Slackware

[Matthew T.]

I finally got bored with Debian Stable and installed Slackware 13.37
about a week back. I'm liking it so far and have learned a little more
about Linux while configuring it. First time I ever had to run
mkinitrd, set up CUPS, or use xsane. I basically have XFCE set up the
way I want to with the exception of gwibber. The prospect of
installing all of those dependencies is daunting.

Slackware reminds me of Arch with (a lot) fewer updates and no pacman.
It's nice that Slack finally detects my mouse's scroll wheel
automatically.

What are everyone else's thoughts on Slack?

[Cosmo Manning]

Ahh Slackware, it was my first distro. Downloaded over a 36.6k dial-up it was like 15 3.5in floppy disks that had to be raw written under msdos… I had one of those Cyrix 486's that seriously would *only* stay booted for more than an hour when running a Linux kernel, 3.11 would not run more than a few hours. The mere thought of it makes me nostalgic…
Kept it on a box or two ever since. Most seem put off by curses based installers, but in my experience they seem to work as correctly and typically faster than the GUIs. I like to use slackware on older boxes since it has a really low overhead on resources but consider it about tied with debian.

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[Avleen Vig]

+1, also my first distro before I flipped to using BSD for several years.
I haven't used it in over 12 years but it definitely has a place in my heart :-)
It definitely it a good way to have to learn more about linux basics
and internals.

[Don Faulkner]

Slackware was my second distro, after SLS 1.01. Boy, was it a big improvement. :)

I remember having to learn how to configure absolutely everything. You could be fairly confident that your keyboard would work, and your disks would be recognized, but past that it was a process of much trial and error, and much reading, to get the rest of the system up an running. Remember configuring X to properly talk to your CRT monitor with that odd spreadsheet that needed arcane information about your monitor, and if you got it wrong there was a very real risk of blowing up your monitor? Remember NEEDING to recompile the kernel because there were no modules yet, and you had to get all the right drivers built in to support your particular hardware? How do you configure the network again?

I think that we owe SLS, Slackware, and the other early distros a debt of gratitude. Without that early introduction with all the work, I certainly wouldn't know as much about the internals of Linux as I do. I love Ubuntu and the other Debian distros today (and the Redhat world's not bad either), but folks who cut their teeth on Ubuntu or CentOS just don't come away with the same kind of knowledge. If you're trying to learn Linux as a sysadmin, a distro that makes you do some work is definitely the right place to start.

[Matthew T.]

13.37 is my first real go-round with with Slackware. I remember that
when I would (briefly) install Slack a few years ago, my mouse wheel
wouldn't work. I'm happy to say that its hardware detection has
drastically improved since then.

The only real problem I encountered was that my monitor was giving me
an over-frequency message on first boot. I chose a mirror and ran
'slackpkg upgrade-all' which installed a new kernel and firmware
support packages - problem solved. (I had chosen the 'current' mirror
instead of '13.37' out of ignorance. I was able to safely revert.)
Hplip couldn't find the drivers for my all-in-one printer but cups and
xsane work with it. Other problems were self induced, like installing
nvidia-kernel and nvidia-driver after having compiled them using a
kernel other than the one I was running right then.

I wish Patrick would push out security updates faster but I grabbed
the current version of Firefox from the Salix sources. Works fine so
far.