thelinuxlink.net

I was looking at the Slackware store, and noticed the official guide to Slackware 10.2, and the 4 cd set bundled together for 60 bucks. For someone who has never used Slackware before, other than Slax, is it worth the money?

I have been a Slackware subscriber for awhile, so I get my CD's separately from the book, but I did buy the book and thought it was very good. You can also check it out online for free:

http://slackbook.org/

I bought the book too - although I bought it from Amazon rather than from the slackstore. I think it cost me about £12 which is good value I think.

How hard is Slackware actually to learn?

I don't think Slackware is hard to learn. I probably would not recommend it to someone who has never used Linux at all, but if you have a general understanding of how Linux works then Slackware is not difficult. The installer is very easy to follow although it is not a GUI based one. Slackware does not configure xorg for you, so upon the first reboot you are at the command prompt. But, logging in and running xorgconfig is all you need to do to get X working.

Three other things to understand:

(1) almost nothing is patched. 99.99% of the packages including the kernel are vanilla, just the way the author created them. That's partly why they say Slackware is the most "Unix-like" of the Linux distros. It's vanilla and you need to be able to use the CLI. Pat V. believes in providing a clean base for users to build their own system upon.

(2) Slackware uses BSD-style rc.d init scripts, rather than init.d found in almost all other distros. It's much, much easier in Slackware, IMHO.

(3) The Slackware package manager does not figure out your dependencies. You will need to figure that out on your own and either grab a package from somewhere, e.g. linuxpackages.net, or compile it yourself. I can say that in 2 years using Slackware, I have never, ever, ever had a problem compiling a package. Seriously. Everything you need is included with Slackware so compiling is a piece of cake.

There are lots of good resources, including the slackbook I linked to above, Daniel de Kok's excellent http://www.slackbasics.org book, and the official forums located at LinuxQuestions.org: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... forumid=14. That forum is excellent -- filled with super nice Slackware users who love the distro and are more than willing to lend a hand.

MadPenguin also has the Slackware Handbook project located at http://slackersbible.org/

I've got some basic tweaks, scripts, and hacks at my own site, http://www.chessgriffin.com.

I've used Linux since 2002 and Slackware since early 2004. I've tried almost every other distro out there and keep coming back to Slack. The Slackware Security Team issues patches and updates for years to come (they are still issuing patches for version 8.1, released in 2002), so it's killer as a server. I use it on my home server, my desktop, and my laptop.

Slackware's been around since 1993. It's tried and true. Go for it!

Thanks for the heads up Chess, sounds like something worth trying, one question though, say I install a minimal install of Slackware and I wanna install KDE, how in the world do I go about doing this because KDE has major dependencies on all kinds of things.

I'm spoiled with the convienience of SUSE's YaST, SUSE was originally based on Slackware you know, so it might be a little tough getting used to Slackware.

Well, you could of course install the KDE packages that are on the Slackware CD's. I think Slackware 10.2 came with 3.4.2, and you could then download 3.4.3 packages from the -current tree. Pat V. is now in the process of updating -current so I am sure there will be 3.5 packages very shortly. When there are, you can download those and upgrade and you should be good to go. Just keep an eye on Pat's -current changelog:

http://www.slackware.com/changelog/

(there are changelogs for the stable tree, which is 10.2, and the current tree)

KDE also provides unofficial 3.5 packages for Slackware:

http://kde.org/download/

I would recommend installing slackpkg, which is a third party package updater (Pat V includes Slackpkg in /extra, so it has his "unofficial" blessing). You can then point slackpkg to a -current mirror and update kde that way. That's what I've done and it works like a charm.

http://slackpkg.sourceforge.net/

There is also swaret and slapt-get, two other third party package tools. Some people swear by 'em and some people can't stand 'em. I have not used either one extensively, but browse through the LQ forums. It seems like every 3 weeks there is a swaret vs. slapt-get thread. I would stick with Slackpkg, IMHO.

If we forget about slapt-get and stuff like that for a minute, say I install a barebone Slackware 10.2, how would I go about finding out the dependencies of KDE and all that stuff? What I hate the most in all distros is dependency issues no matter if it's the pacakge manager that's messed up or programs that don't work because of dependency issues.

I don't use KDE so I can't give you any first hand tips on KDE dependencies specifically. However, there is no way to figure out dependencies with the default tools in Slackware. But this is not necessarily a problem. Check out the section on Slackware's package management in the wikipedia entry and maybe it will help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware

If you do a minimal install of Slackware and include KDE in your package selection during install, you'll have KDE installed. If KDE needs something to run, it will be on your Slackware CD's. Everything is included for all the apps on the CD's, so if you forgot to install something, just mount the CD and install it. Since this is your first time, could you not just do a full Slackware install?

I have always just installed all the libraries and development tools and have not run into any dependency issues, so I'm not sure what else to tell you. By the way, if you download the CD's, you only need CD's 1 and 2. CD's 3 and 4 are /extra, /testing, and /source.

If you try to install something that is not included with Slackware, then as with Linux in general, you need to read the release notes of whatever package you are tryiing to install or read the error messages generated upon execution to see what it's complaining about and then install those packages as well.

Before I switched to Slackware, I used Debian based distros and got caught up in dependency checking. I would upgrade packages here and there and stuff would always end up broken at some point. In the 2 years of using Slackware where there is no dependency checking, I have no such upgrade problems. Everything installs and compiles fine. When I have installed an outside package, the author's website has always listed the dependencies, most of which were already in Slackware. If not, I would just download those other packages and compile them too. I really think that once you try it, you'll see what I mean.

This thread in LQ seems right on point:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... p?t=398889

(the "ldd" command gives you required libraries for a particular package)

Chess wrote:Before I switched to Slackware, I used Debian based distros and got caught up in dependency checking. I would upgrade packages here and there and stuff would always end up broken at some point. In the 2 years of using Slackware where there is no dependency checking, I have no such upgrade problems. Everything installs and compiles fine. When I have installed an outside package, the author's website has always listed the dependencies, most of which were already in Slackware. If not, I would just download those other packages and compile them too. I really think that once you try it, you'll see what I mean.

Hmmmm, I think I need to get more frustrated with dependency resolving package managers because I think that having to read stuff before doing a quick install of something, or upgrade something, and calculating dependencies myself is too big a pain when I consder that I start on a new school tomorrow (Actually in 10 hours at the time of writing).
After I've begun using SUSE as my main distro, I've actually never really had a dependency issue, not something that didn't take 5 seconds to fix, which was because I added the wrong repository to YaST or something like that.

Tsuroerusu wrote:If we forget about slapt-get and stuff like that for a minute, say I install a barebone Slackware 10.2, how would I go about finding out the dependencies of KDE and all that stuff? What I hate the most in all distros is dependency issues no matter if it's the pacakge manager that's messed up or programs that don't work because of dependency issues.

As per the previous post, ldd is your friend! Just run ldd on the binary and it will indicate what libraries are missing and grab those.

Now if you are trying to compilie the software yourself, you need to read all the documentation to find out what additional libraries you may need. For something like Gnome or KDE you will want to go to their website; there's going to be a long list of dependencies you have to get installed first and possibly in a specific order.

dann wrote:As per the previous post, ldd is your friend! Just run ldd on the binary and it will indicate what libraries are missing and grab those.

Now if you are trying to compilie the software yourself, you need to read all the documentation to find out what additional libraries you may need. For something like Gnome or KDE you will want to go to their website; there's going to be a long list of dependencies you have to get installed first and possibly in a specific order.

I hate compiling KDE, last time I did that was with Gentoo and it too freaking 16 hours, in which I was so bored that I was getting ready to tare my hair off.

ldd sounds handy to know on any distro, thanks for the tip, I think I'll stick with SUSE for now, which I've been using for a while now

Tsuroerusu wrote:After I've begun using SUSE as my main distro, I've actually never really had a dependency issue, not something that didn't take 5 seconds to fix, which was because I added the wrong repository to YaST or something like that.

Just to clarify, virtually everything you need is already included with Slackware. I have never encountered a dependency problem. That's not to say that packages I install don't have dependencies -- some do. But the few times that has occurred in the 2 years I've used Slackware has been easily addressed by compiling and installing those dependencies. The difference for me is that nothing breaks, unlike what happened to me when I was using Debian with various branches, pinning etc. Because I am in total control of my system, I can decide exactly what goes on.

Anyway, the great thing about Linux is that it's about choice. You need to find what works for you and stick with it. SuSE is a great distro -- one of the best. I used 7.3 and 8.0 a few years back and YaST is a really nice tool. However, I am a tinkerer, something that goes back to my youth hacking on my Apple II in the late 70's. I enjoy knowing exactly how my system works, where everything is, and how to maintain things manually. I prefer editing config files by hand vs using a GUI. To me, Slackware's simplicity is a thing of beauty. It's fast, clean, and has a long track record of stability and reliability.

So, while Slackware is not for everybody, it fits me to a T.

First, really enjoy the podcasts, Thanks.

I loaded Slackware 10.2 (2.4 kernel) on my laptop (Celeron aprox. 677MHZ w/ 128 MB) after listening to a few of the podcasts, with XFCE as desktop.
No doubt, this was the fastest combination I have tried so far (Ubuntu, Debian). I loved it. But, I had trouble with the install when trying to use the 2.6 kernel (which I figured I would need to get ndiswrapper to work).

I fell back to Debian - finally got Ndiswrapper to work and find that it runs fast enough with Gnome (suprisingly - also like the speed of the default browser - Epiphany) that I haven't booted into my Windows ME partition since.

I'd still love to get Slackware working - -Question-- How difficult is it to run these two distros on the same HD? I'd like to wipe the ME partition and use it for Slackware and pick back up tweaking and learning with it.

Thanks