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Slackware Live Edition

alien.slackbook.org

41–50 of 61 posts

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It felt too restrictive to me. Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs.

> Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces. > One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs. Y…

You can also make rsyslog work on windows, doesn't mean it's supported or encouraged..

people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" but in the end the bad bits are orthogonal to it's design and 'bypassing' them or hacking around them should not be encouraged- it should be able to be done by default.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Ah, you're right it was slapt-get that I used; it convinced me that apt-get was really good, part of the reason I moved despite up to then being more familiar with compiling my own (yay for checkinstall) or using yum.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

sbotools is the magic dep mgr for slackbuilds

http://dawnrazor.net/sbotools/

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#44
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces. > One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs. Y…

You can also make rsyslog work on windows, doesn't mean it's supported or encouraged.. people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" but in the end the bad bits are orthogonal to it's design and 'bypassing' them or hacking around them should not be encouraged- it should be able to be done by default.

> people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits"

Where in my comment did I imply that the journal was "bad"? The journal is awesome. But if you have some workflow designed around syslog, such as a log analyzer or statistics package that you don't want to tweak, text logging still works just fine.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It felt too restrictive to me. Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs.

> Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces. > One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs. Y…

systemd only has extensive documentation if you count the source code itself. otherwise, most people are left guessing for things above a "systemctl restart"

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#46
post #12
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.

Slackware only took me 8 installs vs 15 for Arch.

Gentoo only took me 2 installs vs. 8 for Slack

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#47
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…

What do you think dependency management would bring to slackware?

I remember, back in 2001 or so, how bad package management was.

yum didn't exist, apt-get was not widely deployed. You were stuck with rpm and dpkg. You should spend a few days forcing yourself to just use those two commands and see how much you hate life.

I used to install systems (up to Mandrake 6.1) via RPM, then give up on package management entirely, in order to compile Enlightenment and GNOME (and much of rawhide!) from source. Eventually, I gave up on installing binaries altogether on these systems, because it was easier to manage upgrades from source.

Now, as a lazy old man, I've switched to gentoo ebuilds, which are glorified scripts that bring just enough dependency management to not get in the way.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces. > One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs. Y…

systemd only has extensive documentation if you count the source code itself. otherwise, most people are left guessing for things above a "systemctl restart"

> systemd only has extensive documentation if you count the source code itself

...and the manpages for every tool, every config file, built-in units, and every type of unit, plus the extensive documents linked from https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/ , including a 21-part series of articles targeted at system administrators, a dozen more pages targeted at users and administrators about specific topics, several dozen documents for developers, a dozen videos...

There are many criticisms you could reasonably throw at systemd, but "not well documented" certainly doesn't seem like one of them.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#49

Does Slackware have notable practical applications?

I run an entire data center of Slackware Linux on Dell servers. My entire EMail and Web hosting platform is Slackware. I have ~30 Slackware Linux boxes. My installs are very stripped down. I.E. I don't install any of the KDE, Gnome or X stuff. I also remove the games and many of the stock applications that ship with Slackware.

I hate Ubuntu, RedHat, etc... Everytime I use them, I feel like I'm fighting the GUI. Ubuntu, for example, I could never figure out how to change the IP address without using the KDE GUI. On Slackware it's as easy as editing /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf

I resist Ubuntu, RedHat, etc... because it forces you to become familiar with that distro's way of doing things. And there in lies the rub. As more and more distributions of Linux come about, I see a fragmented Linux world.

So, in short, I guess you could say I stuck with what I learned and know from years back. I know that at start up, the stuff inside /etc/rc.d/inet1.conf are parsed and fed to ifconfig for static IPs.

my 2 cents...

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#50
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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