Old School Goes New School with Slackware 13.1 | Hacker News Reader

Old School Goes New School with Slackware 13.1

linux.com

39 pointsjennifercloer11 comments

Criticizing Slackware for lack of modernity would be like criticizing a well-maintained 1957 Chevy for not having power windows or satellite radio. You don't run Slackware to escape from the complexity or configurability of Linux; you run Slackware to embrace those things.

A very good analogy for this distro. It is slightly misleading, though, since new technology regularly makes its way into Slack. The problem most people will find isn't the lack of "modernity" in terms of new versions of software and support for features like encrypted root filesystems and modern kernels. If anything I think it's the lack of larger resources [edit: in the way of amount of distro devs, packaged software, software 'polish'] provided by other distros that make Slack daunting.

Also, i'd say there is even less complexity and configurability in Slack than most other distros. Each distro brings its own method for dealing with common tasks central to any operating system. Typically these include management of the configuration and operation of local services, network services, and taking care of the heavy lifting of installing complex interlinked applications and libraries. What Slack does is strip all that away. You become the manager of your operating system, not an obscure software tool. What's really beneficial is the experience you gain in working with open source software at such an intimate level. Everyone who wants to really know Linux well should try out LFS once, but then use Slack day to day.

I just upgraded my main personal desktop from slack 12.1 (lagged behind recently :) to slack 13.1. Though an upgrade from anything older than slack 13.0 is unsupported, it worked pretty well :)

Now I'll have to upgrade my slack 13.0 work desktop, will be a breeze...

By the way installing applications properly from source is very easy now with "makepkg" : simply do

    ./configure && make && mkdir PKG \
    && make install DESTDIR=./PKG && \
    cd PKG && sudo makepkg ../myapp-version-arch-rev.txz \
    sudo installpkg ../myapp-version-arch-rev.txz

Check http://www.src2pkg.net/ out---you just pass it a tarball and it will figure out how to build it, for most types of packages.

Thanks for both of these. I've been making SlackBuild scripts or installing in /usr/local until now.

Also, http://www.sbopkg.org/ takes the drudgery out of using SlackBuild scripts from http://slackbuilds.org/ ; you may wish to check it out.

Just as a reminder, this will create and install your software as owned with your local user/group. This means your /usr/bin/ and other directories will now be writable by your local user and group. You can pass '-c y' to makepkg to make all directories owned by root:root and mode 0755, which may screw with some things that expect group 'bin' or more tight permissions.

I prefer to do 'make install DESTDIR=./PKG/ && rm -rf ./PKG/ && sudo make install DESTDIR=./PKG/ && cd PKG && sudo makepkg -c n -l y ....'. This first tests if the Makefile properly supports DESTDIR (assuming the 'make install' will fail if it tried to install a file to a root-owned directory). If it does, it runs the 'make install' as root with the DESTDIR argument, which will create all the files with the expected owners/perms.

I put it all in some shell scripts a while back if you're interested: http://psydev.syw4e.info/new/slacktools/

Slackware was my first linux experience and has always been my favorite since. When I happened to see the 13.1 release a few days ago I couldn't help but check it out.

I have been running Mac OS for a few years now, but if Apple finally annoys me too much I am running back to slack.

My first linux experience as well. I recall purchasing a 50 pack of diskettes and making hard choices to determine which disk sets i would download and install. Fun times :)

I was a FreeBSD brat myself - If I had to use Linux I always chose Slackware.

I've been using OS X for the past 3 years.

Arch Linux is my poison of choice these days -- but what the hell. I have a few gigs to set aside and will try booting this in a VM, see how the ol' boy fits.

...and if you are disappointed at the smaller set of packages available as opposed to other distros, visit http://slackbuild.org to get a broader choice.

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