[ale] Slackware questions for Slackware users

[Geoffrey]

Greg wrote:
> I should preface this to say that I honestly hope that this does not
> devolve into some distro religious war or a thread hi-jacking into
> religion, politics, or any other discussion.  I would like to find
> out more about *this exact* distro before going to the trouble of
> downloading an ISO and playing with it.
> 
> I have only tried Mandrake (3 yrs ago), RH 7.3, and Suse 8.2 and
> OpenBSD - so I have some questions about the Slackware Linux distro.
> I am looking for some type of Linux distro that is less commercial
> than RH, Suse, etc.. to run on servers.

You're on the right track with Slack then.

> 
> 1.  What do you think are the main differences between Slackware and
> the rest ?

Slackware will provide you a smaller footprint.
It's built from tar files, not rpms or dep format.
It's a very fast install, when you're trying to create a small footprint 
or server for specific purposes (firewall, dns, dhcp..)

I view Slack much as you've noted above, less commercial.  It does not 
have the flashy install gui, although the install gui is perfectly 
sufficient for your needs.

You can install it on much older less capable hardware than all the rpm 
based dists (RH, Mandrake, SuSE).  I can't speak to Debian on that one.

> 
> 2.  How do you update ? is this the one that uses the apt-get stuff
> or is it via rpm's ?  The website only had a package/port  installer
> that looked similar to the BSD type system - which is fine by me.

Neither apt-get or rpm.  You download tar ball code, either precompiled 
or source.  Unpack precompiled and you're good.  Unpack the src code, 
compile it and install and you're good.

> 
> 3. Can a base install of only the kernel be achieved, without all of
> the unneeded (by me) crap of Sendmail, bind, mutt, etc., etc, .... ?

You can get closer to that solution then you ever will with RH, Mandrake 
or SuSE, but you'll still find some stuff you'll likely remove after the 
install.  You can really tune the install tight.

> 
> 4.  What is it about Slackware that you prefer to run it over other
> distros ?

It's clean, fast and installs on just about anything.  I've got a 486 
with 12 mb, 200 mb drive I installed it on.  That is sweet.  You don't 
have the dependency problems you run into with packaging systems because 
you add new code via source.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey	esoteric at 3times25.net

Building secure systems inspite of Microsoft