Slackware 8.0

[leech]

Anyone tried out Slackware 8.0 yet? I downloaded the ISO's and am considering giving it a try. I've never used Slackware so I was just wondering what sort of packaging it uses. I know it uses just tar balls, but will it check for dependancies, etc. It looks to me like it has all the right versions of things (unlike Mandrake which has a old GCC still, it has GCC 3.0 in contribs, but I tried installing that and it didn't go over too well, so I couldnt' compile anything worth crap.) I'd like a little input before I try it, but then again knowing me, I'll just install it anyhow, and then find out if I hate it or not *laughs* Laters

Leech

[floodle]

Slackware ain't Mandrake, thats for sure. The install is entirely text-based, it has very little in the way of autoconfiguration (in fact virtually none), and the package system totally lacks dependency checking. None of this is really a negative if you know what you are doing, though. The installer isn't terribly hard to use at all, ugly as it is. I would take it over dselect any day. Although there is no dependency checking, it is usually indicated in the package description if you need other packages in order to install something. Installing binary packages isn't hard, in fact, other than the lack of dependency checking, slackware tarballs are very much like packages for other distributions (a compressed file containing the binaries and an installation script). Just 'installpkg package_name' will do it. There is an apt-style auto-updater and some kind of GUI frontend under development. Its considered to be the most 'source-friendly' distro out there, because if you compile a lot of software from source, it won't break your dependency tree (as there is none). And then there is the BSD style init system, which is quite different from any other linux distribution. Basically, rather than having a whole bunch of links in the rcX.d directories for each service, everything is contained within a few scripts (one for each runlevel, and a few more for device drivers, networking, etc.) which are much more friendly to hack by hand. For compatibility, it can still run SysV init scripts if you create the directory structure for them (and need them for proprietary software that targets redhat or something).

[leech]

Thanks for the great input. I seem to recall something about the Debian initscripts being somewhat like that as well, though I could be wrong. I do know that Debian does their init scripts differently than Redhat type Distros. Perhaps I'll stick with Mandrake 8 for now. And actually I didn't mind Dselect too much, though lately all the Distros I installed had GUI frontends but just used the Debian distro (Storm, Corel, Progeny (which I couldn't ever get to install))

Leech