Slackware or another distro?

[Floppyman]

Hi all,

I'm about ready to ditch RH 8.0 on my dualboot system for another linux distro. I was thinking of either going back to 7.3 (which worked quite well), or trying a whole new distro (besides Mandrake and RedHat). I have been considering Slackware. Would this be a good choice, or are there other better distros out there? I have a little experience with linux and that's why I would like to try something different than RH and Mandrake. Thanks in Advance.

[OOPS!]

Hi,

Slack is a superb distro. There isn't much for GUI tools in it, so it will teach you a lot about config files and such. It perhaps does a bit better on older hardware rather than the latest and greatest.

Debian is another choice to consider. It is a true GNU distro. Made and maintained by only vollentiers. Apt-get is fun and works great. But it is stilll possible to hose a system with it. Been there, done that, LOL .

In my opinion, the 3 distros that a person should try on your road to linux "guru-ness" are: Slack, Debian, and finally LFS.

So, if Slack tickles your fancy, floppyman, go for it!

OOPS!

[Floppyman]

Thanks OOPS. How is the setup in Slackware different than in RH or Mandrake? Is there anything I should look out for? Thanks again.

[TMAN]

It's all console and menu driven rather than event driven so it will take considerably longer to setup if you don't know what packages you want. You'll notice a slight tingly feeling as you get a taste of all that power. Slack is rock solid but at the cost of some easy setup. If you want 3d support, for instance, you may need to recompile your kernel AND get the latest drivers. If you want graphical login, you'll need to edit the config files. But it's all in good fun and education.

[Floppyman]

I'm planning on installing this on an IBM 390X laptop. Here are approximate specs:

PII 400
192mb of ram
6.4 gig hdd
2.5mb Neomagic 256 (I think) video
ESS Solo1 sound


Will I be ok installing Slack on this system? Also I have win2k installed now, can I just repartition and reformat my drive for linux during setup? Thanks again.

[TMAN]

That system should run Slack fine. Except I'm not familiar with that vid card. As for partitioning.... welll depends what FS 2k is on and if you want multiboot. Did you have linux on that system? If you did, you can just format them and install slack on them without repartitioning.

[Floppyman]

Thanks again for the reply. Win2k is using NTFS right now and I'm going to wipe it out completely to install slack. Is that possible to do during setup? Also does slack come with any bootloaders (i.e. lilo or grub) in case I ever want to dual boot? Thanks again.

[TMAN]

during setup.... I would strongly advise you to never ever mess with NTFS in a *nix setup and likewise never mess with a non MS FS in a win setup. Alll decent distros come with bootloaders.

[OOPS!]

Yeah,

NTFS is still new ground for linux. Becareful with it. I've never messed with it myself, but isn't it possible to run fdisk and change it to FAT?

OOPS!

[TMAN]

fdisk does partitioning not formatting. Even 9x windows has some trouble handling NTFS. You could probably use MS fdisk to remove it, though.

[Floppyman]

Yep, thanks guys. I'll go ahead and do that. I'm thinking now whether or not I should go with something like RH7 for simplicity, since I need this laptop for taking notes etc., and don't have all that much time. How detailed is slack? Does it require hours of tweaking and setting up? I would like to play with it, but I'm afraid I haven't got the time right now. Thanks again.

[TMAN]

oncle slack is set up it should be extremely low maintenance. There is no reason you wouldn't be able to do notes and other day to day activities. If RH on that system was no real trouble slack will be much less.