Comments on: The Slackware 12.2 interview

By: gargamel

gargamel — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 12:31:39 +0000

Regarding OpenOffice.org: You found one excellent solution for installing it in Robby Workman’s SlackBuild packages. But especially, if you are not living in an American/English speaking country you might want to try the mulitlanguage OOo package from slacky.eu. It provides the easiest installation of OOo I know of on any platform. It allows you to select the desired language from a menu, then downloads the RPM package, converts it to Slackware package format and installs it. All automatically. *Very* comfortable!

Regarding Slackware as a development platform, I can tell that I haven’t seen a better platform for Java development. Many other distros I have seen with so-called “sophisticated” package management system are trying to install a whole ecosystem of tools, IDEs and libraries, when you select the Java SDK package in the installer. Then you learn what the term “dependency hell” with regard to package managers like RPM actually means. Why can I only install the JDK, when I also install Eclipse in a particular version, when I either want to work with another version or Netbeans?

So Java is one good example, why the Slackware package management is the best package management available.

And Slackware is the best Java development platform I know of. It doesn’t introduce requirements that are not deriving from Java as such.

Compare this to other distros which usually try to support javapackages.net. A good, but failed effort to make Java programs “installable” for end-users, IMHO.

gargamel

By: JK Wood

JK Wood — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 08:21:49 +0000

Um… I like the article overall, but I have to burst your bubble on one thing. Pat’s preferred method of upgrading a system is definitely NOT slapt-get. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t include it in Slackware.

By: seth

seth — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:56:33 +0000

For package management, you should also check out sbopkg which works like a front end to the slackbuilds.org repository. It pretty much rocks and imho, all you really need is slackbuilds.org and sbopkg for extra third party packages.

By: brent racobs

brent racobs — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:11:52 +0000

Wonderful job on your report. Well done. Like all systems it is up to the person on the other side of the screen to make it work for them.
Slackware 12.2 and the community keep it stable. Thanks Robby and Robby. Love the store. slack get pay pal please.

By: hoodooman

hoodooman — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:51:25 +0000

Great review of a great distro.Been using it since version 8 and it does make a great desktop distro.Quicker and less resource greedy than all the current “fave” distros.Just installed 12.2 and all the packages I use and its running like a train.

By: Robby

Robby — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:17:53 +0000

; ) Thanks Robby – I also have to say thanks from my side for all the work you do for the distro. I was thinking of wicd when I said “Also included are a number of Wifi tools, drivers and firmware, as well as ” but I should’ve mentioned it specifically seeing as it’s an important ‘new’ tool in the Slackware system.

I’m still working my way through all the Slackware package tools and slackpkg is the last on my list. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with src2pkg lately converting ( most of ) my custom compile scripts, but slackpkg is next! I’ve a soft spot for swaret seeing as it’s the first I ever used but you have to move on …

By: Robby Workman

Robby Workman — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:28:56 +0000

Hrm, ignore the pm-utils comment – I see that you mentioned it. No idea how I missed that the first time :/

By: Robby Workman

Robby Workman — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:24:58 +0000

First of all, I like your name; clearly, your parents have class

Second, thanks for a *real* review instead of ranting about how Slackware isn’t like $other_distro.

Third, thanks for the plug of my OpenOffice.org package.

Finally, a few minor points probably worth mentioning in a review:
1. wicd, a gui network manager application, has been added and is available in the /extra repository on the cdroms/dvd.
2. pm-utils, a collection of scripts to make suspend and hibernate “just work” has been added; lots of users should appreciate those
3. slackpkg has been moved from /extra to the ap/ series, and generally speaking, it’s strongly preferred over slapt-get and especially swaret.

By: JayY

JayY — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:07:49 +0000

Finally, a _useful_ review of a distribution!

Very good work, I thank you.

JayY

By: Robby

Robby — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 11:58:43 +0000

Update:

I thought it necessary to expand on my upgrade experience as there are some slightly advanced steps to do if you’re upgrading packages like the kernel and udev. I noticed after rebooting for the first time that the machine refused to boot either using the hugesmp kernel ( an issue with stack space ) or the generic-kernel ( couldn’t find jfs first and then couldn’t find /dev/root ). To solve this I booted from the DVD and created an initrd:

mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.27.7-smp -m jfs -r /dev/sda2

I then edited /etc/lilo adding:

initrd = /boot/initrd.gz

… to the boot section for my kernel and ran:

/sbin/illo

… to reinstall the boot loader with the new setup. As I was using a new kernel, it was also necessary to reinstall both the NVidia video driver and VirtualBox. I took the opportunity to install the latest of both of those.