An Old Hacker Slaps Up Slackware 240
cdlu writes "What do you get when you mix an old hacker with an old distribution? A good old review of the recently released Slackware 10.2." Joe Barr over at Linux.com (owned by the same company as Slashdot) lays down his thoughts on everything from the install to reliability and user loyalty.
It's here (Score:5, Informative)
And the maintainer is fantastic. I deal with him often.
Re:Seems like a basic review of a basic Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Where does this review say it's not for the desktop? It says it's not for everyone, which I certainly agree. But it makes a great desktop OS for its very niche userbase.
Re:It's here (Score:3, Informative)
That's a good question. I'm fond of both distros :-)
The way I see it, UbuntuPPC gives that nice, Ubuntu/Debian feel on PPC platforms. Slackintosh gives that nice, Slackware feel on PPC platforms.
A colleague of mine has even ported GNOME for Slackintosh/PPC: http://gsb.freerock.org/download/ports/ [freerock.org]
Re:Seems like a basic review of a basic Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I like Slackware's minimalist approach, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Seems like a basic review of a basic Linux (Score:1, Informative)
After having used/tried several distros (including infamous Ubuntu; liked LFS, Gentoo and Debian), I keep coming back to Slackware - has always worked for me best. It just feels simple and reliable; I am not sure why though (I am not a Unix geek). Somehow it gives me this feeling of freedom I do not have when I use other distros (including Gentoo): this is the only distro (other than LFS) where I do not feel guilty when I happen to compile some app from the stock source tarball instead of using the distro-specific package.
Maybe, I just like Unix in its more or less basic form, as opposed to behemoths (OS X, Ubuntu, Suse) people build on top of it. Slackware, I think, is as basic as it gets, and that's what makes it perfect.
You want a real review here you go! (Score:1, Informative)
Given that Gnome is not on the package list some issues with wxWidgets and gtk2.6 will arise if you want to install things like Audacity. There are slackpacks for audacity but you need to make sure you pre install and ldconfig wxWidgets.
The multimedia interface to alsa can become problematic with KDE 3.4 as the kcontrol (Control Centre) has a habit of messing with dev/midi too much. You need to restart it every time you launch KDE. No config file that I can find lets you set it to run dev/midi at launch. A minor inconvience at best.
There is a problem with KRecord, it wants to do the microsoft trick and lable .wav with its own file tag and gets the shits when you try to save .wav. So good recording software is best served by installing jack, and Rosegarden which are not included in the extra packages. Apart from that OpenOffice2 will not install as it is only available in packaged form that must have allsorts of deps. A slackware package for the latest and greatest things like OpenOffice and Audacity will take some time, but you can bet it will happen and when it does it will rock.
Back to multimedia Rosegarden4 takes a long time to compile, but is well worth the effort!, on Slackware it is much more reliable than on any Debian varient I have tried, kudos to the Rosegarden guys!
Apart from the lack of some of the GTK stuff that is necessary for alot of newer releases Slackware is still the most stable and most configureable distro out there. If you have trouble with things like your scroll mouse you just pico etc/X11/xorg.conf and edit it and bingo you are in mouse wheel heaven. Leaving the printer config in your browser makes the config alot more reliable than any wacky gui I have used with distros like RedFat or Mandork, just make sure you have cups going at boot and go to localhost:631 and if you cant follow the instructions then ask Eric Raymond about how he had trouble with it...just kidding.
In summmary if you really want a Linux experience with speed and reliability Slackware is still the best way to go.
Eric Reesor X the ratfynk