This was quite a pleasant read and a credit to the author. Quite a surprise to see the installation section as a bullet list; I wish some more reviewers would do the same :p
Once cannot help but feel the excitement and enthusiasm of a fellow OS enthusiast as they take the “wrapper” off of a new version of their favourite distro; this article is no exception.
In fact, I’m inspired to give Slackware a go. It seems a ‘sane’ way to my ideal set-up (I’d just given LFS6.0 a go :|).
It’s a reasonable article for someone who has experience installing Slackware or Linux distributions before, but perhaps a wee bit light on the detail and explanation.
Having run Slack since version 3.0, I’m still impressed with its stability and ease of use.
That kind of color scheme may be fine for a game clan page where most text is on or two-liners summarizing last night’s game – c001! gr8t game gang! we r0x – but not for a multi page article.
Only a matter of personal preference. I prefer white-on-black in a terminal window, a text editor or even in a word processor. Less luminosity against my eyes.
Only a matter of personal preference. I prefer white-on-black in a terminal window, a text editor or even in a word processor. Less luminosity against my eyes.
Well, then your personal preference is rather deviant.
Since VAST majority of both printed and online publications are black text on white background.
And your “less luminosity” explanation doesn’t make any sence at all. How do you deal with the other 99.99% of pages that are black on white? Do you wear very dark gogles or put a dark filter over you monitor?
Maybe damaging your eye site by squinting on diminished contrast, hard to read publication is your personal preference, but I call it a health risk and find raising a complaint about it perfectly valid.
That kind of color scheme may be fine for a game clan page where most text is on or two-liners summarizing last night’s game – c001! gr8t game gang! we r0x – but not for a multi page article.”
I was wondering why he went through modifying the lines in the included xorg.conf (which seems to only be configured for VESA as a failsafe) instead of just doing “Xorg -configure” and have Xorg autogenerate an xorg.conf file with the necessary device options or use either xorgconfig or xorgsetup?
Incidentally, I was finally able to DRI working for my Radeon card with the Xorg driver using the settings for my card from this site:
I have never used Slackware, but I always had an impression that it is somehow different from other distributions. Perhaps more than they are different from each other. Is it true ? Why ?
I switched away from Slackware to use SuSE for a while. I switched back because my swap partitions would fill up with hundreds of megabytes and slow the system down. Not horribly, I have 3 fast drives and sometimes I configure them as a RAID 0 for speed, but still very noticeably slower.
It’s not that I run lots of programs at one time that was causing all the swapping. Once the system slowed down, even with nothing but the shell running, even after shutting down X, the swap partitions were still heavily loaded until I did an init 1/init 4 or (perish the thought!!) rebooted. I attributed this to memory leaks.
Even if I was wrong about the cause, the result is that Slackware runs faster than SuSE did and that’s worth the switch to me.
One of the beauties of Slackware package management is the ability to easily upgade existing Slackware packages with the #upgradepkg command which uninstalls an old package and installs the new package.
Slackware allows you to compile from source, install pre-built packages, or use SlackBuild scripts.
But I just feel at home with Slackware, setting everything like in the article at least you know it’s working. I compiled latest GNOME with jhbuild and all is good, you just dont get the quirky bugs like in some distros.
I started out in slackware around version 7. Since then I’ve jumped ship into various other distro’s only to come to the same conclusion many do eventually. I want a distro to stay out of my way. So I’m not running Slackware again and loving it.
Slackware is perfect for me, as it lays the ground work and then lets me take it from there. I love the simplicity in it’s package management, Slackbuilds are just so damn simple to create a package with. The closest thing to that for me was when I played around with ArchLinux. Both follow the KISS philosophy and don’t “over-engineer” by adding layer upon layer of complexity in means to automate everything.
My only real complaint for those so called “package managers” are the over bloated dependencies that come with making packages for the masses and not on a user to user basis. Gentoo is good for that though, USE-Flags are really nice to keeping things slim and trimmed down without pulling in all these extra packages to get functionality in an application that I’m not even looking for or going to use.
Don’t get me wrong, there is just a niche that Slackware fills that I fall into. I have grown over the years of using GNU/Linux to where I need this sort of flexibility and lack of hand holding.
Now to be more on topic then this generalized rambling of my own Slackware experiences, I always like seeing these kind of reviews. It was well written with some exceptions which were already corrected.
This was quite a pleasant read and a credit to the author. Quite a surprise to see the installation section as a bullet list; I wish some more reviewers would do the same :p
Once cannot help but feel the excitement and enthusiasm of a fellow OS enthusiast as they take the “wrapper” off of a new version of their favourite distro; this article is no exception.
In fact, I’m inspired to give Slackware a go. It seems a ‘sane’ way to my ideal set-up (I’d just given LFS6.0 a go :|).
It’s a reasonable article for someone who has experience installing Slackware or Linux distributions before, but perhaps a wee bit light on the detail and explanation.
Having run Slack since version 3.0, I’m still impressed with its stability and ease of use.
Just wondering why the hell he needs to be member of group mysql ? This account and group is for mysqld, not users.
Have take note of that and edited the review, tnx.
I refuse to read white text on black background.
Hurts my eyes.
That kind of color scheme may be fine for a game clan page where most text is on or two-liners summarizing last night’s game – c001! gr8t game gang! we r0x – but not for a multi page article.
Actually it is grey text on black background !
Now, WHY (?) does this comment scores 3 when other, more interesting, comments score 1 ?
There is nothing given or added to the discussion by the comment.
This policy of this site looks very stupid to me, unfair and based on how many friends you have in the site’s community.
Only a matter of personal preference. I prefer white-on-black in a terminal window, a text editor or even in a word processor. Less luminosity against my eyes.
Well, then your personal preference is rather deviant.
Since VAST majority of both printed and online publications are black text on white background.
And your “less luminosity” explanation doesn’t make any sence at all. How do you deal with the other 99.99% of pages that are black on white? Do you wear very dark gogles or put a dark filter over you monitor?
Maybe damaging your eye site by squinting on diminished contrast, hard to read publication is your personal preference, but I call it a health risk and find raising a complaint about it perfectly valid.
Black fonts on whiter papers is fine…
Black fonts on light yellow papers is better…
Black fonts on a white MONITOR really sucks…
Do you know how a monitor works?
” refuse to read white text on black background.
Hurts my eyes.
That kind of color scheme may be fine for a game clan page where most text is on or two-liners summarizing last night’s game – c001! gr8t game gang! we r0x – but not for a multi page article.”
Can’t believe your whine got you a score of 5.
it shows this site is headed to the dump.
grey text on black background actually looks better than black on white for me.
IMHO, it has got to do with preference and the kind of monitors used.
In my own CRT days, black on white was very nice. With the LCD, that sort of switched around.
I prefer the grey on black simply because its less glaring on my eyes, and I attribute my allegedly good eyesight to setting the LCD brightness to 0.
Can a eye specialist please tell me if I am right?
You could always Ctrl+A the page and have dark fonts on bright ground.
I was wondering why he went through modifying the lines in the included xorg.conf (which seems to only be configured for VESA as a failsafe) instead of just doing “Xorg -configure” and have Xorg autogenerate an xorg.conf file with the necessary device options or use either xorgconfig or xorgsetup?
Incidentally, I was finally able to DRI working for my Radeon card with the Xorg driver using the settings for my card from this site:
http://www.free3d.org
Now if only I could figure out why Sauerbraten won’t launch.. 🙁
Tnx for the comment, added to the tutorial.
I have never used Slackware, but I always had an impression that it is somehow different from other distributions. Perhaps more than they are different from each other. Is it true ? Why ?
– BSD-like init scripts (with sysV compatibility)
– simple and effective build system (shell scripts)
– vanilla packages (patched only if broken or unsecure)
– packages are plain tar.gz archives
– no dependencies tracking
What do you mean by “build system” ? Something other instead of autoconf ?
What does it mean “no dependencies tracking” ? Packages. How do you manage packages then ?
Is there some FAQ on Slackware, that explains the specifics ?
By build system I mean the way to obtain a package from a source tarball, say bash [1]
For package management, please see [2]
[1] http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-12.0/source/a/bash/bash.Slack…
[2] http://www.slackbook.org/html/package-management.html
How do you manage packages then ?
well I have been using netbsd’s pkgsrc on slackware and it works nicely.
I switched away from Slackware to use SuSE for a while. I switched back because my swap partitions would fill up with hundreds of megabytes and slow the system down. Not horribly, I have 3 fast drives and sometimes I configure them as a RAID 0 for speed, but still very noticeably slower.
It’s not that I run lots of programs at one time that was causing all the swapping. Once the system slowed down, even with nothing but the shell running, even after shutting down X, the swap partitions were still heavily loaded until I did an init 1/init 4 or (perish the thought!!) rebooted. I attributed this to memory leaks.
Even if I was wrong about the cause, the result is that Slackware runs faster than SuSE did and that’s worth the switch to me.
It’s more UNIX than any other “UNIX-like” Linux distro. And it adheres the KISS principle.
– packages are plain tar.gz archives
Most slack packages are in the .tgz format.
One of the beauties of Slackware package management is the ability to easily upgade existing Slackware packages with the #upgradepkg command which uninstalls an old package and installs the new package.
Slackware allows you to compile from source, install pre-built packages, or use SlackBuild scripts.
Yes the files are named packagename.tgz but it is still a gzip’d tar file.
Is there some FAQ on Slackware, that explains the specifics ?
http://www.slackbook.org/html/index.html
The Slack Book website covers the basics very well.
But I just feel at home with Slackware, setting everything like in the article at least you know it’s working. I compiled latest GNOME with jhbuild and all is good, you just dont get the quirky bugs like in some distros.
Jhbuild
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/jhbuild
Latest GNOME modules for jhbuild
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/teams/releng/2.18.3/
Related to the groups list the article author puts the new user I found other groups were necessary o useful, namely:
disk wheel plugdev burning
without burning, for example, K3B wasn’t working right. And wheel for sudo is handy.
Don’t get me wrong, the articles is very good, just appeared to me this issue needed clarification.
Writing this lines from inside Swiftfox, under XFCE, running great Slackware 12… (-current really, but at this moment they are the same).
I started out in slackware around version 7. Since then I’ve jumped ship into various other distro’s only to come to the same conclusion many do eventually. I want a distro to stay out of my way. So I’m not running Slackware again and loving it.
Slackware is perfect for me, as it lays the ground work and then lets me take it from there. I love the simplicity in it’s package management, Slackbuilds are just so damn simple to create a package with. The closest thing to that for me was when I played around with ArchLinux. Both follow the KISS philosophy and don’t “over-engineer” by adding layer upon layer of complexity in means to automate everything.
My only real complaint for those so called “package managers” are the over bloated dependencies that come with making packages for the masses and not on a user to user basis. Gentoo is good for that though, USE-Flags are really nice to keeping things slim and trimmed down without pulling in all these extra packages to get functionality in an application that I’m not even looking for or going to use.
Don’t get me wrong, there is just a niche that Slackware fills that I fall into. I have grown over the years of using GNU/Linux to where I need this sort of flexibility and lack of hand holding.
Now to be more on topic then this generalized rambling of my own Slackware experiences, I always like seeing these kind of reviews. It was well written with some exceptions which were already corrected.
Well, that’s my 2cents.