Slackware 12.0 Released 286
Matt writes "Straight from our good friend and colleague in the fight for quality distributions, Mr. Patrick Volkerding, comes a brand-new and eagerly-awaited release of Slackware, version 12. HAL automount, KDE 3.5.7 and XFCE 4.4.1, Xorg 7.2, 2.6 kernels as far as the eye can see, oodles of updated applications and utilities, and hardware support for just about anything under the sun. Get it here. Enjoy! I know I will."
Am I the only one? (Score:3, Insightful)
Slackware... ironic that it's too much effort (Score:2, Insightful)
if it still lacks a ports or packaging system that allows easy to update packages and conflict resolution, it's not worth the time.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh well.
Archives, you know we all can get at em'. You do understand there are tools to use your debby stuff elsewhere deb2targz being just one. What's a kernel structure and why just 2? We tend to roll our own kernels mostly.
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you're probably not the only one. However, that opinion is the opposite as that of Jason1729 below, who states he gave it up due to too many updates and fixes, and he's probably not the only one to feel that way either. Between the two, Patrick is probably running at pretty much the right speed:
From: Patrick J. Volkerding (bf703@cleveland.Freenet.Edu)
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Slackware Linux 1.00
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Date: 1993-07-16 17:21:20 PST
The Slackware Linux distribution (v. 1.00) is now available for
anonymous FTP.....
12 versions in 14 years, plus revisions between. All under his guidance. Most would have abandoned the effort sooner and with fewer releases, and probably due to doing so many in that time. Hell, most would have given up rather than rewrite it all in order to switch libraries.
Slack Vs. Other Distro (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Slak Rules (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I meant to say 'terminal' several times in this post. Do you see a theme here? Welcome to Linux. (If this is your first Linux distro, try Slack, *then* try the others. You'll be back.)
Re:Slack Vs. Other Distro (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not ideal for servers (Score:4, Insightful)
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=8G bs=1048576 count=8192
I dare you to tell me that command failed on your system, with space remaining on your partition containing
Re:Slak Rules (Score:2, Insightful)
Or very educational, depending on just how stubborn you are. *wink*
Ah, Slackware. (Score:2, Insightful)
Slackware is great for many things - single-purpose machines, getting that old P1 running, etc. It has a few major flaws that make it unusable in businessland:
1: too #$%) hard for a new admin. It requires a lot of arcane skills to get set up properly - skills that don't come cheap, and are hard to find in the marketplace.
2: No dependency management. Debian- and RH-based distros have had dependency tracking for ages, and the capabilities of up2date, yum, and apt-get are far in advance of what you can do with any slackware package management system. Plus, there is literally nothing in Slackware that matches RHN.
3: Proprietary software. Although with enough hacking, you can get a lot of it to run on Slack, the provider will not give you any support. And without that, you're hosed. We've ended up using RHEL on a Websense box because they would not recognize a bug that showed up in CentOS. You know what? The bug went away on RHEL.
Given all that, I still like Slackware as a Swiss Army knife-type distro that I can use for things where I don't have to maintain it too much. It runs on just about anything, and can be slimmed down far further than any other distro. I just can't justify businesswise the amount of labor it takes to maintain, when we are short on skilled *nix admins anyway.
Re:Once you go Slack ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slak Rules (Score:2, Insightful)
Please reply that this was an elegant piss take, please