The long-awaited Slackware 10 release has hit the streets, so to speak. Though Patrick Volkerding’s Slackware wasn’t the very first Linux distribution (it was originally based on the SLS distribution) it has outlived all of its predecessors. First released on July 16, 1993, Slackware has come a long way since its floppy-based origins — though in some ways, it has also remained very much the same. More here…
LWN: A look at Slackware 10.0
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
or slackware dies. Whichever comes first.
I have slack running on my laptop, and I really enjoy it. It dual boots with Win2000 with no problem, although I don’t really use Windows anymore. I liked it so much that I was going to use it on my desktop, but slack 10 simply refused to install properly. I’m a relativly new linux user and just didn’t have the expertise to make it work. So I tried Fedora Core 2. Fedora is pretty good and I enjoy it, but I really liked the simple .tgz package system of slack. RPM works but I have had a lot of trouble with libraries, that I never had with slack. I also really like http://www.linuxpackages.net/ that only supports slack, and I just havn’t seen anything simular for fedora. Despite its reputation, I have found Slack to be a little easier to use/maintain, after the initial installation.
I cut my teeth on Mandrake, and despite being targeted to Linux neophytes, I look back on those days and only remember how difficult it was. For me, RPM hell simply replaced dll hell with *doze. I have been Windows free for almost 3 years, and for the last 2.5, it’s been slack all the way. Package management is as simple as it should be; one command to install, and that’s it.
The distro itself runs with the elegance and class that Linux was intended to be. I have successfully converted twelve Micro$oft drones to Slackware, and they have, in turn, enlightened others.
The Slack Pack are a select few, and to be thought of with much respect. We are so dedicated to our distribution of choice, and others percieve this as masochistic. Like the people who smoke Lucky Strikes, drink Wild Turkey, and do their own dentistry, the Slack crowd is among the most fierce and loyal band of Linux folk to ever grace the earth.
Much respect and reverence to Pat Volkerding. That’s my Slack praise, take it as you will.
having used Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat, Yoper, Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, and Slackware. Slackware is the best distro for me. It has simple pkg tools and it’s not hard to create packages with checkinstall. Like people say, it’s a distro that just works.
One of my favorites. Slack 10 improves upon an already great lineage.
I have used various distros, and slackware has topped them all , being straight forward and easy to use, kudos to pat, and hope to see even more improvements to already one of the best OSes in existance.
I have been running Mandrake for awhile and I have kept with it only because of loyalty being it the first distro I used back in 1999. However, the more I have used Slackware the more it is harder for me to hold on to mandrake. The simplicity is amazing even though urpmi on mandrake is simple but slackware even makes it even easier to install or uninstall packages. There is something about slackware that keeps calling me to it.
heck it out. . . scary stuff, Pat was big into the church.
hehe. .
I had not caught the Slackware reference and smoking J.R. Dobbs like mascot until I read about it last month.
Slack was my first distro when I found some 3.x or 4.x CD in a library book. I went to SuSE 8.1, RH 6.2 – 9 for a while. But too much RPM hell so I returned to Slack again. I’m now running Vector 4.0 on one desktop (a slack derivative) and Slack 9.0 UML server. I’ll try Buffalo linux at some point (another Slack derivative).
Add swaret and you have easy package management. Just don’t try a 9.0 to CURRENT upgrade. It’s good for smaller upgrades and patching though.
yes ..slack is a simple and good OS. but do not so proud of using slack as if you are a proLinux. Sweep it away in mind and keep learning hard..
I am using slack at home as a desktop, plus a small server run by freebsd. it s as good as slack, even better in performance. Though i do not use FC or MDK SUse, i still think good of them. So many ppl are using it anyway..
I’ve started on Slackware almost two years ago (On Dragon Linux, because it would run in a loopback device – and avoid repartioning), and I found it a mess then. Partly because it was Slackware 7.0, which was rather outdated at the time, and partly because I was a complete newbie. In the end, I installed Debian, but I started having problems since I constantly tracked Unstable and found myself longing for Slackware’s simplicity. I switched back to Slackware three months ago and haven’t looked back since – there’s something to be said about cleanly designed, simple systems like Slack.
And now that slapt-get handles automatic upgrades, I’m in *nix heaven =)
I run Slackware on all my non Macintosh boxes and I think it’s the best damn OS ever. It’s simplicity is what keeps me coming back, no bloated GUI configuration tools or anything like that.
Slack forever!
my lappy is always slack.. it appears to be the only thing that just flat out work without massaging the kernel.. eventhough I do it anyway…
I cut my teeth on Mandrake 5.x even though I had a very Slackware version before that. I just couldn’t be bothered to give it a try back then. Time passed and during one of my “let me see what’s out there in Linux Land” moods I tried out recent versions of Arch,Suse, Buffalo, Vector, PcLinux and Mandrake. Well what do you know, I now have Slack 10 installed with Dropline Gnome and am loving it. I’ve even geared myself up for a 1 month “Windows Cold Turkey” experiment. I honestly can’t see, except for some games, where Linux falters when compared to other Os’s these days and love the Slackware approach. In fact in many regards Linux is the better choice. I’ve since installed Firefox and openoffice with ease.
For all those peopel out there considering Slackware, repeat after me “SWARET”. This tool will make the Slackware experience a joy that it really should be and is. I’ve found and installed some other usefull tools such as the “Gnome Package Tool” to add to my spoiled GUI mentality. This is not to say that I shun the command line, I in fact embrace it.
Slackware does exactly what it says it will do, isn’t that all we can hope and expect from pretty much anything these days??
Check it out. . . scary stuff, Pat was big into the church.
Its funny how people take that the wrong way when in fact its one of the biggest jokes in the Slackware community.
PS It’s linked at the bottom of this page
http://www.slackware.com/~msimons/slackware/grfx/
Its funny how people take that the wrong way when in fact its one of the biggest jokes in the Slackware community.
Yep, don’t leave slack in the Cold rain & snow because you didn’t get the joke
. Patrick is not the friend of the devil or something like that.
Keep on Slackin’
.
Well, Slack users seem to be very dedicated… I may want to try it myself, but one thing that puts me off with most distros is their ugly fonts. And yes, I have loads of Truetype fonts, they just don’t render well in Linux. That’s why I a using Mandrake 10 now, because the PLF branch has a modified version of the freetype2 library that renders the fonts quite good.
My second PC is currently chugging away with Slackware – I use it for surfing and open office documents etc.
Windows I use for games and multimedia (I’m a web/multimedia designer)
It’s by far the most responsive and stable distribution I’ve ever used – the other top distros have become bloated imho, spending too much time on fancy installers and themes.
KDE on Slack 10 is amazing !
Now I only wish Macromedia/Adobe would start porting the apps I need to Linux !
After reading so much positive things about Slackware I decided to try it out last week. All in all installation and configuration is straight forward and simple.
Kernel & NTPL
I don’t understand why the default kernel version is still 2.4.x. I have only positive experiences with the 2.6.x series and miss the improvements it has. In particular I have trouble with thread programming under Slackwares 2.4.x kernel and glibc combo — something that has been resolved on my Gentoo 2.6.x + NTPL + glibc 2.3.x box. I will switch to the testing versions but so far did not have the time to do so. Including NTPL is a must have for me since programming multithreaded applications in the pre NTPL aera was not exaclty an easy thing.
Fonts
The first thing I noticed when running X was how ugly the truetype fonts are. I know that due to patents freetype turns the TT bytecode interpreter off by default. So I downloaded the freetype source and recompiled with interpreter turned on and replaced Slackware’s version. Fonts are now displayed as I expect it. I understand why Slackware did not do this for me but I would greatly appreciate it if freetype would be a separate package and not part of X.org since it would be much easier to build a new freetype package and upgrade from the one installed.
Packages
I missed a bunch of packages (notably Gtkmm) that I need for my daily work. This led me to try out building packages manually wich I have to confess works quite good. I have never experienced a more simple way to integrate my own compiled packages into the distro. However I don’t have the time and will to build huge packages like OpenOffice or Evolution. These I think should belong to Slackware by default.
Conclusion
Overall I like Slackware quite much. While it contains not every package one needs it is a slim distribution that can easily be extended as needed. If only a 2.6.x kernel + NTPL would be default I would like Slackware even more.
I´ve been using Slackware since 7.0 and it was very painful to use 10. gcc is unstable with a lot of segmentation faults, system freezes and mozilla can´t stay open(wuthout a segmentation fault) for 10 minutes. I´m looking for another distro until those problems get fix.
Paulo, perhaps this problem is related to your hardware configuration. I mean: I’m running Slackware 10, using GCC all the time and had no problems with this release. Saudações Brasileiras!
slackware 10 is like a rock on my system, an upgrade from 9.1
its probably your hardware.
Hiya.
I too have experienced the same problems, not with moziila but with Gnome 2.6.
I then installed Slackware 10 on another computer and it works very stable – Somehow I believe I have a hardware problem on that computer and Gnome 2.6 seems to aggravate this hardware problem.
How to determine what actually went wrong is still unknown to me.
Jim
you should definetly check yout GNOME dropline for slack. A smooth updated desktop without any hassle
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/
http://www.distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20040628#1
Checkinstall is a very useful tool:
http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/
Swaret also:
http://www.swaret.org
The first thing I noticed when running X was how ugly the truetype fonts are. I know that due to patents freetype turns the TT bytecode interpreter off by default. So I downloaded the freetype source and recompiled with interpreter turned on and replaced Slackware’s version. Fonts are now displayed as I expect it.
Well, you did it wrong. Using the bytecode interpreter stuff only makes it look worse (if you use aa). To get the best results you need to use the auto-hinter instead and that can be enabled in freetype’s config file. But even with the auto-hinter it still doesn’t look very well. The kerning problems is the worst I think.
“Its funny how people take that the wrong way when in fact its one of the biggest jokes in the Slackware community.”
The Church of the Subgenius itself is one big joke. I know it can be hard sometimes to tell ‘serious’ religions apart from joke religions since there are ‘serious’ religions that have aliens riding around in DC3s with soul catching flypaper. But I think its pretty safe to say that as far as religions go, its probably safer to just slack off.
Also with Slackware 10 you don’t really have any problems at all from using Dropline. Since Gnome and KDE are on a seperate disk anyway, just get Dropline and you get a bit more up to date Gnome, and you don’t have to spend as much time downloading since KDE isn’t included.
Is checkinstall part of the default distribution yet?
” Fonts
The first thing I noticed when running X was how ugly the truetype fonts are. I know that due to patents freetype turns the TT bytecode interpreter off by default. ”
Fedora don’t have bytecode turned on and its look pretty dam good right from the start. Is slackware doing something different? I understand why you did what you did but personally I don’t have any problem with the way my fonts look without that patented code turned on. Just question really, I’m not asking for a list of why Slackware is better then Fedora.
Thats right 30 dollars for eternal salvation or triple your money back
Unless you beat the snot out of BoB first 
Praise slack and f’em if they cant take a joke…….. Watch out for pink boys
@ Best:
Checkinstall is included on the second cd of slackware 9.1 in /extra as far as I know.
Sorry for not being clear enough on the font issue. What I ment was that I prefer not to anti alias fonts in a certain range. Anti aliasing by itself looks as good in Slackware as in other distributions but turning AA off gives quite jerky fonts. Enabling the bytecode interpreter in freetype made those not anti aliased fonts appear nice again.
And they both rock!
Thanks Eugenia and all the other Slack lovers for spreading the word.
What I expect to do with Slackware?
I want to be able to install software easily, without waiting for someone else to build a package before-hand, and without messing with dependency hell. I want plain and simple software installation, without depending on system administrators of any kind. 😉
My previous system was Debian based.
recently i needed a linux for a minimal and server. normally i would use a BSD, but this time i needed the technologies of the 2.6 kernel. so i went looking and slackware was the only main linux (minority ones are a risk if you need community support) which is safe with a text-only install and is safe for much continued use with text-only (ssh access).
my attempt with fedora 2 ran into X and X library dependencies which i didn’t appreciate.
a linux distibution that allows a minimal system to be installed, and then also allows normal and administrative use without unecessary dependencies is what, for me, is the Slackware difference. vive la difference. and i thought fedora fed into redhat which aimed at the corporate server market?
Ahhh. If only my gfx card would work with dualhead monitors, I would be set. I could actually use it for development, no doubt about it. Sweet!
Couldn’t get better, really.
Cheers
Ahhh. If only my gfx card would work with dualhead monitors, I would be set. I could actually use it for development, no doubt about it. Sweet!
What type card do you have?
But it wasn’t working with the default ‘fglrx’ module. Some problem with the (re)painting of the screens.
I set the module to ‘radeon’ and MonitorLayout to ‘CRT, CRT’ instead of ‘AUTO, AUTO’. Seems ok now.
I’m relatively new to Slackware, started at 9.0. Before I used Mandrake, Redhat. Ever since I switch to Slackware, I have got stability ever since. It wasn’t a huge cruve for me to learn it (FreeBSD helped out a lot) but it was greatly different from the previous two. 9.1 was an alright release, but with the 10 release its like they made a huge jump. Its stable. I got ALSA to mix streams through my hardware and my Intellimouse left&right buttons to finally work. (Wasn’t automated, but it worked a hell of a lot better then when I attempted on 9.1) Great job guys
/quote/Only the first disk is necessary for a basic install with KDE/quote/
this is wrong, kde is on the second disk
did he really install slackware ?
ps : by the way … SLACKWARE RULES =:D
/quote/The only complaint this writer has about Slackware 10 is the lack of a simple sound configuration utility. Configuring sound on the Toshiba laptop with Slackware was a bit more challenging than with other distributions, which usually find and enable the sound card without any user intervention./quote/
i see no problem in running alsaconf
i think it’s much worse when the distro automates it ant then fails … then the user is left with no clue and frustated
Kernel & NTPL
I don’t understand why the default kernel version is still 2.4.x. I have only positive experiences with the 2.6.x series and miss the improvements it has. In particular I have trouble with thread programming under Slackwares 2.4.x kernel and glibc combo — something that has been resolved on my Gentoo 2.6.x + NTPL + glibc 2.3.x box. I will switch to the testing versions but so far did not have the time to do so. Including NTPL is a must have for me since programming multithreaded applications in the pre NTPL aera was not exaclty an easy thing.
go to kernel.org and download the version you wish.then untar the archive in /usr/src/. make a simbolic link to the new folder , linux. then go to /boot and backup your vmlinuz in something like vmlinuz.old . Move back in /usr/src/linux now and do make mrproper,make menuconfig (choose yer stuffs),make , make install. Some people say do make modules and make modules install. I don’t. An there you go , a clean kernel.Sorry,couldn’t hold it
PS : I will try your tip about freetype.Thx.
The easiest way to do a quick and painless upgrade to the 2.6.7 kernel in the second CD testing directory :-
installpkg kernel-generic-2.6.7-i486-1.tgz
Then also installpkg the modules, kernel headers and alsa-drivers.
Then you create an initrd :-
mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.7 -m jbd:ext3 -f ext3 -r /dev/hdb3
make sure you have the correct partition type and of course root partition in the above, if your running reiserfs :-
mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.7 -m reiserfs
Then edit your lilo.conf file and your all set.
With some of these barebones distros and some BSDs as well. They assume everyone has broadband, or even an internet connection at all. While some are calling Mandrake, Suse and Red Hat bloat just because they actually come with apps, you get something like Slackware and you get squat in the deal. No internet connection? You’re screwed. Slow internet connection, hope you like twiddling your thumbs and staring at your monitor. Let’s face it, should you be required to have a connection at all just to use an OS? The internet is great, but an over reliance on it is not.