7 ms·

Slackware Live Edition

71 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

rifung 11y ago
How does Slackware compare to ArchLinux? They both seem to be very barebones and force you to learn more about Linux, but ArchLinux seems much more popular from what I gather.
- EC1 11y ago
  Slackware only took me 8 installs vs 15 for Arch.
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    Gentoo only took me 2 installs vs. 8 for Slack
- komaromy 11y ago
  The Arch docs are superior (best that I've encountered in the Linux world) but Slackware is worth it to me to stay away from systemd.
  - coherentpony 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, why don't you like systemd?
    - komaromy 11y ago
      It felt too restrictive to me. Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs.
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces. > One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs. You can keep a syslog implementation like rsyslog installed, and you'll continue to have text logs too. And journalctl outputs plain text.
        dijit 11y ago
        You can also make rsyslog work on windows, doesn't mean it's supported or encouraged.. people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" but in the end the bad bits are orthogonal to it's design and 'bypassing' them or hacking around them should not be encouraged- it should be able to be done by default.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" Where in my comment did I imply that the journal was "bad"? The journal is awesome. But if you have some workflow designed around syslog, such as a log analyzer or statistics package that you don't want to tweak, text logging still works just fine.
        thiagowfx 11y ago
        "bad" is just a metaphor in this context
        anonbanker 11y ago
        systemd only has extensive documentation if you count the source code itself. otherwise, most people are left guessing for things above a "systemctl restart"
    - toast0 11y ago
      I recently put together a systemd system, here's a list of grievances compared to the previous setup: On boot, systems waits for two minutes or so for dhcp on an Ethernet interface with no cable, and it's not cancelable if I happen to be at the console On shutdown, it turns off swap before shutting down daemons; not an issue for my system because I don't expect swapping, but in what world does this make sense? Closing the lid sleeps the computer without configuration; some people might find this to be a good thing, but in my experience in the last 15 years, Linux only slept on lid closure if i was running software to handle that (acpid and/or something from a desktop environment), if i have apache running on an old laptop with no GUI, i expect it to stay on. (yes, there's a config, but its still annoying)
    - deckard1 11y ago
      it's like the face-hugger, from Alien(s). Once it gets into your distro, it impregnates it with a horror monster. An init should not be micromanaging every aspect of my system. I'm on arch now, but my next Linux will not have systemd or journald.
    - Elhana 11y ago
      Let's say we have a service, that needs network to be up and running. network.target won't work on boot, you start googling and find network-online.target that should do the trick, but it doesn't. Then you spend half an hour trying to figure out how to make it wait for dhcp config to finish for /etc/network/interfaces. In the end, either find that you need to enable some obscure service that waits for it and makes network-online.target actually work and enable it or you copy-paste it from somewhere on the internet and it is a shell script anyway. I'm not sure how you can you depend on network-online.target and be sure this network waiting services are properly enabled. With sysvinit you'd usually just put it on S99 and be done with it in most cases.
  - rvern 11y ago
    I disagree. For every Fedora release, the Documentation Project prepares a new version of the System Administrator's Guide[1] and of five other high-quality manuals. These manuals are usually up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive, and since they are maintained in the DocBook format (which is very superior to wikimarkup for technical documents), they can be converted into HTML (for the version on docs.fedoraproject.org), PDF (for printing or viewing in a PDF reader) and EPUB (so I can put the guides on a e-reader and read them comfortably). The documentation is even translated in multiple languages. Debian has documentation of similar quality, with the Debian Reference[2] and the Debian Administrator's Handbook[3], which is more up-to-date. Also in DocBook, and all I said about the Fedora documentation applies as well. This will not be a popular opinion, but I don't think Arch Linux's documentation compares to Debian's and Fedora's. [1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/System_Administrators_Guide/index.html https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/System_A... [2]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ [3]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/ https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Arch isn't at all bare bones, that's more of an outdated humblebrag than anything else. Actually, neither is Slackware. I find sbopkg and SlackBuilds.org to be better than yaourt and AUR. sbopkg's UI is just top notch (ncurses-based). Slackware uses sysvinit with flat rc scripts as opposed to the traditional System V setup of numbered symlink farms. Much cleaner. Arch uses systemd. Slackware's pkgtools are much more minimalistic than pacman. They're shell functions that manage local tarballs. In addition, you have slackpkg for fetching remote updates. Slackware actually double-functions as both a rolling and stable release distribution. You can either set slackpkg to track -current, which is often bleeding edge yet surprisingly robust, or stick to official versions like 14.1. Slackware's installer and setup utilities are all ncurses-driven rather than pure CLI as in Arch. I actually find them much more capable. The only pure CLI part of installing Slackware is disk partitioning, the rest is a highly detailed TUI menu installer (similar to FreeBSD if you've tried that). Slackware has a very strict devotion to not patching upstream packages at all, with exceptions only in the most critical circumstances. This means that you're pretty much always using vanilla Linux userland as it is, and so if there's bugs, you report to upstream rather than to the distribution tracker. If you're a developer, this is great. Slackware's package management can alternate between binary and source-based. As such, I'd recommend Slack. It's venerable and rock solid.
- massysett 11y ago
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_compared_to_other_distributions https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_compared_to_other_...
- delcaran 11y ago
  I've been using Arch for two years before going back to Slackware. It was a good run, Arch is fun and easy to use and everything works very, very well. On the same laptop is even faster than Slackware (I did not run any test, it was just my perception after a fresh install... maybe because Arch has way less packages...). BUT Arch brokes often. Even when I look the news on the official website or search the forums for issues with recent updates, even when I check that everything is ok accordin to the (awesome, really awesome) docs, Arch brokes something. I grew reluctant to run "pacman -Syu". Now with Slackware I am 100% sure that my system will always work after every update, and if it doesn't work is because a simple new dependency that I can install in a couple of minutes if I want, or I simply keep the already installed package without any issues whatsoever.
theseatoms 11y ago
Does Slackware have notable practical applications?
- snw 11y ago
  it's a nice linux distribution. The packages are usually very stable and well tested. It does the job on the desktop and on the server. In that sense it is practical, not sure if "notable" as there are many other more popular distributions these days.
- gruturo 11y ago
  I ran it for many years (and still do on a couple smaller machines). It has been exceptionally stable and thankfully devoid of "surprises" (using the word in its worst possible connotation). Things stay exactly as you leave them, it's exceptionally rare for any package to have been "customized" and nothing happens in the system unless you explicitly asked for it / made it happen. This used to be true for the initial setup too, which made it a bit scary to newbies - but since quite a few years that's become a painless experience. Its learning potential is very large. As someone once wrote: Study RedHat, you will have learned RedHat Study SuSE, you will have learned SuSE Study Slackware, you will have learned Unix.
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    As someone who should learn more Unix, this is great to know. Thanks.
- jqm 11y ago
  It's simple so it's somewhat easy to take apart and re-purpose. I was able to use it to build an internet enabled kiosk for instance without a lot of extra weight. It's super stable also so it make a good server. Lack of package management means you won't find it in the standard VM distro line up though. As for other uses... using it to reply to this comment right now.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Lack of package management There is no lack of package management. There is a lack of automatic dependency resolution without third-party additions. This is nowhere near as debilitating as often presented by outside observers who have never tried the distribution. YMMV, but I've ran into circular dependencies and conflicts in addition to configuration updates rendering systems unbootable multiple times on distros like Debian with their non-transactional resolution heuristics that make your life easier, until they don't. Slackware's spartan package management has not failed me once, it's rock solid no matter how much you thrash your file system hierarchy. In addition, when I want to install SlackBuilds, I have never used a more convenient package manager than sbopkg before. Dependencies can be cleanly recorded and built with queuefiles.
jqm 11y ago
Eric Hameleers is a awesome. As a Slackware user his blogs and tips have been helping me for years. "we are well equipped to keep systemd out of our distro for a while" Win! This certainly isn't the first live Slackware though. Slax is how I first came to really experiment with Linux internals. It was a cool little tiny distro on a live USB. I was able to take stuff apart and build my own kernel etc without borking my real machine. I made several derivatives and even re-wrote the "live scripts" when the author took a hiatus around 2010. I learned so much from Slax.
- cyphax 11y ago
  Ahh you beat me to it (it being praising Eric Hameleers) :P Slackware is a better operating system thanks to Eric. Native Steam, multilib, leave it to Eric to make these things simple for others to use. I owe the man more beers than I can afford. :)
- jqm 11y ago
  Here is an additional mirror. Apparently Eric is a bit concerned about potential overload on his main server. http://mirrors.edgeorbis.com/distros/slackware-live/ http://mirrors.edgeorbis.com/distros/slackware-live/
kozukumi 11y ago
Slackware was my first experience with Linux. So long ago now, I am 31 now but was 12 when I was first shown Linux and I was hooked from there. Like most I have been around the block with many different Linux distros over the years, even a scary few years doing stage 1 Gentoo. I will always be fond of Slack though. Patrick and his work will always have a very special place in my life, I do not doubt I would have gone into technology anyway (seems to be in my DNA) but Patrick and Slackware was such a huge part of what I first remember of truly learning. Sorry this post is a little off-topic, it is Sunday afternoon and I guess I am feeling sentimental or something ;)
- sigzero 11y ago
  Nah that's cool. I started with Slackware 0.98 as my first distro. We've come a long long long way baby.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  I was "a bit" older when I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95. I was working doing C development on a number of *nix and other platforms (most of which are gone now), and needed something better for working from home than a 16 bit compiler on MS-DOS. Slackware felt MUCH more powerful than the SCO x86 OS we had at work, and having a desktop GUI was just gravy, rather than worrying about anything being "ready for the desktop".
  - Roboprog 11y ago
    Delicious irony 20 years later: the mobile era. Apple, yet again, makes really good devices. However, the most numerous devices are now Linux/Android. Now we have to ask "Is Microsoft ready for mobile", but it's too late, and the answer is "nobody cares". God, it feels so good to watch Linux kick the crap out of MS, after all those years of putting up with their slow/buggy OS's and development torment-ware.
    - jmnicolas 11y ago
      Well yes but my Android phone (Nexus 4) really feels like Windows 98 though : security is an illusion and it crashes (reboot) for no apparent reason (I believe it doesn't like to be put in Airplane Mode while I sleep). Let's not talk about my desktop Linux experience which is not stellar either. Honestly if it weren't for the telemetry updates I'd be a happy Windows user. I didn't mention Apple since I can't afford what they think people should pay for their devices.
systems 11y ago
i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until that day, its too hardcore, i dont have that kind of time
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something - maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online consistently).
  - morb 11y ago
    slackpkg doesn't do dependencies. slapt-get (http://software.jaos.org/ http://software.jaos.org/) does, but it needs repo that has dependency metadata. Official repos don't have it. If a repository doesn't have dependency metadata then slapt-get doesn't resolve deps for that set of packages. Some other repos (AlienBob's for instance) do have dependency metadata, which assume that you did a full Slackware install, so only dependencies that aren't part of Slackware are listed. There is also slapt-src (same URL) that automates installing stuff from http://slackbuilds.org/ http://slackbuilds.org/, and it resolves dependencies. It's not fullproof, but is good enough (for me, at least). There's a new repo on http://slackonly.com/ http://slackonly.com/ which offers binary packages built from scripts on slackbuilds, and it looks like it has dependency metadata. I can't vouch for the quality of those packages, I haven't used it yet. UPDATE: After skimming through PACKAGES.TXT for a few minutes, I'm not confident that slackonly repo has all dep. metadata correct, but hopefully they'll get better with it soon.
    - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      Ah, you're right it was slapt-get that I used; it convinced me that apt-get was really good, part of the reason I moved despite up to then being more familiar with compiling my own (yay for checkinstall) or using yum.
chews 11y ago
mu
ryanpcmcquen 11y ago
Slackware is what made me love computers, and love being a learner.

71 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

How does Slackware compare to ArchLinux? They both seem to be very barebones and force you to learn more about Linux, but ArchLinux seems much more popular from what I gather.

EC1 11y ago
Slackware only took me 8 installs vs 15 for Arch.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  Gentoo only took me 2 installs vs. 8 for Slack
komaromy 11y ago
The Arch docs are superior (best that I've encountered in the Linux world) but Slackware is worth it to me to stay away from systemd.
- coherentpony 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, why don't you like systemd?
  - komaromy 11y ago
    It felt too restrictive to me. Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      > Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces. > One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs. You can keep a syslog implementation like rsyslog installed, and you'll continue to have text logs too. And journalctl outputs plain text.
      - dijit 11y ago
        You can also make rsyslog work on windows, doesn't mean it's supported or encouraged.. people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" but in the end the bad bits are orthogonal to it's design and 'bypassing' them or hacking around them should not be encouraged- it should be able to be done by default.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" Where in my comment did I imply that the journal was "bad"? The journal is awesome. But if you have some workflow designed around syslog, such as a log analyzer or statistics package that you don't want to tweak, text logging still works just fine.
        thiagowfx 11y ago
        "bad" is just a metaphor in this context
      - anonbanker 11y ago
        systemd only has extensive documentation if you count the source code itself. otherwise, most people are left guessing for things above a "systemctl restart"
  - toast0 11y ago
    I recently put together a systemd system, here's a list of grievances compared to the previous setup: On boot, systems waits for two minutes or so for dhcp on an Ethernet interface with no cable, and it's not cancelable if I happen to be at the console On shutdown, it turns off swap before shutting down daemons; not an issue for my system because I don't expect swapping, but in what world does this make sense? Closing the lid sleeps the computer without configuration; some people might find this to be a good thing, but in my experience in the last 15 years, Linux only slept on lid closure if i was running software to handle that (acpid and/or something from a desktop environment), if i have apache running on an old laptop with no GUI, i expect it to stay on. (yes, there's a config, but its still annoying)
  - deckard1 11y ago
    it's like the face-hugger, from Alien(s). Once it gets into your distro, it impregnates it with a horror monster. An init should not be micromanaging every aspect of my system. I'm on arch now, but my next Linux will not have systemd or journald.
  - Elhana 11y ago
    Let's say we have a service, that needs network to be up and running. network.target won't work on boot, you start googling and find network-online.target that should do the trick, but it doesn't. Then you spend half an hour trying to figure out how to make it wait for dhcp config to finish for /etc/network/interfaces. In the end, either find that you need to enable some obscure service that waits for it and makes network-online.target actually work and enable it or you copy-paste it from somewhere on the internet and it is a shell script anyway. I'm not sure how you can you depend on network-online.target and be sure this network waiting services are properly enabled. With sysvinit you'd usually just put it on S99 and be done with it in most cases.
- rvern 11y ago
  I disagree. For every Fedora release, the Documentation Project prepares a new version of the System Administrator's Guide[1] and of five other high-quality manuals. These manuals are usually up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive, and since they are maintained in the DocBook format (which is very superior to wikimarkup for technical documents), they can be converted into HTML (for the version on docs.fedoraproject.org), PDF (for printing or viewing in a PDF reader) and EPUB (so I can put the guides on a e-reader and read them comfortably). The documentation is even translated in multiple languages. Debian has documentation of similar quality, with the Debian Reference[2] and the Debian Administrator's Handbook[3], which is more up-to-date. Also in DocBook, and all I said about the Fedora documentation applies as well. This will not be a popular opinion, but I don't think Arch Linux's documentation compares to Debian's and Fedora's. [1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/System_Administrators_Guide/index.html https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/System_A... [2]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ [3]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/ https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Arch isn't at all bare bones, that's more of an outdated humblebrag than anything else. Actually, neither is Slackware. I find sbopkg and SlackBuilds.org to be better than yaourt and AUR. sbopkg's UI is just top notch (ncurses-based). Slackware uses sysvinit with flat rc scripts as opposed to the traditional System V setup of numbered symlink farms. Much cleaner. Arch uses systemd. Slackware's pkgtools are much more minimalistic than pacman. They're shell functions that manage local tarballs. In addition, you have slackpkg for fetching remote updates. Slackware actually double-functions as both a rolling and stable release distribution. You can either set slackpkg to track -current, which is often bleeding edge yet surprisingly robust, or stick to official versions like 14.1. Slackware's installer and setup utilities are all ncurses-driven rather than pure CLI as in Arch. I actually find them much more capable. The only pure CLI part of installing Slackware is disk partitioning, the rest is a highly detailed TUI menu installer (similar to FreeBSD if you've tried that). Slackware has a very strict devotion to not patching upstream packages at all, with exceptions only in the most critical circumstances. This means that you're pretty much always using vanilla Linux userland as it is, and so if there's bugs, you report to upstream rather than to the distribution tracker. If you're a developer, this is great. Slackware's package management can alternate between binary and source-based. As such, I'd recommend Slack. It's venerable and rock solid.
massysett 11y ago
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_compared_to_other_distributions https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_compared_to_other_...
delcaran 11y ago
I've been using Arch for two years before going back to Slackware. It was a good run, Arch is fun and easy to use and everything works very, very well. On the same laptop is even faster than Slackware (I did not run any test, it was just my perception after a fresh install... maybe because Arch has way less packages...). BUT Arch brokes often. Even when I look the news on the official website or search the forums for issues with recent updates, even when I check that everything is ok accordin to the (awesome, really awesome) docs, Arch brokes something. I grew reluctant to run "pacman -Syu". Now with Slackware I am 100% sure that my system will always work after every update, and if it doesn't work is because a simple new dependency that I can install in a couple of minutes if I want, or I simply keep the already installed package without any issues whatsoever.

theseatoms 11y ago

Does Slackware have notable practical applications?

snw 11y ago
it's a nice linux distribution. The packages are usually very stable and well tested. It does the job on the desktop and on the server. In that sense it is practical, not sure if "notable" as there are many other more popular distributions these days.
gruturo 11y ago
I ran it for many years (and still do on a couple smaller machines). It has been exceptionally stable and thankfully devoid of "surprises" (using the word in its worst possible connotation). Things stay exactly as you leave them, it's exceptionally rare for any package to have been "customized" and nothing happens in the system unless you explicitly asked for it / made it happen. This used to be true for the initial setup too, which made it a bit scary to newbies - but since quite a few years that's become a painless experience. Its learning potential is very large. As someone once wrote: Study RedHat, you will have learned RedHat Study SuSE, you will have learned SuSE Study Slackware, you will have learned Unix.
- theseatoms 11y ago
  As someone who should learn more Unix, this is great to know. Thanks.
jqm 11y ago
It's simple so it's somewhat easy to take apart and re-purpose. I was able to use it to build an internet enabled kiosk for instance without a lot of extra weight. It's super stable also so it make a good server. Lack of package management means you won't find it in the standard VM distro line up though. As for other uses... using it to reply to this comment right now.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Lack of package management There is no lack of package management. There is a lack of automatic dependency resolution without third-party additions. This is nowhere near as debilitating as often presented by outside observers who have never tried the distribution. YMMV, but I've ran into circular dependencies and conflicts in addition to configuration updates rendering systems unbootable multiple times on distros like Debian with their non-transactional resolution heuristics that make your life easier, until they don't. Slackware's spartan package management has not failed me once, it's rock solid no matter how much you thrash your file system hierarchy. In addition, when I want to install SlackBuilds, I have never used a more convenient package manager than sbopkg before. Dependencies can be cleanly recorded and built with queuefiles.

jqm 11y ago

Eric Hameleers is a awesome. As a Slackware user his blogs and tips have been helping me for years. "we are well equipped to keep systemd out of our distro for a while" Win! This certainly isn't the first live Slackware though. Slax is how I first came to really experiment with Linux internals. It was a cool little tiny distro on a live USB. I was able to take stuff apart and build my own kernel etc without borking my real machine. I made several derivatives and even re-wrote the "live scripts" when the author took a hiatus around 2010. I learned so much from Slax.

cyphax 11y ago
Ahh you beat me to it (it being praising Eric Hameleers) :P Slackware is a better operating system thanks to Eric. Native Steam, multilib, leave it to Eric to make these things simple for others to use. I owe the man more beers than I can afford. :)
jqm 11y ago
Here is an additional mirror. Apparently Eric is a bit concerned about potential overload on his main server. http://mirrors.edgeorbis.com/distros/slackware-live/ http://mirrors.edgeorbis.com/distros/slackware-live/

kozukumi 11y ago

Slackware was my first experience with Linux. So long ago now, I am 31 now but was 12 when I was first shown Linux and I was hooked from there. Like most I have been around the block with many different Linux distros over the years, even a scary few years doing stage 1 Gentoo. I will always be fond of Slack though. Patrick and his work will always have a very special place in my life, I do not doubt I would have gone into technology anyway (seems to be in my DNA) but Patrick and Slackware was such a huge part of what I first remember of truly learning. Sorry this post is a little off-topic, it is Sunday afternoon and I guess I am feeling sentimental or something ;)

sigzero 11y ago
Nah that's cool. I started with Slackware 0.98 as my first distro. We've come a long long long way baby.
Roboprog 11y ago
I was "a bit" older when I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95. I was working doing C development on a number of *nix and other platforms (most of which are gone now), and needed something better for working from home than a 16 bit compiler on MS-DOS. Slackware felt MUCH more powerful than the SCO x86 OS we had at work, and having a desktop GUI was just gravy, rather than worrying about anything being "ready for the desktop".
- Roboprog 11y ago
  Delicious irony 20 years later: the mobile era. Apple, yet again, makes really good devices. However, the most numerous devices are now Linux/Android. Now we have to ask "Is Microsoft ready for mobile", but it's too late, and the answer is "nobody cares". God, it feels so good to watch Linux kick the crap out of MS, after all those years of putting up with their slow/buggy OS's and development torment-ware.
  - jmnicolas 11y ago
    Well yes but my Android phone (Nexus 4) really feels like Windows 98 though : security is an illusion and it crashes (reboot) for no apparent reason (I believe it doesn't like to be put in Airplane Mode while I sleep). Let's not talk about my desktop Linux experience which is not stellar either. Honestly if it weren't for the telemetry updates I'd be a happy Windows user. I didn't mention Apple since I can't afford what they think people should pay for their devices.

systems 11y ago

i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until that day, its too hardcore, i dont have that kind of time

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something - maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online consistently).
- morb 11y ago
  slackpkg doesn't do dependencies. slapt-get (http://software.jaos.org/ http://software.jaos.org/) does, but it needs repo that has dependency metadata. Official repos don't have it. If a repository doesn't have dependency metadata then slapt-get doesn't resolve deps for that set of packages. Some other repos (AlienBob's for instance) do have dependency metadata, which assume that you did a full Slackware install, so only dependencies that aren't part of Slackware are listed. There is also slapt-src (same URL) that automates installing stuff from http://slackbuilds.org/ http://slackbuilds.org/, and it resolves dependencies. It's not fullproof, but is good enough (for me, at least). There's a new repo on http://slackonly.com/ http://slackonly.com/ which offers binary packages built from scripts on slackbuilds, and it looks like it has dependency metadata. I can't vouch for the quality of those packages, I haven't used it yet. UPDATE: After skimming through PACKAGES.TXT for a few minutes, I'm not confident that slackonly repo has all dep. metadata correct, but hopefully they'll get better with it soon.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    Ah, you're right it was slapt-get that I used; it convinced me that apt-get was really good, part of the reason I moved despite up to then being more familiar with compiling my own (yay for checkinstall) or using yum.

chews 11y ago

ryanpcmcquen 11y ago

Slackware is what made me love computers, and love being a learner.