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Slackware 12.1 First Impressions
The installer assumes you know what you are doing (think Expert install if you're an Ubuntu user) and that you want the ability to control every aspect of the installation. A newcomer to Linux would be utterly, totally lost. I've actually done two installations: a fully functional one with an Xfce desktop and all the dev tools that currently occupies about 2.7GB of disk space, and a truly minimal but usable installation with a minimalist window manager (PekWM) and a handful of apps and tools. That takes up only 600MB of disk space. Slackware always was flexible and that hasn't changed. You can tell you're dealing with a distro for serious Linux geeks when booting into the GUI isn't even offered as an option by the installer. Heck, the installer doesn't even deal with X configuration. You start at the command line. GUI system administration tools? You can get them from third parties but Slackware itself is devoid of such things. Edit your config files or use command line tools. Is this a bad thing? If you know what you're doing and don't mind taking some time to get your configuration right and your favorite apps from various third party sources it really isn't. OK, it's time consuming but the end result is a fast, rock solid system. That's what Slackware is known for. It remains seriously user unfriendly, hence all the derivative distributions like Zenwalk, Vector Linux, Wolvix, etc... that try and fix that. They all succeed to a large degree, giving users a friendly environment with all of the speed and stability. Most of the usual third party packages sources like LinuxPackages.net and Slacky.eu don't have a full selection of apps built for 12.1 yet but that is rapidly changing. The project I'm working on is going to force me to do a lot of compiling from source in any case. Could I live with Slackware as my main distro? Yes, easily. Would I recommend it? Only to those who know what they are getting into. In a way I've come full circle. In late 1995 I was introduced to Linux by a coworker. When I asked which distribution to choose she suggested two: Red Hat Linux and Slackware. I chose Red Hat because she said it was easier to learn. It's also what she ran on her workstation in the office. Slackware was the second distro I looked at all those years ago. What's changed since then? First off, I was very skeptical about Linux at the time and probably for about three or four years after that. I didn't think it would ever be a serious OS or that it was anywhere near ready for prime time. That sounds silly now but 13 years ago the state of Linux was still pretty primitive. Second, I don't think any of us would have dreamed of downloading a 3.8GB DVD iso image in an hour and a half and burning it ourselves. Thankfully time and technology really do march on. What hasn't changed? In a fundamental way Slackware is the same as it ever was. It isn't any easier to get going now than it was all those years ago. You really do have to either know how Linux works under the hood or else you have to be willing to learn. |
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Comments (130)
110 earlier comments in the full thread.
I don't think anyone here disagrees with that. The question is: What percentage of people who are going to need 10 or 15 packages not in the official CD's? Slackware with KDE offers a fairly complete system for your average user.
> Using 3rd party package managers is one such thing to avoid in Slackware as I found out to my cost as a wrong upgrade can bork your system.
Like it can't with any other distribution? I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Debian users complaining that an upgrade broke their system.
> But unlike what most Slackware users like to claim, dependency handling is not a matter of expertise, empowering the user or lack of it but a matter of simple convenience at a (very small, in my opinion) cost of lack of total control.
I, and other Slackware users, disagree. Which is, of course, why we use Slackware and you don't.
> I agree that Slackware does not fit everybody's needs - even for some advanced users...
As does everyone here. :)
> ...while it might even serve the needs of a new user very well.
Well, that puts you ahead of Caitlyn. She doesn't seem to consider that a possibility. Personally, I think a preinstalled Slackware system makes a very good new user system. I wouldn't ask a new user to install and configure it themselves though.
> It's not a case of newbies vs. advanced users.
Agreed. It's more a matter of what you want and expect from your system. As you said, Slackware isn't for everyone.
I don't dislike Slackware. I think it's very useful when you want a distribution that is totally self-contained off-line (unlike Gentoo for instance) and can be installed fairly quickly and administered with little fuss (when you know what you're doing).
> Like it can't with any other distribution? I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Debian users complaining that an upgrade broke their system.
I broke Debian only twice in 8 years and once it was my fault when I was tracking 'unstable' branch which is supposed to break anyway. The other time, I accidentally destroyed the Debian partition from another Linux's installer (I think it was Arch)
> I don't think anyone here disagrees with that. The question is: What percentage of people who are going to need 10 or 15 packages not in the official CD's? Slackware with KDE offers a fairly complete system for your average user.
The point I made is that I might not need all 18000+official packages found in Debian, but who knows which 15-20 of them I might need? Not everybody uses just the few popular software around.
Debian has one of the best repositories for scientific (engineering) and mathematical software, for example, not found in most other distributions.
I've always had great respect for Slackware because it's obvious that it has a certain vision and goal, but there are situations where I cannot honestly use it and others where I can use it quite well.
Almost all the cases I mentioned were where the person was running testing or unstable. However, to run current packages, you're often forced to do that with Debian. Each distro has its strengths and weaknesses.
> Debian has one of the best repositories for scientific (engineering) and mathematical software, for example,
AFAIK, Debian has the largest repository of software of any Linux distribution. If you want it, Debian probably has it, though (as noted above) it may be in testing or unstable.
You're right that things do break in unstable but in "testing" it happens very rarely. But still for those seeking super stability, Slackware and/or Debian stable might be the best two distributions around.
My solution on my work machine was to go with Slackware and compile the few pieces that I need that aren't available. This gives me a stable machine that is also at the bleeding edge (for applications). Nothing else comes close at providing both. Debian Stable's wonderful if you can handle apps that are a year or more old. Arch is good if you can handle the stress of knowing that there's a small probability of breaking the machine that puts food on your table with each update.
Slackbuilds.org is what makes this work, with the way it makes compiling trivial. If such a thing were available for Debian, that's what I'd use.
Well, you can still get tarballs and compile from source on Debian as long as you've installed "build-essential" and the required *-dev packages and it's guaranteed to work every single time.
Of course, checkinstall also creates .deb packages and of course there are source repositories so you can still install source packages on Debian, but I don't know if the equivalent of Slackbuilds exists on Debian.
You people have interested me in Slackbuilds. I want to really explore Slackware again, since I never tried Slackbuilds and used only binary packages (which can be iffy sometimes when obtained from sources like linuxpackages.net).
You can try to build things on Debian, and provided that the dependencies can be met, you can get it to work. Unfortunately it is all too often more than just configure/make/make install. Then you are digging around here and there figuring out what to do. With the SlackBuild, you just type ./foo.SlackBuild and it does everything for you. When a new version comes out, you update the package version and do ./foo.SlackBuild again.
I was a Debian user for about two years. I changed to Slackware with the 12.1 release. I miss the fast and complete Debian repos, I don't miss the occasional headaches.
Remember that Slackware uses lilo by default, while the others use grub. You'll have to read up on how to get Slackware working with grub (which shouldn't be too difficult, as grub's included in extras).
SlackBuilds.org has become something of a testing ground for new packages. One could kind of say that SlackBuilds is to Slackware -current what -current is to -12.1.
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I did just think of a caveat for Slackware installation:
Because Slackware now has support for init ramdisks (initrd), it ships with four kernels installable:
generic generic-smp huge huge-smp
The "huge" has a whole bunch of IDE and SCSI drivers, as well as all the major filesystems (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS), built directly into the booted kernel. This makes the first boot after installation almost guaranteed to work, but it is very wasteful of memory.
To use the "generic" kernel, you must also install the "kernel-modules" (or "kernel-modules-smp") package, build an initrd ("man initrd" for more info), and adjust /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect the new reality.
Doing this is not mandatory, but strongly suggested.
Or, you can do like I do, and just build a custom kernel from the -current kernel sources.
Pat V really put a lot of thought into the usability aspect of the software as of the last few releases.
I'm not really a Slackware user any more; I'm a SLAMD64 user. It's heavily based on Slackware, and a lot of the custom Slack stuff gets carried over into SLAMD64.
Still, I thought only the -huge kernel was installed by default.
But I now am chainloading from the MBR to EVERYTHING, so I can install LILO on the root partition and just use that.
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I must say I think that dependency handling is a must have for most modern Linux distributions. Let me make a confession: I've used Debian for around 8 years now and I've tried most Linux distributions on and off with the major exception of Mandrake/Mandriva.
Slackware doesn't make third party software installation any easier or simpler. It just transfers the headache of dependency handling from the developer to the end user. Dependency hell does not magically disappear.
With non-automated dependency handling, imagine the headache of not only keeping the base system in sync with all the third party software installed, but also all the third party libraries you might have installed. And now imagine doing all this downloading and compiling software every time a new version of your software needs to be installed. This is all assuming that compiling always works right 100% of the time - which is far from the case as I've seen with some software. In fact, some exotic software simply fail to compile correctly for odd reasons. More than once this has happened to me.
Slackware is great if you happen to agree with Patrick V's vision and his selection of software. But I personally feel that if you find yourself tweaking it too much or installing more than 10 or 15 third party software not found in the official CDs, maybe it's not for you. Using 3rd party package managers is one such thing to avoid in Slackware as I found out to my cost as a wrong upgrade can bork your system.
I also wasted many days in compiling software in Slackware that I would have downloaded in a few minutes with dependencies resolved in Debian simply because the official software selection in Slackware simply doesn't have the choice that Debian has through sheer numbers. That's also understandable.
But unlike what most Slackware users like to claim, dependency handling is not a matter of expertise, empowering the user or lack of it but a matter of simple convenience at a (very small, in my opinion) cost of lack of total control. I know that it's good to learn to do generic command line installation (./configure, make, make install) of software, but it can get old very fast and it's not very educational either beyond a point.
Even though I consider myself a fairly advanced Linux user, I agree that Slackware does not fit everybody's needs - even for some advanced users - while it might even serve the needs of a new user very well.
It's not a case of newbies vs. advanced users. Slackware is not intended for anybody in particular yet it seems to find favour with a certain section of all classes (newbies, intermediate, advanced) of users and equally it tends to find disfavour with another section of all classes of users as well.