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Slackware Live Edition

alien.slackbook.org

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Re: Slackware Live Edition

#31

Post by rvern »

komaromy wrote: post #13
rifung wrote: post #11

How does Slackware compare to ArchLinux? They both seem to be very barebones and force you to learn more about Linux, but ArchLinux seems much more popular from what I gather.

The Arch docs are superior (best that I've encountered in the Linux world) but Slackware is worth it to me to stay away from systemd.

I disagree. For every Fedora release, the Documentation Project prepares a new version of the System Administrator's Guide[1] and of five other high-quality manuals. These manuals are usually up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive, and since they are maintained in the DocBook format (which is very superior to wikimarkup for technical documents), they can be converted into HTML (for the version on docs.fedoraproject.org), PDF (for printing or viewing in a PDF reader) and EPUB (so I can put the guides on a e-reader and read them comfortably). The documentation is even translated in multiple languages.

Debian has documentation of similar quality, with the Debian Reference[2] and the Debian Administrator's Handbook[3], which is more up-to-date. Also in DocBook, and all I said about the Fedora documentation applies as well.

This will not be a popular opinion, but I don't think Arch Linux's documentation compares to Debian's and Fedora's.

[1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/System_A... [2]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ [3]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#32

Post by jqm »

jqm wrote: post #3

Eric Hameleers is a awesome. As a Slackware user his blogs and tips have been helping me for years. "we are well equipped to keep systemd out of our distro for a while" Win! This certainly isn't the first live Slackware though. Slax is how I first came to really experiment with Linux internals. It was a cool little tiny distro on a live USB. I was able to take stuff apart and build my own kernel etc without borking m…

Here is an additional mirror. Apparently Eric is a bit concerned about potential overload on his main server.

http://mirrors.edgeorbis.com/distros/slackware-live/

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#33

Post by deckard1 »

coherentpony wrote: post #14
komaromy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Arch docs are superior (best that I've encountered in the Linux world) but Slackware is worth it to me to stay away from systemd.

Out of curiosity, why don't you like systemd?

it's like the face-hugger, from Alien(s). Once it gets into your distro, it impregnates it with a horror monster. An init should not be micromanaging every aspect of my system. I'm on arch now, but my next Linux will not have systemd or journald.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#34

Post by Roboprog »

kozukumi wrote: post #23

Slackware was my first experience with Linux. So long ago now, I am 31 now but was 12 when I was first shown Linux and I was hooked from there. Like most I have been around the block with many different Linux distros over the years, even a scary few years doing stage 1 Gentoo. I will always be fond of Slack though. Patrick and his work will always have a very special place in my life, I do not doubt I would have gone…

I was "a bit" older when I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95. I was working doing C development on a number of *nix and other platforms (most of which are gone now), and needed something better for working from home than a 16 bit compiler on MS-DOS.

Slackware felt MUCH more powerful than the SCO x86 OS we had at work, and having a desktop GUI was just gravy, rather than worrying about anything being "ready for the desktop".

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#35

Post by Roboprog »

Roboprog wrote: post #34
kozukumi wrote: post #23

Slackware was my first experience with Linux. So long ago now, I am 31 now but was 12 when I was first shown Linux and I was hooked from there. Like most I have been around the block with many different Linux distros over the years, even a scary few years doing stage 1 Gentoo. I will always be fond of Slack though. Patrick and his work will always have a very special place in my life, I do not doubt I would have gone…

I was "a bit" older when I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95. I was working doing C development on a number of *nix and other platforms (most of which are gone now), and needed something better for working from home than a 16 bit compiler on MS-DOS. Slackware felt MUCH more powerful than the SCO x86 OS we had at work, and having a desktop GUI was just gravy, rather than worrying about anything being "ready fo…

Delicious irony 20 years later: the mobile era. Apple, yet again, makes really good devices. However, the most numerous devices are now Linux/Android. Now we have to ask "Is Microsoft ready for mobile", but it's too late, and the answer is "nobody cares".

God, it feels so good to watch Linux kick the crap out of MS, after all those years of putting up with their slow/buggy OS's and development torment-ware.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#36

Post by pbhjpbhj »

systems wrote: post #29

i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until tha…

I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something - maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online consistently).

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#37

Post by Elhana »

coherentpony wrote: post #14
komaromy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Arch docs are superior (best that I've encountered in the Linux world) but Slackware is worth it to me to stay away from systemd.

Out of curiosity, why don't you like systemd?

Let's say we have a service, that needs network to be up and running. network.target won't work on boot, you start googling and find network-online.target that should do the trick, but it doesn't. Then you spend half an hour trying to figure out how to make it wait for dhcp config to finish for /etc/network/interfaces. In the end, either find that you need to enable some obscure service that waits for it and makes network-online.target actually work and enable it or you copy-paste it from somewhere on the internet and it is a shell script anyway. I'm not sure how you can you depend on network-online.target and be sure this network waiting services are properly enabled.

With sysvinit you'd usually just put it on S99 and be done with it in most cases.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#38

Post by morb »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #36
systems wrote: post #29

i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until tha…

I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something - maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online consistently).

slackpkg doesn't do dependencies.

slapt-get (http://software.jaos.org/) does, but it needs repo that has dependency metadata. Official repos don't have it. If a repository doesn't have dependency metadata then slapt-get doesn't resolve deps for that set of packages.

Some other repos (AlienBob's for instance) do have dependency metadata, which assume that you did a full Slackware install, so only dependencies that aren't part of Slackware are listed.

There is also slapt-src (same URL) that automates installing stuff from http://slackbuilds.org/, and it resolves dependencies. It's not fullproof, but is good enough (for me, at least).

There's a new repo on http://slackonly.com/ which offers binary packages built from scripts on slackbuilds, and it looks like it has dependency metadata. I can't vouch for the quality of those packages, I haven't used it yet.

UPDATE: After skimming through PACKAGES.TXT for a few minutes, I'm not confident that slackonly repo has all dep. metadata correct, but hopefully they'll get better with it soon.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#39

Post by darkr »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #36
systems wrote: post #29

i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until tha…

I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something - maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online consistently).

> automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment;

It's called DKMS, a Dell project originally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Suppor...

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#40

Post by [deleted] »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #36
systems wrote: post #29

i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until tha…

I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something - maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online consistently).

[deleted]
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