This is the third installment of LinuxBeginner’s “A week with” series, this time testing Slackware. The author liked the stability and “just works as promised with no extra promises” Slackware mentality.
A Week with Slackware 9.1
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I enjoyed reading that article – it was interesting to see how others customise their slack installs. I would have liked a bit more info on the actual scripts created to customise the terminals etc (maybe a download for the lazy among us – it looks good)
The discussion provides an excellent introduction to anyone wanting to try out slack, like most people should
My drives crashed this weekend so I had some time to waste on installing Slackware. It’s a shit I didn’t know about things like pkgconfig mentioned in this nice article, but I did it all by hand and got a pretty usable system. Like first I must say it feels much faster than Mandrake and like second my consciousness is clear. I also like the packaging system; too much automatization hurts.
I was a bit disappointed considering the documentation. HowTos included are ages old and I couldn’t find anything else. And I couldn’t get on the net with my modem. Another distro, same shit again!
If at least FreeBSD had better multimedia and some i18n stuff, than my choice about linux distros would be clear
I was a bit disappointed considering the documentation. HowTos included are ages old and I couldn’t find anything else.
Maybe http://www.slackfiles.net/ is a good start?
We could use some help…
Slackware 9.1 crashes when I try to boot the install CD due to some USB errors.. couldn’t find anyone else with the problem through (groups.)google.com :/ So I can’t even try it out.
Unplug your USB devices before starting the boot CD (you can plug them back in once the command prompt appears).
(I had the same problem with my USB mouse).
The scripts have been added to the article availible for download.
Thanks Dan, I’ll give it a shot.
I switched a few weeks ago to Slackware (from Fedora Core 1) and it truly is a pleasure to use my computer nowadays. I remember how shocked I was to find out how much more responsive the whole system was (GNOME in particular) than in other distros I tried (MDK, RH9, FC1, Knoppix, etc). Nice review for a great distro.
Any news on when the next release is comming?
Many thanks for adding the scripts at http://www.linuxbeginner.org/scripts/
Don’t forget to visit http://www.dropline.net/gnome and grab their auto-installer and give yourself the ultimate Slackware desktop.
Slack 9.1 , kernel 2.6.1 , Dropline Gnome.
Ultimate desktop.And is on my machine.Can’t believe I’m so lucky!I think Slackware will gain more adepts in the near future.I’m sure they’ll do.The next distro I like is Gentoo , but I want a fast install , I don’t have time always for a Gentoo install.
The best thing in the article is the example the writer set for all beginners… He googled and RTFMed for all his answers. Most all problems have come up before and are answered out there if you look. Great article.
I ran Gentoo for months but hosed it one evening as I tend to do, I needed to get backup and running quickly so I installed Slackware 9.1. I have not looked back since.
This is probably not the right place to ask but I’d like to know if anyone notice the amount of memory that Slackware 9.1 uses when running Gnome 2.4. I mean it uses a big chunk of memory. In my setup (with almost everything except KDE), it uses about 360 meg of my 386 meg of RAM. And I notice that it is significantly slower than Windows XP Pro which is installed on the same machine. Is this because of the amount of memory that Slackware 9.1 with Gnome 2.4 use or it is something else?
I don’t see those memory issues on my PIII 450 w/256mb RAM…maybe you have a rogue process in there somewhere? I’m using the stock gnome, rather than the dropline version. Which are you using, and what applications do you have open etc?
Why is it only for Slack? And is it really that much better than standard Gnome?
In my setup (with almost everything except KDE), it uses about 360 meg of my 386 meg of RAM.
That is a bit excessive for just Slack and Gnome 2.4. I just checked one of my 9.1 boxes running Gnome 2.4 and memory usage right now is at 142M. What services do you have active?
360 meg sounds very high. In any event, KDE (and possibly Gnome) can be heavy. I’ve noticed my windoze 2003 install would work pretty well on 256 meg ram, while SuSE with KDE was slightly sluggish. In fact, before opening apps on 2003, i did some tweaks and got my ram useage down to 100 megs (approximately). It really depends on the configuration of windoze / KDE / linux, etc. I hear Gnome is lighterweight than KDE, but i dunno. Also unless u are using shared video memory, where did 386 meg come from? 384 would be more typical size.
As far as Slack, I honestly love it. Slack was my first distro a few years back, I later tried many more and ended up going back to Slack, and Vector too since the iso is friendly with old comps. Add swaret and this solves the fundamental package management problems. Swaret is buggier than apt-get IMHO, but it’s still quite useable. I should emphasize I am mainly a hobbyist, and I don’t know about Slack’s role in SOHO and serious servers.
I noticed that you said you couldn’t get on the net with your modem. I, too, recently installed slackware 9.1 and am a modem user. I ran the pppsetup script that comes with Slack (see http://www.slackware.com/config/ppp.php), and then was able to connect with no problems using the ppp-go command. HTH.
I’m having a good start with Slack but I’ve already been bitten by what I consider a dumb bug.
On one of my systems with scsi disks, after finishing the install and rebooting, I get an error: LILO Timestamp Mismatch
Doing a search on google has shown that other people with numerous scsi disks have been bitten by this error as well.
The undocumented LILO error message is quiet cryptic, but in this case, has nothing to do with timestamps.
Downgrade LILO or install GRUB.
I simply used the bootdisk I created with the install (always a smart move) and removepkg lilo, and downloaded grub source, compiled and installed. (uneventfully)
all is well now.
Thanks Mark, pppsetup script is very nice, however I still have some problems with ppp module. I’ll sort that out later.
I just wanted to add that slack installer & configuration scripts are really rough. I don’t dare to experiment with menu entries that I’m not 100 percently sure what they do. This roughness has bright sides too…