[NBLUG/talk] Slackware install

[A'fish'ionado]

*Long rambling account follows; feel free to skip*

I've got Slackware 10.2 up and running on my desktop.

The verdict: 1) Despite its reputation, if you can install Debian, you can
install Slackware; 2) Slackware is *fast*.

The computer I was installing on already has SuSE and Debian installed, so
I've gotten fairly familiar with its idiosyncracies. It has an nVidia
GeForce4 and a modem that won't work without a Linuxant driver; everything
else usually works right out of the box under Linux. As expected, I had to
grab drivers for those two devices, but also the mosuewheel on my USB mouse
wouldn't work right away. I haven't gotten around to playing with the X
configuration to get that working (the mouse works fine except for the
wheel).

As for the actual install... Slackware immediately dumps you at a command
prompt with the hint to run either "fdisk" or "cfdisk" manually, and then
run "setup". Once you launch "setup", you've got a pretty standard
curses-based installer running. Figuring out the partitioning is really the
only part that's any scarier than Debian (and is about the same as Knoppix
puts you through if you try to do a HD install). It took me three tries to
get it installed, but that was because of me doing stupid things with
partitioning, not a fault of Slackware's (I had two seperate blocks of
unpartitioned space; one was 2 Gb, the other was over 100 Gb ... guess which
one I picked first). Beyond the installer, I haven't gotten to play with any
of the Slackware package management tools yet.

Two things that stood out: 1) The installer never prompts you to create any
user accounts other than root; this seems like an open invitation to just do
everything under root, and strikes me as a bad idea. 2) The installer lists
all the installed daemons and prompts you to select which ones to launch on
boot. I like this a lot better than the usual
if-it's-installed-then-it-should-launch-on-boot-by-default approach used by
most distros.

Slackware has a bit of an "old time" feel to it; between the material on its
website, and its installer, it looks like it came out of the early 90s.
Fortunately, I was glad to find the latest versions of all the software
installed. KDE 4 is much faster than I'm used to KDE being. I switched to
Gnome on that machine just because KDE was so slow, but I may have to
rethink that now.

Slackware ships with X.org <http://X.org>. Thus, I couldn't resist trying to
enable the composite extension. :-) It took a bit of Googling, and I had to
download an older version of the nVidia driver (go figure), but now I have
see-through windows and drop shadows. As far as I can tell, though, I've
disabled hardware-accelerated 3D rendering in the process, which sucks. I'll
probably have to disable composites again because of that, given that 3D
helps productivity more than drop shadows (wait, did I say *helps*
productivity? *GLTron!!!*).

One final random comment: Slackware, by default, launches a command shell at
startup instead of a graphical login window. You get to log into bash and
run startx from there. I poked around to see if KDM or GDM was installed,
and to see if I could launch one... And found XDM. XDM, of all the desktop
managers, they had to pick XDM. What on earth is up with that? <rant done>

So, I've tried an RPM distribution (SuSE, and I've played with Mandrake),
Debian, and Slackware. So, what does that leave to try? I'm not really keen
on trying Gentoo or LFS without a broadband Internet connection. Hmm, maybe
FreeBSD is next on the agenda...

William
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