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Slackware 11 is Coming 115

Posted by CowboyNeal from the tarballs-and-more-tarballs dept.
ejd3 writes "In the slackware-current changelog Pat has stated that 'Although there's still quite a bit in the TODO queue here I'm making my steps carefully as -current is very stable, and I think it should ship as a stable 11.0 soon so that we can get back to the business of breaking things in -current. :-)' How much longer will the slackers have to wait?"
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Slackware 11 is Coming More

Slackware 11 is Coming

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  • No need to wait (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iiiiiiii ( 652593 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @02:40AM (#15546869)
    Slackers just run what's in -current

    • Re:No need to wait (Score:5, Informative)

      by ejd3 ( 963550 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @02:56AM (#15546915) Homepage Journal
      Slackers just run what's in -current
      Quite right, its certainly it is stable enough. There even many many unofficial ISOs of the current tree you can grab at various sites including slackware.no [slackware.no]

      • Re:No need to wait (Score:5, Informative)

        by the unbeliever ( 201915 ) <chris+slashdot&atlgeek,com> on Friday June 16, 2006 @03:05AM (#15546934) Homepage
        Or just install 10.2, then install slapt-get and add your favorite slackware mirror's -current as a source.

        • Re:No need to wait (Score:3, Informative)

          by goarilla ( 908067 )
          that's a bad idea
          swaret and slapt-get can bork your install very easily
          unless you know exactly what slapt-get does

          it's much wiser to rsync the current tree
          then following the instruction in UPGRADE.TXT
          which is basicly go to init 1
          upgrade glibc shared libs, sed and pkgtools
          then the rest: for i in a ap ...; do cd "$i"; upgradepkg --install-new *.tgz; cd ..; done; updatedb && ldconfig; init 3
          • There is a utility is slackware-extras called scalkpkg which can be used to upgrade to current without borking the install like swaret and slapt get. It has been majorly updated recently, and has a partial ncurses interface.

          • that's a bad idea swaret and slapt-get can bork your install very easily unless you know exactly what slapt-get does

            I hear this again and again. While I can see it being dangerous for an upgrade, I have also heard the general "swaret will eat your system" under normal use. Do you have any proof to this end?

      • Re:No need to wait (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Skater ( 41976 )
        One of my problems with Slackware is that -current isn't really what I want in many cases. I recently updated my laptop to Slackware 10.2, then searched for all of the security updates to install. I did those, but things broke, like apache (well, php, actually) because I didn't have the new-since-10.2 Cyrus-imap library, updated libpng library, etc. installed. Those weren't updated as a result of a security problem; they were updated for other reasons. I know this because I searched the changelog for "s
      • And a lot of third-party developers using Slack as a base for their own distribution also use the -current tree. I've been doing my own distribution lately (yes, you know, I never shut up about it...) and I just base everything on -current, making a few tweaks and changes as I deem necessary – it really is rather nice and stable, and since it's significantly more up-to-date, I see no reason not to use it. As far as I care, the releases are mostly milestones between updates.

        Quick tip to any fellow wo
      • and with a post like that I think I forgot english

    • Re:No need to wait (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tsa ( 15680 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @05:26AM (#15547297) Homepage
      I usually run the distribution I installed for years and years until I can't run new programs on it anymore, because of library issues and such. Then it's time to upgrade.
      • I was down that road with the 3.x series. It was hell to upgrade from that!
        • I always backup all my data and format the SW partition. Aesy, but some work to get all the settings right. Then again, I only have to do that once every 4 years or so.

      • Re:No need to wait (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )
        Gentoo, and to a lesser extent debian, are very good at letting you run them for years and keep them up to date as you go along...
        The only trick with gentoo, is to update regularly rather than all in one large chunk. You also don't have the typical problems that occur with binary updates being linked to particular versions of libraries and thus needing to install those libraries too.

        For instance, anything compiled against glibc 2.4.x will depend on that version of glibc, but the same programs will still com

        • Re:No need to wait (Score:2, Insightful)

          by zsau ( 266209 )
          Thing is, those of us who do stick to our distributions don't want to upgrade as we go along. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Updating regularly isn't what I want, it keeps changing things. Even if the change is for the better, it can still interrupt your workflow...

          With Gentoo or Debian/Sid or the like, you have to continuously maintain your computer (as packages change) to keep it up-to-date with security (or even to able to upgrade easily in a few years time). With Slackware or Debian/Stable, you just s

      • Re:No need to wait (Score:2, Interesting)

        by joedoc ( 441972 )
        Heh, this reminds me of the web server I managed at my last job. When we finally went on line locally, I demanded that we not use Windows, but Linux, and specifically Slackware. I installed version 8.0 and ran it with literally no changes (expect for occasional security patches and application updates to Apache, PHP and MySQL) until this past January. I shifted to a new box due to some hardware issues and installed 10.1. That site has now closed. I often wonder how long I could have run that Slack 8 box if

    • Re:No need to wait (Score:3, Informative)

      by sgt scrub ( 869860 )
      Or you can pre-order 11 here http://store.slackware.com/cgi-bin/store/slack11.0 ?id=7qg7pUeb:mv_pc=27 [slackware.com] support the project, and look forward to 12.

  • 64-bit official? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Spydir Web ( 120941 )
    Are we gonna see an official 64-bit release this go round? I had to switch to gentoo then ubuntu just to use my AMD64...

    • Re:64-bit official? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I doubt that... Never tried Slamd64, but maybe Patrick could make it some sort of "official port" or something like that... I've heard Slamd64 was rock solid and very "conservative" (maybe that's not the right word to use, but what I want to say is that it follows Slackware's path/philosophy).

      - English is not my native language, so please excuse me if I mess things up -

    • Re:64-bit official? (Score:4, Funny)

      by troll -1 ( 956834 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @04:50AM (#15547195)
      I had to switch to gentoo then ubuntu just to use my AMD64...

      All you need to do is rebuild your kernel. A Linux distro is just a bunch of programs and config files, its not 64-bit specific.

    • Re:64-bit official? (Score:4, Informative)

      by badfish99 ( 826052 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @04:59AM (#15547217)
      You could use Slamd64. But regular Slackware will work fine on an AMD64: I believe that Pat is using one as his development machine. He wrote somewhere that he tried compiling 64-bit versions of various things, but he didn't see any performance improvement from it, so he abandoned the experiment. Of course it would be a different matter on a high-end server with lots of memory, but that's not Slackware's target market.
      • Having more registers (x86-64 doubles the count of general purpose and SIMD registers) is never a bad thing.
        • True, but the acid test is whether it goes faster or not. From what I read, Pat tried it, and it didn't. Of course, your milage may vary.

          I can imagine various possible reasons for this: for example
          The 32-bit compiler is more mature, and produces better code.
          64-bit variables use more memory, so the memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck.
          The hardware may be compensating for lack of registers by clever caching strategies

          I've no idea whether these ideas are true or not, but my point is that the only wa

    • Re:64-bit official? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I *have* been using slamd64 (from the beta versions onward) on a bunch of dual opteron (pizza ;-) ) boxen as number crunchers,
      and it is indeed rocksolid. *All* of the slamd64 versions up to now.

      I wish Pat would bless it as the official slack for AMD64.

      Also, yes, stock slack runs on these well as well, only you lack 64bit stuff. Which comes in handy once in a while, if you develop your own machine learning algorithms, and test them on huge datasets. There are probably other applications where you don't miss

    • Re:64-bit official? (Score:5, Informative)

      by 1369IC ( 935113 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @06:46AM (#15547457)

      There are a couple of slack-based AMD64 systems besides SLAMD64. I liked SLAMD64, but haven't found it as trouble-free as some others apparently have. Frugalware claims to be pretty much Slackware with Pacman bolted on, and I liked it a lot. I also just downloaded something called Bluewhite 64 Linux, another unofficial port. That goes on my testing partition this weekend (replacing STX Linux, another Slackware derivative I was testing for installation on a friend/potential convert's older laptop).

      So if Slackware is a niche player now (which I don't believe), then one part of that niche is as a base for new distros -- the excellent Zenwalk (which I run on my laptop), STX, Frugalware, Voltalinux (Slackware with pkgsrc?), Slax and Vector, just off the top of my head. Not as many derivatives as Debian, perhaps, but certainly a healthy number and probably indicative of a healthy distro.

      I think Slackware's biggest "problem" is that it has little to no "community," at least as far as vocal fanboys (you know, the kind who visit Distrowatch to click through and drive up its numbers). I think it tends to attract and keep a self-sufficient, quieter crowd, and therefore its presence isn't as great as its numbers, if that makes any sense.

      And text, of course. As soon as I boot up and people see text instead of a pretty splash screen I see that sphincter-tightening look come over some of their faces.

      But beyond the entertainment value it's probably a bad thing.

      • there is community

        you have the a.o.l.s usenet newsgroup and more importantly
        the ##slackware channel on freenode :D
      • My sister's comment on seeing me boot up my laptop was along the lines of "Linux must suck. I saw his laptop turn on and it just had a DOS window come up with a bunch of junk flying past the screen." Gotta love how MS has some people programmed to think information is bad.

        On a side note, I had sucked the battery dry on the plane home for Christmas, so it was the first boot in something like 3-months. Funny thing is I could never get standby to work properly when I still had an XP partition on the lapto

      • Re:64-bit official? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16, 2006 @09:00AM (#15547950)
        I think Slackware's biggest "problem" is that it has little to no "community," at least as far as vocal fanboys (you know, the kind who visit Distrowatch to click through and drive up its numbers). I think it tends to attract and keep a self-sufficient, quieter crowd, and therefore its presence isn't as great as its numbers, if that makes any sense.


        It makes perfect sense, as I'm one of those of whom you speak. I'm a UNIX professional who works with Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Redhat AS. I run Slack on my workstation and on a couple of smaller servers because it is about as unobfuscated (at least from my perspective) as you can get. No glittery anything, just a very solid Linux.

        I need to send Pat money this time around as well as I think I purchased 10.1 but not 10.2. Anybody who seriously uses Slack should do the same if they can afford it. He puts out solid distro, and he's a nice guy.
        • Well Said!

          Slackware is the most straightforward, uncluttered, trouble-free, and generic (in the nicest sense of the term) Linux distribution I've every tried (and I've done SUSE 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, RHEL 4, RH9, Mandrake/Mandriva, and Knoppix). I do plan to send Pat some $$$ because he consistently provides a wonderful Linux experience.
      • Slackware just doesn't have a rabbid following.

        I for one prefer slackware as a linux distro, because when you want it done and you want it done right w/o BS, use slackware.

        As nice as other distros are to configure your system, most distros screw up the NORMAL tools in favour of their own. Then there is package hell!

        Then I switched from the dark side and went to the BSD's.

      • Re:64-bit official? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @09:26AM (#15548121) Homepage
        I think Slackware's biggest "problem" is that it has little to no "community,"

        there is a huge slackware community, it's just very much like the BSD community. WEare simply too busy using it in embedded systems, and other places to take the time to run around posting to all forums "S1ac4war3 0wnz joo!" messages.

        Slackware is the absolute best distro for doing really advanced things like stuffing it in an embedded device or making a super stripped down machine that makes an old useless 486 scream like a monster for a single important task... makes the best OS for a homebrew firewall that fits on a 8meg CF card.

        I use it for developing apps for the gumstix embedded platform. installing the cross compilers for alpha processors is painless compared to a rpm or deb based distro.
      • Actually, the type of community Slackware has is precisely what drew me to it. Every now and again, a "Mine's Better!" flamewar sparks up, and Debian and Gentoo and Fedora and SuSe and more recently Ubuntu users slam and flame eachother to high heaven. Meanwhile, you can always find a thread of content Slackware users cordially chatting with eachother and sharing just how much they love Pat's plucky little distro.

        That's it... The community is confident enough in the distribution that they don't need t
      • indeed, I and many friends use slackware. slackware isn't as dependant on a community because most users don't bother with the package system. this way when you have a problem installing a tar, you can go straight to the project forum to figure out what's wrong and missing rather than dealing with a distro forum who probibly doesn't know jack about the software you're trying to install anyway.

        -collin

  • Marketshare? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Noodlenose ( 537591 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @02:51AM (#15546897) Homepage Journal
    Having huge respect and sympathy for Patrick Volkerding I nevertheless wonder whether Slackware is (after being one of the groundbreakers for Linux) is becoming a niche - distro. Shame, really.

    • Re:Marketshare? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @02:57AM (#15546918)
      IMO Slackware is still the best Distro. I've been using it since 2.3 back in the 1.0 kernel days. I love its simplicity; it's designed so you can edit the config files yourself, none of the GUI tools so many distros like now with the actual config files hidden all over the place.

      • Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by drange_net ( 859642 )
        I love its simplicity; it's designed so you can edit the config files yourself, none of the GUI tools so many distros like now with the actual config files hidden all over the place.

        Well, I use Debian at servers, Arch Linux at my private desktop, Kubuntu at my laptop and Ubuntu at work. Please tell me I can't manually edit my config files and that the "GUI tools [...] with the actual config files hidden all over the place"...

        I call BS

        • Re:Marketshare? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Poppler ( 822173 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @05:04AM (#15547234) Journal
          It's true that you don't need a GUI to configure Ubuntu. However, in my experience, if you're used to Slackware, the location of some config files in Debian-based distros can seem counterintuitive. Slackware is very simple once you understand it; I especially like the BSD style init system, it just makes sense.
          Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu is great too (I'm using it right now), and I haven't had much trouble configuring it the way I want. But after using Slackware regularly for a while, I can understand why he feels the way he does.

          • Re:Marketshare? (Score:1, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward
            I especially like the BSD style init system, it just makes sense.

            Blasphemer! System-V init is the only true way to do startup scripts. It makes a SHITLOAD more sense than the BSD-style. How do you even restart a daemon under BSD? I have no clue. Under System-V I can just call the init script with stop and then start or restart or reload if those are available options. On BSD you... uhhh... manually kill the daemon and relaunch it hoping you remember the options it passed on the commandline?

            You prob

            • Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Insightful)

              by jibjibjib ( 889679 )
              You are obviously just trolling and have no idea how the BSD system actually works. It's just as simple as in SysV to restart a daemon. For example:

              /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd restart

              • You are obviously just trolling and have no idea how the BSD system actually works. It's just as simple as in SysV to restart a daemon. For example:
                 
                /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd restart

                That's not traditional BSD style though. Only OpenBSD still uses that as far as I'm aware. Most OSes which use "BSD style init" use a BSD/SysV hybrid. In FreeBSD and NetBSD it's called rcNG.

          • Re:Marketshare? (Score:1, Flamebait)

            by cloudmaster ( 10662 )
            I especially like the BSD style init system, it just makes sense

            Yeah, having a bunch of scripts that call each other in an unclear order (unless you read all of the scripts) is a whole lot easier to understand than one directory - named after the current runlevel - full of scripts, all of which are run in the same order that ls shows them to you. "Hmmm, does lpr launch from rc.net1, rc.net2, or something else? When does nfs start relative to ssh?" The only "simple" thing about BSD-style init is that ther
            • On my system...

              Hmmm, does lpr launch from rc.net1, rc.net2, or something else?
              Something else. rc.M

              When does nfs start relative to ssh?
              After. Both in rc.inet2, lines 101 and 82 respectively.

              grep is your friend - Learn it. Use it. Love it.

              BSD-style scripts really aren't hard to figure out. For Slackware, check out - http://www.slackware.org/config/init.php [slackware.org]

              Read through /etc/rc.d/rc.M. That will pretty much give you an exact idea of what order the scripts are called in.
              • I run slackware. I have, in fact, since 1994. It was my first distro, and it still runs my firewall + mail relay. But thanks for posting the tips - someone might benefit from them. :)

                Anyway, the point was not that it's impossible to figure the scripts out - it was that the scripts are non intuitive. Look at "rc.M" and tell me that it's obvious how that filename's connected to lpr. It's more difficult to do simple tasks with BSD-style init than it needs to be. Envision, instead, a SysV-style init setup:

    • Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Erik Hensema ( 12898 )

      It's been a niche distro for many years now. The only reason slack is mentioned on /. at all is because of its important place in Linux history.

      Slack is for hobbyists. It's rarely used in production environments because where money counts, slack is almost always out of the question for being way too labour intensive. Even in the hobby market it's filling a niche. Only a few die hard nerds like to be exposed to the inner workings of their system as slack does. Most others will just use a more automated dis

      • It's about as bare a distro as can be

        and THAT is the beauty of slackware

        no bloat, no extra crap that one doesn't need
        just the pure loveliness that one needs :]
      • >It's about as bare a distro as can be, and as such it's nice learning material when you like to explore the innards of a linux distro.

        I think you have slackware confused with Linux From Scratch.

      • Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I hate to disagree with you, but you must be both misinformed *AND* smoking pretty powerfull shit ...

        Slackware is _THE_ most rocksolid stable distro there is. Which is why slack fanboys can give mac fanboys a run for their money on sheer loyalty.
        And also why a *large* proportion of slackware installs are servers. It is most definitively *not* just a hobby system, although you can learn a lot using Slackware.

        If you really insist, you can automate Slackware just as well as any other distro (slapt-get?).

        Someho

      • Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Informative)

        by SmurfDaddy ( 982934 )
        well i can only say that we use Slackware at our company...and guess what we, are in the train control business and yes we handle ppl safety. Train control itself is done with propriatary solutions but sopport servers run slackware. regards SD

      • Re:Marketshare? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by wed128 ( 722152 )
        I don't think you've ever used slackware, it's not as scary as you think. Everything is much easier to configure if you're willing to read the documentation.
        • My first distro was slackware 2.0. My second was Slackware '96. I would have no problem at all installing and running any current slackware. Heck, I could install linux from scratch without Linux From Scratch. No problem at all.
      • Slack 10.2 was distributed in 2 iso's (4 if you wanted source) ... if that's what is called "bare" in linux community today, then we linux users might have to start eating our words when complaining about bloat in other people's software.

        As for its use in production environments, I'd say it's one of the few distros I've tried that is serious competition for OpenBSD in terms of stability and security (and securability). Pat doesn't throw in stuff just because he can or because it looks pretty. He also do
        • Slack 10.2 was distributed in 2 iso's (4 if you wanted source) ... if that's what is called "bare" in linux community today, then we linux users might have to start eating our words when complaining about bloat in other people's software.

          Yeah but 2 CDs worth of Linux distro is worth a hell of a lot more than 2 CDs on Windows, for eg. in Windows you're first 2 install CDs give you Windows (incl. Media Player, Web Browser, IM program) and Office. Any Linux distro will manage to fit media player, web browser,

        • The only problem I've ever had with Slackware is that it didn't always do as good a job at recognizing USB devices as some others.

          My only real problem with Slackware is that Pat won't modify the base vim install to

          set nocompatible

          in the global vimrc. Damn that bugs the shit out of me. I've emailed him and he was very nice about it, he simply said that he does the bare minimum mangling of any package configuration and if I could convince the vim maintainer to make that change that Slackware'd have

      • Re:Marketshare? (Score:2, Informative)

        by frinkacheese ( 790787 ) *
        Bollocks. I use Slackware ina very production environment (Telecomms) where money counts and have never had a single failure or any issues whatsoever accountable to Slackware. Our RedHat servers often break and to fix them you either compile yourself and RedHat usually breaks or you call RedHat and get their official patches (for which you need to pay support). I know what I'd rather be using.

    • Re:Marketshare? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by NosTROLLdamus ( 979044 )
      Every time I use one of those more "modern" distros and something goes wrong or I need to do something even slightly complex there always comes down to some nit-picky problem that's a complete pain in the ass to even deal with.

      It's as if newer distros are so good at hiding things from you that even when you are looking for them you can't find them.

      • I mucked about with a Mandrake system, and those guys seem bent on hiding crud all over the place, and using proprietary gui tools to manage etc, even installs of common open source apps have been reconfigured (I call it obfusticated) and install in non standard directories so that you pretty much have to pay them the annual fee to get access to the mandrake updates.
        All the power to them, but obfusticating other people's free software and then charging money to untangle it for you isn't something I want to
  • Despite the Ubuntus, Suses and Fedoras out there, Slackware is still going strong. Still #11 in http://distrowatch.com/ [distrowatch.com] Will release 11 make it go up a notch or two?

  • RSN? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by User0x45 ( 530857 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @03:27AM (#15546982) Homepage
    I love Slackware. Other then a brief gentoo thing, I've used nothing
    but Slack since putting it on my 486. But shouldn't this topic have
    come out next week/month/year when Slack 11 is *actually* released?

    It'll be ready Real Soon Now. Let's really discuss it then.

    Think it'll have 2.6 as its default? Huh, huh, huh?

    --User0x45
    • I guess it's even exciting to wait. Slackware is THAT exciting... yes I am looking forward as well :)

    • Think it'll have 2.6 as its default?


      Or what about a highmem enabled kernel? At this point, I think it's reasonable for the kernel to support > 1GB RAM out of the box.
    • But shouldn't this topic have come out next week/month/year when Slack 11 is *actually* released?

      Duke Nukem Forever [slashdot.org] has made it to the front page twice [slashdot.org] in the past week. I think slackware deserves at least as much attention.

  • Health Issues (Score:3, Interesting)

    by maelstrom ( 638 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @04:44AM (#15547183) Homepage Journal
    Was there ever a follow up about Pat's health issues? Is he ok now?

    • Re:Health Issues (Score:4, Informative)

      by KwKSilver ( 857599 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @08:14AM (#15547697)
      Other than noting that he is recovered, none that I've noticed. A private person, which I respect.
    • Yes he recovered a while back. Thank god too, because I don't think slackware would be the same without him at the helm.

      • Re:Health Issues (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Lxcom ( 79243 )
        --That may be part of the reason why some people feel reluctant to become too dependent on Slackware. I love it even though I use Apple hardware. I like raw simplicity. I purchased a "PC" just for FreeBSD use and installed Slackware as the secondary, Linux OS. I hope Slackware can survive in the long run.

  • Slackware makes sense. (Score:5, Informative)

    by inflex ( 123318 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @05:51AM (#15547364) Homepage Journal
    I've seen a few comments above from people saying that Slackware makes poor economic sense. I say it can make economic sense in many cases.

    Slackware is a distro, like any other - and just like any other distro you tend to have to be familiar with it in order to get things done efficiently. However, what Slackware does let you get away with is to update packages direct from the developers without having to worry about exploding the "package database" or maintainance system. If you want "fancy" package handling systems you can use the likes of slapt-get or similar. Slackware won't tear you apart or breakdown into a locked up mess if you install something from a "non-slackware-approved" source package.

    The default relative daemon sparseness of Slackware makes it quite easy to keep an eye on, especially if you're trying to keep an eye out for malicious things. The whole start up script system is rather simple enough too (will we get a soft-linked /etc/init.d though?).

    That said, there's a few things which I wish were included by default in slackware (and perhaps will be in the future) but no single distro is perfect. Nearly all distros require some degree of tweaking.

    Best of all though, Slackware is quick to download, quite often you only need the first ISO and you've got yourself a fairly comprehensive system ready to go, for someone who knows what they're doing.

    • Why do you want a "soft-linked /etc/init.d"? Or better yet, why not just build one for yourself (and package it for others)? Slackware doesn't get in your way. I know because I actually rewrote the whole rc script system from scratch several years ago, and it's been working fine in several Slackware versions since then. My rc designs isn't based on symlinks, though.

      • Only because I've had quite a few apps looking for it when installing. No other reason. I do actually manually create a init.d tree anyhow.

        • Ah, you mean applications that are not portable ... or at least the installer isn't portable. BTW, I do have a dummy /etc/init.d tree. It's never used during system startup. It just satisfies the craving by some programmers to make their installer automatically startup some daemon on my system. Yet the daemon will never run unless I set up the rc tree that really runs to do so (and I won't unless I know what the daemon does and have a need for it). BTW, the rc tree that really runs has no symlinks.

    • (will we get a soft-linked /etc/init.d though?).

      Man I hope not!
    • There is a script in the rc.d directory to handle SysV init scripts. I think it's rc.d/rc.sysvinit or something similar. It will parse and cycle through the SysV init directory structure. You just have to create the SysV directory structure manually. You would rarely have to use this, as you could just drop any init script in the rc directory and call it from rc.local or rc.X, where X is the runlevel you want to call the script from.
  • I've always been a fan of slackware, its probably one of the most stable distros out there. It doesn't try to be bleeding edge and thats why hosting/developing on it is a real pleasure. I do wonder though why the 2.6 series kernel sat in testing for so long, then again maybe thats a stupid question, 2.6 isn't really a production kernel HA. I don't really like the way the LAMP stack is setup from the get go, I always ended up recompiling that stuff from source myself but I've done that with most of the distr
    • Personally I don't think it really matters if Slack includes 2.4.x or 2.6.x in stable branch because most Slackers tend to recompile kernel anyway. But when it comes down to it, it has a lot to do with initial boot and installation on legacy hardwares. My experience is that Linux kernel 2.4 just works on every hardware so far while I can't speak same for Linux kernel 2.6 due to quiet a few drops in legacy hardware support.

      I agree on Pat's great work, and he's such a drama queen. :P
      • Yup. First thing i do on a new slack install is compile the newest stable 2.6 kernel.
      • > most Slackers tend to recompile kernel anyway.
        hmm
        I do it only when I miss some important kernel feature.
        Slackware kernel packages are something you can rely upon.
        I'd guess most slackers stick with it.

        Time for a poll, maybe?

  • Yes, RSN, but that's news for Slackware because... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 1369IC ( 935113 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @08:44AM (#15547858)

    ...it doesn't have a PR machine (even a volunteer one) behind it cranking out a steady stream of news. Look at Distrowatch Weekly's upcoming releases and announcements, and you see release roadmaps, schedules, plans, estimates and pre-order information going all the way out to December. Slackware is nowhere on there.

    Even on userlocal.com, supposedly the Slackware community site, and the top items are from February and April (and the latter's about Zenwalk). Other distros start work on their next release before the current one is final, and we hear about it from one release right to the next. Hell, we heard about the Suse and Ubuntu delays for what would seem like forever if we didn't have all that "when is Debian going to release" and "Vista delayed again" coverage to compare it to. So Slack gets a RSN item on Slashdot. Seems small in comparison to all the coverage of alpha flights, umpteen betas, RCs and golden masters some distros get all over the web.

    Personally, I'm happy to be using a distro done by a guy more interested in getting a solid product out the door than getting a good press release out the door.

  • slackware is fun (Score:1, Insightful)

    by kokoko1 ( 833247 )
    Linux is fun and slackware more fun :)

  • Slackware: It just works (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spaceyhackerlady ( 462530 ) on Friday June 16, 2006 @11:07AM (#15548883)

    I too am a fan of Slackware, and am typing this on a Slackware 10.2 system with a 2.6.16.9 SMP kernel (built from the kernel source [kernel.org]), to support one of those new dual-core Pentium 4 gizmos. In other words, it goes like stink...

    Even though I can download the CD images, I always buy a copy of each new release.

    It's not a crime for a Linux system to look like Unix, and if your hardware barfs over a text-based install, you really do have a problem. I like being able to download source (including kernels), build it and it just works. I still have nightmares about the time I tried to help somebody upgrade a kernel on a Fedora Core box. Shudder.

    Slackware isn't a pre-packaged Linux system in a can: open the can and pour it out, ready to go. It's a construction set for building any kind of Linux system you want. And it's all the better for it.

    Thanks, Patrick.

    ...laura

    • I'm with you on that. I've played with Red Hat, Mandrake, and Debian, and I always come back to Slackware. It can be harder to administer but the flexibility is well worth it.

      I would add that if there's something Patrick didn't include that you need, it's easy to add it without problems. (Except GnuCash, but that's more a result of being based on old Gnome libraries, and I've figured out how to make it work reliably.)
    • Slackware is how I got started on Linux in 1996.

      We ordered an infomagic CD set of redhat, slackware and debian CDs. There were the 3 of us friends. We knew NOTHING of unix or linux.

      So we distributed the CDs and tried installing it. I got redhat first and failed. It was too complex.

      Then we switched CDs and tried again. I got debian. I installed it but the dselect packages and interface were way too much. I didnt know how the system worked. It was crazy and confusing at the time.

      So the others gave up and I to
      • When I started reading your post I couldn't remember having submitted it! Actually, I got the (that very?) Infomagic set for myself. I installed all three systems - I believe I still have them stored somewhere - and very quickly settled on Slackware as the best way to actually learn "Linux". The other two required way too much learning-the-cruft before I could get to what was ultimately happening. Slackware just let me get right down to it.

        I heavily modified that installation through the years and still
  • My first real distro was Slackware several years ago. It was a great learning tool for me. It forced me to learn Linux from the command line. No GUIs of any sort to setup devices.

    It was stable, it was simple, it was perfect for a beginner who wanted to really learn Linux.

    Since last year I've switched to FreeBSD. I do love FreeBSD but I didn'at switch because I got tired of Slackware. Right now I have a Windows machine and a FreeBSD machine. Probably next year I'll get a third computer as a dedicated mail se
  • While I'm certainly more technically inclined than a number of people I know, I wouldn't describe myself as much more than a Linux power-user. I'm an Anthropology major with severe dyscalculia and have had little inclination to learn much more than Python, a little Lisp, and HTML + CSS; I'm not the 'typical' programmer geek or system administrator, but I wouldn't say that Slackware is any more difficult to use than SuSE, RedHat or FedoraCore. I originally started using Slackware (3.2) because I was careles
  • slackware 3

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