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Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

slackware.com

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Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#21

Post by johnchristopher »

orthecreedence wrote: post #16

Slackware is the muscle car of linux distros. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, it's fast and solid. Plus if you can master Slack, you can waltz into any other distro and not break a sweat. I've run it on desktops/servers since version 8 and love it. People knock it for not having a "real" package manager, but if you like the control of compiling from source then this doesn't really matter (and you always h…

Is there an equivalent to apt-get update && upgrade or do you need to track down each source/binary to keep things secured ?

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#22

Post by keithpeter »

massysett wrote: post #19
DeepYogurt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the oldest. SLS predates slackware (as do a few others iirc) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System Slack was awesome back in the day, but the the philosophy as being "as unix like as possible" prevented it evolving and adding nice things like package managers. Using slackware is a good exercise, but I'd never use it for an application I care about.

This is simply false. Slackware has a package manager. It just does not resolve dependencies. It has also evolved. The Slackware developers have worked on packages such as wicd, which makes networking easy without dependency bloat; other distros reap the benefits of it too.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/wicd-re...

Wicd is proving difficult for 14.2. I must admit that I prefer network-manager because of the convenience of the modem-manager when using a usb mobile Internet dongle.

I take the general point you are making. I'm an end user of Slackware. I think that anyone who has ever successfully installed Windows on a laptop would cope with a Slackware install fine if they read the docs on the DVD. Slackpkg makes updates reasonably easy.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#23

Post by teekert »

executesorder66 wrote: post #20
orthecreedence wrote: post #16

Slackware is the muscle car of linux distros. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, it's fast and solid. Plus if you can master Slack, you can waltz into any other distro and not break a sweat. I've run it on desktops/servers since version 8 and love it. People knock it for not having a "real" package manager, but if you like the control of compiling from source then this doesn't really matter (and you always h…

How does the difficulty of installing Slackware compare to Arch or Gentoo? I've only ever installed and used Arch.

I found it to be more difficult than Arch, mainly due to the ease of Pacman and the AUR (using Yaourt), other than that it felt very much the same (note my Slack experience is form years ago.) Gentoo was much harder to setup but easier to keep up to date. I still have warm feelings for Gentoo but I also landed on Arch. And, as I grow older, I like to configuration work Ubuntu does for you...

In my time I'd install Dropline Gnome on Slackware and had a nice up tot date fancy looking desktop on Slackware in about 30 min. I see that Dropline Gnome still exists [0], It can make Slack nice looking and up-to-date quite easily (although they are 2-3 versions behind, they used to be more bleeding edge than anything).

[0] http://www.droplinegnome.org/

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#24

Post by keithpeter »

ihsw wrote: post #15
babuskov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

swaret, slapt-get, etc. listed in Unofficial Tools section on that page do exactly as you wrote. However, I find that people who choose Slackware usually like to compile stuff on their own. It can be a painful experience with some programs that have narrow version compatibility ranges for some libraries. For example, I recall building Inkscape and Workrave to be a nightmare because you had to try 5-10 versions of som…

I remember this, trying to install various dependencies. It was a complete nightmare.

I'm a lazy end user.

AlienBob has binaries of his slackbuilds for download and the Microlinux Desktop (Nicholas Kovacks) provides a range of binary builds for a nice xfce4 desktop. 14.2: microlinux builds are on hold a bit until 14.2 gets more stable.

There is also the slackonly binaries that are built from the slackbuild scripts at slackbuilds.org. Not sure how maintained slackonly is but many of the 14.1 builds work fine.

You don't have to compile a lot unless you want special options or if you have trust issues about binaries.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#27

Post by bitwize »

Tomte wrote: post #4
ktRolster wrote: post #2

I don't see systemd in there anywhere.

Patrick Volkerding is hesitant about systemd, but not openly hostile, so he has decided to stay away from it for now, but hasn't ruled it out for the future. People who are set against systemd should probably better look elsewhere (although their options are pretty limited).

Alternatives include CRUX (whose maintainer's systemd stance is "over my dead body :)"), Void Linux (the only distro I know of to adopt systemd by default and then migrate away from it; currently it uses runit with systemd as an option), and Alpine.

I'm sticking with Slack for the time being, but I've got my eye out for alternatives should the worst happen.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#28

Post by baldfat »

warrenmar wrote: post #3

For those of you that don't know about Slackware. Slackware is the oldest distro and it is still plenty alive today. When to setup linux on my computer in the early days with other distros (red hat/suse/etc), this would eventually crap up (rpm hell) and give me something unusable. Using Slackware forces you understand how everything works in a linux distro. This lets you fix your own problems.

I know you didn't mean to bring this up as a point against rpm but my ALL TIME MOST HATED PHASE is rpm hell. I still hear people say that they won't use RPM based systems because of RPM Hell which makes me inside want to jump through the screen and shake them and say "Have you ever built a single package?! Because if you ever have you would know this is 100% crap for over 10 YEARS!"

Sure there was a time frame when there was an issue with dependency and it was fixed but everyone treated it like it still was an issue 5+ years later.

Sorry rant over but I just want people to know that RPM issue was just an issue in the early 2000s and Redhat made --redhatprovides and --redhatrequires command line options that if people used them would fix the issues at the time till things got changed with libraries.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#29

Post by bitwize »

executesorder66 wrote: post #20
orthecreedence wrote: post #16

Slackware is the muscle car of linux distros. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, it's fast and solid. Plus if you can master Slack, you can waltz into any other distro and not break a sweat. I've run it on desktops/servers since version 8 and love it. People knock it for not having a "real" package manager, but if you like the control of compiling from source then this doesn't really matter (and you always h…

How does the difficulty of installing Slackware compare to Arch or Gentoo? I've only ever installed and used Arch.

Slightly easier than Arch.

Just install everything when it asks you to. You can ignore the kdei disk set if you speak English (and have no plans to run KDE in, say, Urdu), and the kde disk set if you do not need KDE altogether.

Since there is no dependency resolution, when you install from SlackBuilds.org (Slackware's AUR, more or less), you have to install each package's dependencies as well. These are listed in the package info file and tools like sbopkg let you install many packages at a go through a queueing system, so this is not as bad as it sounds.

The benefit of this is a completely user-configurable system, and a lack of errors when you hosed the dependency resolver since there's no resolver to hose. :)

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#30

Post by creshal »

baldfat wrote: post #28
warrenmar wrote: post #3

For those of you that don't know about Slackware. Slackware is the oldest distro and it is still plenty alive today. When to setup linux on my computer in the early days with other distros (red hat/suse/etc), this would eventually crap up (rpm hell) and give me something unusable. Using Slackware forces you understand how everything works in a linux distro. This lets you fix your own problems.

I know you didn't mean to bring this up as a point against rpm but my ALL TIME MOST HATED PHASE is rpm hell. I still hear people say that they won't use RPM based systems because of RPM Hell which makes me inside want to jump through the screen and shake them and say "Have you ever built a single package?! Because if you ever have you would know this is 100% crap for over 10 YEARS!" Sure there was a time frame when t…

RPM seems hell enough in current versions: https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a81c11aa

Disclaimer, I've never worked with it, I don't know how accurate the description is.

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