4 ms·

I ran Slackware many moons ago. It was very bare bones and it took a lot of work, but I was young and it was an immersive experience. As another commenter wrote

by devin 13y ago

I ran Slackware many moons ago. It was very bare bones and it took a lot of work, but I was young and it was an immersive experience. As another commenter wrote, people on IRC played up how 1337 they were for running Slack. I disagree slightly with that statement. I spent a lot of time building my Slack system on a PII 266, and I was 12, so it took me a long time with a lot of false starts. I don't think anyone was trying to be "1337", they were just proud of what they'd accomplished. I know I was. In any event, it's cool to see Slack is still around. I installed ArchLinux on my MBP a couple weeks back. After installing Mavericks, the modified EFI partition I created no longer lets me boot Arch, so I think I'll give Slack a try. It's the challenge that makes it worth it. Also, I have to strongly suggest to anyone who is not all that into Linux but is interested in learning: Skip the window environment. Force yourself to just sit there on the command line. It's surprising the kind of focus you have when you can't be distracted by all manner of visual eye candy. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was a real pleasure to use only the CLI. It's sort of like the difference between writing with sidewalk chalk and a fine fountain pen. You find yourself writing /differently/. It's a subtle change with lots of unintended consequences that cause you to think about your work from a different perspective. As Alan Kay put it: Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

devin 13y ago
Also, since package managers seem to be the common gripe. I never used one, and I'm glad I didn't. I learned a lot by not having a proper package manager as a crutch. The creature comforts were never the point for me, inventing creature comforts that fit me was an enlightening experience and one that I think ought to be recognized for what it was: It wasn't "efficient" or "awesome" -- it was the basics. It was nuts and bolts, and so few things are these days. Sometimes it's not about nostalgia, it's about first principles.
- barrkel 13y ago
  Around the tenth time you re-run configure and hope that app picks up those dev libraries you installed for it, you'll get a wee bit jaded. I'd rather recommend a weekend spent with Linux From Scratch in a VM.
telephonetemp 13y ago
> Force yourself to just sit there on the command line. That's good advice in general but instead of using the bare CLI I'd suggest that you learn about screen and tmux early on. It'll make you miss the windowing system less.
- vasquez 13y ago
  Personally I use Xmonad for my desktop (all servers are headless, of course -- running screen but tmux looks interesting). It's a no-nonsense tiling WM for managing all your xterm windows. I also have dmenu installed, launching apps directly from the WM is more convenient than you'd think. I guess the two of you refer to not having X installed at all, but while it does provide some distractions, I can't see myself getting shit done (i.e. procrastinate on hnews) without a real browser.
simias 13y ago
The first non-windows system I installed was FreeBSD and later on moved to slackware and then other linux distros. I would really recommend FreeBSD to a novice who'd like to install an un*x and really understand how it works. It's mostly the same steps as slackware but 1/ FreeBSD docs are godly (I didn't have internet at the time and managed to do all I wanted with just the FBSD user manual, I hope it hasn't changed since then) and 2/ Slackware is sometimes hard to get to work for the wrong reasons. Lack of proper dependency tracking in the package manager for instance is just insane unless you only plan to install a couple packages or you plan to spend your life manually installing and updating your packages (or never update which seems to be how most slackware users deal with that in my limited experience). In the end I don't think it requires more skill to properly set up a slackware install versus some BSD or even Gentoo or Arch. And if you don't really care about having a maintainable OS and just want to know how everything fits together in a modern linux system you might as well try Linux From Scratch, it's meant for that.

by devin 13y ago

devin 13y ago

Also, since package managers seem to be the common gripe. I never used one, and I'm glad I didn't. I learned a lot by not having a proper package manager as a crutch. The creature comforts were never the point for me, inventing creature comforts that fit me was an enlightening experience and one that I think ought to be recognized for what it was: It wasn't "efficient" or "awesome" -- it was the basics. It was nuts and bolts, and so few things are these days. Sometimes it's not about nostalgia, it's about first principles.

barrkel 13y ago
Around the tenth time you re-run configure and hope that app picks up those dev libraries you installed for it, you'll get a wee bit jaded. I'd rather recommend a weekend spent with Linux From Scratch in a VM.

telephonetemp 13y ago

> Force yourself to just sit there on the command line. That's good advice in general but instead of using the bare CLI I'd suggest that you learn about screen and tmux early on. It'll make you miss the windowing system less.

vasquez 13y ago
Personally I use Xmonad for my desktop (all servers are headless, of course -- running screen but tmux looks interesting). It's a no-nonsense tiling WM for managing all your xterm windows. I also have dmenu installed, launching apps directly from the WM is more convenient than you'd think. I guess the two of you refer to not having X installed at all, but while it does provide some distractions, I can't see myself getting shit done (i.e. procrastinate on hnews) without a real browser.

simias 13y ago

The first non-windows system I installed was FreeBSD and later on moved to slackware and then other linux distros. I would really recommend FreeBSD to a novice who'd like to install an un*x and really understand how it works. It's mostly the same steps as slackware but 1/ FreeBSD docs are godly (I didn't have internet at the time and managed to do all I wanted with just the FBSD user manual, I hope it hasn't changed since then) and 2/ Slackware is sometimes hard to get to work for the wrong reasons. Lack of proper dependency tracking in the package manager for instance is just insane unless you only plan to install a couple packages or you plan to spend your life manually installing and updating your packages (or never update which seems to be how most slackware users deal with that in my limited experience). In the end I don't think it requires more skill to properly set up a slackware install versus some BSD or even Gentoo or Arch. And if you don't really care about having a maintainable OS and just want to know how everything fits together in a modern linux system you might as well try Linux From Scratch, it's meant for that.