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Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

slackware.com

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Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#31

Post by creshal »

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.

wicd is pretty much obsoleted outside Slackware because of its atrociously slow development pace. connman beats it by far in terms of "easy networking without bloat", and NetworkManager doesn't have noticeable bloat if you have a desktop environment anyway.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#32

Post by morb »

johnchristopher wrote: post #21
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 ?

slackpkg update && slackpkg upgrade-all. See http://slackpkg.org/documentation.html. slackpkg is a part of Slackware, installed by default. If you really like apt, you can use slapt-get (and slapt-src) http://software.jaos.org/.

After answering this f. question with the same f. answer for literally 10 years, I'm starting to feel that some kind of re-branding would be a good thing for Slackware. It doesn't matter what Slackware is, it matters what people think it is. And what they think it is isn't really what it is. It's a reasonable distro.

Anyways, I recommend you give it a shot. See the README files, and http://docs.slackware.com/. And have fun.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#33

Post by adrusi »

bitwize wrote: post #29
executesorder66 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just wish slack had something comparable to mkinitcpio that arch has, which makes it much easier to set up an initial ramdisk for an encrypted root partition.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#34

Post by unixhero »

I really want the best for Slackware. I used to be a slacker 1996-2006 and grinded my Linux teeth on it. It escapes me why they don't want to innovate at all with a proper modern package manager. Also they need to remake their website and with that create a decent forum and a decent wiki just like Arch has perfectly done.

Nowadays I don't care at all about knowing every corner of my system. I have applications to manage, languages to learn, money to make and a life to live - so I lazily run Ubuntu on everything.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#35

Post by morb »

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 used Arch for 8 months sometime in 2010. And I switched my main computer to Arch just yesterday, just to give it a shot, to see a different approach, to use a systemd-based system, to re-learn some stuff, etc etc. Basically to experiment.

IMO Slackware is definitely easier to install, more reasonable defaults, less fiddling with the system post-install. For me it's basically aiming slapt-src (something like yaourt) to https://slackbuilds.org/ (something like AUR, but the scripts are reviewed and tested by site admins) and letting stuff compile & install (with a _lot_ less interaction required than AUR stuff).

Wait for a 14.2 to be released and then give it a shot. See the readme files and http://docs.slackware.com/. I hope you like it.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#36

Post by pjmlp »

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.

It was my very first one, Slackware 2 with kernel 1.0.9.

I still remember the main feature being announced was the early support for elf format.

Nowadays after a decade of jumping between OSes, I just settled on Windows, for better or worse, it does better what I need for my work (please don't start a flame war on this).

However I do owe a lot to Slackware, as before it my only access to UNIX were expensive Xenix, Aix and DG/UX workstations at the university.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#37

Post by morb »

ktRolster wrote: post #2

I don't see systemd in there anywhere.

Because you weren't supposed to see it there. Because it was never announced. Because it was never planned to be in there.

It might happen in the future, but as of now Slackware (and Gentoo) are those distros that don't have systemd. Some people might like it for that.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#38

Post by bitwize »

adrusi wrote: post #33
bitwize wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just wish slack had something comparable to mkinitcpio that arch has, which makes it much easier to set up an initial ramdisk for an encrypted root partition.

Well there is mkinitrd...

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#39

Post by baldfat »

creshal wrote: post #30
baldfat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you post a German blog post about something you have never done. I now have gone full on salt.

Once again their is nothing wrong with RPM and this anti-RPM stuff needs to just die. Linus uses Fedora and if anyone would flip out if something was bad technology Linus would, but instead people who just heard a cool RPM Dependency Hell still continue this 10+ year old issue over and over again without knowing anything technical about why it was an issue (For a short period of time) and how it was fixed.

Re: Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1

#40

Post by creshal »

baldfat wrote: post #39
creshal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you post a German blog post about something you have never done. I now have gone full on salt. Once again their is nothing wrong with RPM and this anti-RPM stuff needs to just die. Linus uses Fedora and if anyone would flip out if something was bad technology Linus would, but instead people who just heard a cool RPM Dependency Hell still continue this 10+ year old issue over and over again without knowing anything…

> So you post a German blog post

I'm sorry, I didn't know Germans weren't allowed to have opinions.

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