Slackware, whats good and bad?

[danbo]

I just bought slackware 9.1 from the linux emporium for £12 because i have heard it is one the best distros (especially for learning linux). What is good about it? Does it ship with the latest release of KDE? Is there anything bad about it? Does it ship with all drivers and plugins (e.g. sound, graphics and modem drivers) (i have rh8 and it doesn't ship with sound drivers (well for my sound card anyways))?

Edit: Does it also have full support for nvidia graphics cards?

[kriss]

Slackware is good if you wan't to learn, yes. It can be tough, and quite frustrating, but when you're done, you will have 10 times more experience than you would get on eg. Mandrake.

9.1 Shipped with 2-3 cd's right? Cd 1 was base system, 2 was Xfree, Kde, Gnome et al.

It ships with the Linux kernel, that contains everything you want. Xfree also support nvidia cards, but to get the best performance out of your nvidia card, you could install the proprietary drivers.

A url that will come in use is www.slackware.com/book. Getting a bit outdated, but still it covers the essentials.

Good luck

[danbo]

it ships with 4 disk, 2 install and stuff and the other two are source code apparently (for £12 thats a bargain)

does slackware 9.1 also ship with the proprietary drivers or do i have to get these myself? also does it ship with onboard sound support (drivers for sound blaster live onboard card)?

[kriss]

You have to download the nvidia drivers for yourself, but that's no biggie. The installation is very easy. Only thing you have to do is change a sentance in your xfree config file.

If the kernel supports it, then yes slackware also supports it. Take a look in the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and find and enable your hardware there.

Good luck

[danbo]

/etc/rc.d/rc.modules

i dont have that directory (i am using rh linux 8.0)

[Opnosforatou]

Then check /etc/modules.conf to see if there are any aliases and/or driver settings. [When using Red Hat, Kudzu takes care of modprobing and driver detection.]

/etc/rc.d/rc.modules is the moduleprobing file using by Slackware when booting the system.


Slackware supports the Nvidia drivers from default, but its wise to download and install Nvidia's own drivers, be sure to make some modifications to the X86Config, See the helpfile on the NVidia Website for details.
[This adjustment to the configfile is for all linux distro's]

btw. Slackware is NOT the easiest distro to learn. Better stick to Suse or Mandrake for the easy part.

Soundblaster works fine using Slack, I have various PC's with SB's making lots of noise

[skyfolly]

I installed it once, not too bad, the only draw back is its Chinese support. But I can not stand compiling and installing X-windows and x-free all over again.

[heartsmagic]

Slackware is a perfect distro. It s so table and compiling applications is so easy. You never get a dependicy error with the source codes. Just compile them. I dont agree that Slackware is so hard. Yes it is a little bit harder than RedHat and Mandrake, but not so hard. It is faster and more much stable.

So if you want to get a real Linux just try it.

[Chris H]

IMO Slackware is one of the easiest distros for setting up and fiddling with. Basically cos everything works as it should. Directories are where they should be and files aren't put in obscure places. Everything's there for installing source code and tgz files are a doddle to work with using pkgtool. Some excellent scripts for sorting hardware and other stuff.

Lightweight and using summat like xfce or fluxbox there's little bloat and it goes like the wind.

Tis the mutt's.

[Opnosforatou]

I started using linux with the slackware distro way back., in the days when there were no graphical (X based) setup utils.

When I put a total newbie behind a slackware install most he/she will fail.
Hack, since most are used to the window$ interface.
That's why most ppl who are introduced to linux prefer RH/Fedora, Mandrake or Suse.

I prefer slack as primairy distro for servers and RH/Fedora for clients.
But that's just me.

Directories are where they should be and files aren't put in obscure places.

Hehehhe, been playing with suse ?

Every distro gives his/her own flavour to it, but that's oke...

I still hear ppl say that Slack is the distro for the : Do it yourself. And I can live with that
We can't have to much plug and pray laying around now, can we....

Anyone still playing around with Caldera ??

But I can not stand compiling and installing X-windows and x-free all over again.

Why you making a hobby of that ?
use Slackcheck to download the XWin installer packages...

So if you want to get a real Linux just try it

Yeah, Slack forever