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Comment by executesorder66 | Hacker News Reader

How does the difficulty of installing Slackware compare to Arch or Gentoo?

I've only ever installed and used Arch.

Slightly easier than Arch.

Just install everything when it asks you to. You can ignore the kdei disk set if you speak English (and have no plans to run KDE in, say, Urdu), and the kde disk set if you do not need KDE altogether.

Since there is no dependency resolution, when you install from SlackBuilds.org (Slackware's AUR, more or less), you have to install each package's dependencies as well. These are listed in the package info file and tools like sbopkg let you install many packages at a go through a queueing system, so this is not as bad as it sounds.

The benefit of this is a completely user-configurable system, and a lack of errors when you hosed the dependency resolver since there's no resolver to hose. :)

I just wish slack had something comparable to mkinitcpio that arch has, which makes it much easier to set up an initial ramdisk for an encrypted root partition.

Well there is mkinitrd...

README_CRYPT.TXT in the root of the distribution[0] describes how to do this, step by step, including the relevant theory so you know what you're doing. After all of that it shows you the /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh command which you can use to generate the command that you need to build the initrd. Quoting from the docs:

    The mkinitrd package in Slackware 14.0 (and on) ships with a script called
    'mkinitrd_command_generator.sh'.  If you run this script, it will analyze
    your Slackware configuration and make a smart suggestion about the 'mkinitrd'
    command you have to type in order to create an initrd.gz with all the bells
    & whistles.  The script will recognize your kernel version, root partition
    and filesystem, it will find out if you are using LUKS and/or LVM and will
    determine what kernel modules your initrd needs to mount the root filesystem.
    The following command will save you the headache of figuring this out all
    by yourself:

      # /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -r

    It should emit a string like this (your system will probably give different
    parameter values):

    mkinitrd -c -k 3.14.10-smp -m ext3 -f ext3 -r /dev/cryptvg/root -C /dev/sdx2 -L

The administrator of that machine can examine the output of that command and determine if it is correct after reading the theory about how the initrd needs to be built. If it is, it's a simple one liner, but if not, it's simple enough to either write a wrapper script or copy the script to /usr/local/sbin/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh and make the necessary changes.

[0] ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-current/README_CRYPT.TXT

I used Arch for 8 months sometime in 2010. And I switched my main computer to Arch just yesterday, just to give it a shot, to see a different approach, to use a systemd-based system, to re-learn some stuff, etc etc. Basically to experiment.

IMO Slackware is definitely easier to install, more reasonable defaults, less fiddling with the system post-install. For me it's basically aiming slapt-src (something like yaourt) to https://slackbuilds.org/ (something like AUR, but the scripts are reviewed and tested by site admins) and letting stuff compile & install (with a _lot_ less interaction required than AUR stuff).

Wait for a 14.2 to be released and then give it a shot. See the readme files and http://docs.slackware.com/. I hope you like it.

I found it to be more difficult than Arch, mainly due to the ease of Pacman and the AUR (using Yaourt), other than that it felt very much the same (note my Slack experience is form years ago.) Gentoo was much harder to setup but easier to keep up to date. I still have warm feelings for Gentoo but I also landed on Arch. And, as I grow older, I like to configuration work Ubuntu does for you...

In my time I'd install Dropline Gnome on Slackware and had a nice up tot date fancy looking desktop on Slackware in about 30 min. I see that Dropline Gnome still exists [0], It can make Slack nice looking and up-to-date quite easily (although they are 2-3 versions behind, they used to be more bleeding edge than anything).

[0] http://www.droplinegnome.org/

Installing it is actually pretty easy, because they provide a reasonably straightforward console-based "graphical" installer, rather than pretending that copy-pasting a bunch of commands off the [Gentoo|Arch] wiki will teach you anything beside how to install [Gentoo|Arch].

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