and might even correct the mistake some time in the future.

BTW you can still get the full blown RPi images for slaxbmc 14.2 which would save you starting from a Slackwarearm miniroot. That's an alternative you might want to consider if you're looking for a slackish ready-made image.
download slaxbmc 14.2 images

Thanks. As I´ve said before, I can only take credit for using and abusing the work, good nature, time, and help/advice of other more learned Slackware users than myself in order to make the SARPi project become a reality. It´s due to them and because of them that SARPi exists at all.

No, and (maybe) yes. There is no ¨minimal install¨ option during Slackware ARM setup but what you can do is de-select however many packages you wish to omit and just install those you require. I´ve done this on one of my RPis which runs as a NTP server for my local network, with great results. So, it´s very possible. Slackware (ARM) is very versatile that way. Now, when I say ¨(maybe) yes¨ it´s because when selecting the source directory the installer will not complain if you enter the wrong path - it will just take around 5-10 seconds to say that you´ve installed over 1000 packages. However, I´m guessing that in the event that only some of those +1000 packages actually exist, it will skip over the ones which aren´t there and install the ones that are present. I´ve never actually done this as it´s not something I´ve needed to do, with SARPi or personally. You could always try it yourself and publish the results?

You´re quite correct, on all counts. I´ll hold my hand up and plead guilty, your honour, to having contacted the RPi Foundation (on numerous occasions) and requesting that Slackware ARM be recognised and acknowledged as a viable operating system which is more than suitable for the Raspberry Pi family of devices. Slackware ARM basically LOVES running on the Raspberry Pis and its stability, reliability, and performance is testament to that fact. In my mind anybody who is interested in learning Linux would surely benefit from using Slackware, and I cannot understand why intelligent, free thinking, sane, people wouldn´t feel the same. It´s THE best education in Linux one could ask for, or hope for, and on that basis Slackware has no equal. However, it seems that not all people as previously described feel the same as I do. Sadly.

There´s a bit of a debate about pre-built images within the Slackware ARM on a Raspberry Pi community. I cannot speak for other users and would never attempt to do so. However, I do not endorse pre-built Slackware ARM images, nor will I create them for distribution. I totally believe that part of the Slackware experience and learning curve is installing the system yourself, from scratch. That way you get to understand what you need to do and why, amongst many other things. Pre-built images may be fine, and preferable, for a lot of users and/or the RPi Foundation because it´s the ´quick-n-dirty´ way of saving the time and effort in having to install the OS yourself. Don´t get me wrong, I do have dozens of images which I´ve created from various working systems over the years but they are for my own personal use and purposes and I would never make them public. Some people do create and distribute pre-built images of Slackware ARM and if others want to make use of them then that´s not for me to comment on. Incidentally, the last time I tried and tested a pre-built Slackware ARM image was on the Orange Pi and that was not a pleasurable experience, to say the least. The whole affair unbalanced my equilibrium.

Some years ago, when SolidRun learned that I was creating a Slackware ARM installer for their HummingBoard device their co-founder expressed an interest in including it in their ¨Ignition¨ system (a bespoke OS selector/installer) which caters for many different operating systems that can be installed on their devices. He had no questions or problems about it not being a pre-built image because he understood what Slackware is and how it works, having been one of the first Linux distro´s he´d installed back in the 1990´s. I strongly suspect the same discernment cannot be attributed to the RPi Foundation. In my opinion, SolidRun are light-years ahead in that respect.

Slackware ARM (as Mozes might say) aims to be as near as possible a full port of Slackware x86, which it unquestionably and unequivocally is. With that thought very much in the forefront of my mind, SARPi installers aim is to give users as near as possible the Slackware experience as Pat Volkerding designs it to be, and that´s never going to change. I´ve had a lot of requests over the years for this and that to be included in the SARPi installers (and some were pretty good ideas) but the fact of the matter is; if it´s not already part of Slackware ARM then you´re never going to see it from the SARPi project. For whatever the reason(s) may be, how could I possibly think/feel/believe I could do better than the creator(s)?

... and if you keep it simple you´re not making other things overly complicated.

Ain´t that the truth! <3

A bit off topic but in response to a question ... hope it helps:
You can do it from the command line with iw: (you're form Germany so I'll give you German reg examples)

If you use wpa_supplicant you can add this in there (and have different ones for each configured wifi network)
Be warned:
In practice if you use crda (and slackware does) you're not going to gat any more channels than what the domain that your wifi card was marketed for has, even if you totally disregard the reg domain stuff. If by any change you buy via internet from one of the countries with less restrictive domains that the country you plan to use the card in you might want to set the correct domain to operate within limitation of your country.

Way back in the early days when regulatory domains were introduced I used to tinker with the kernel source to set the default to JP (the less restrictive domain) but things have gotten more complicated over the years and I gave up on that approach. But maybe it's still possible to alter the default world "00" region on linux/net/wireless/reg.c to look like JP ... but to get that to work you need to disable crda (else it will limit the chanells to whatever is is set in the firmware set reg domain of your card). One could try dissuading udev from running crda and see how that works jointly with tinkering with kernel source. Be warned that this may be illegal in some countries.

1 members found this post helpful.