[TriLUG] Tony's experience installing Slackware part two!--Taken from Penguin Shell from Lockergnome.

[al johson]

We're midway through the Slackware leg of the Great Distro Review. I've had
fun this week, playing in my new Slackware sandbox. That's a tough part of
this series of reviews - just when I start to get acclimated to a new
distribution, it's time to move on to the next. But that's OK. Anything for
the cause!

Despite the rough go with parts of the install, Slack has some real
strengths. It's always been known for stability and compliance to published
Linux standards. In some areas, it's begun to show both its age and the
effects of having, in truth, a 2- or 3-person team responsible for all
development. But there are some strengths for which Slackware has always
been known. It's my guess that, whatever form Slack may take in the future,
these core strengths will remain.

One of those core strengths is in the server arena. Slack installs straight
off of the CD with web, ftp and Samba servers ready to go. The server
packages, including Apache and ProFTPD, are completely open source, highly
configurable and, with some careful attention to detail, very secure. The
general lack of overhead in a Slackware distribution, I think, makes these
services much more stable than in any other distribution. I can almost
guarantee that during your treks around the 'net today, you're going to
cross more than just a handful of web servers running Apache in Slackware.
Which point can only lead to a recommendation - if you're considering
setting up a Linux server, be it web, ftp or Samba, you'd be remiss to not
give Slackware a thorough consideration.

The other tried and true strength of Slack lies in its complete
configurability. Linux systems are, as a rule, highly configurable. In the
face of increasingly transparent installations, Slack has maintained a fine
balance between refining the install process and maintaining the complete
configurability that's the hallmark of Linux systems. Take a look in the
/etc/rc.d directory of any Slackware system. There's a hand-tweakable
resource control (rc) file for every major element of the system. That's not
the case in most current distros, including my recent favorite RedHat. If
you have the time and the inclination to better learn how your Linux system
runs by hacking it your way, Slackware is definitely your distribution.

Tomorrow, we'll close the book on Slackware and take a peek at next week.
It's going to be interesting and exciting, regardless of which distribution
I throw your way. By way of a tease, most of Penguin Shell next week will be
written 18 hours from home. Until tomorrow ...


Tony Steidler-Dennison