Joined: Feb 2011 Gender: Male Posts: 188 Location: Costa Rica
Any Slackers out there ? « Thread Started on May 6, 2011, 6:07pm »
Vector has RC seven out now. I fired up the live cd but have a fixed ip so I cant call home. It seems nice. I'm gonna go to the hotel tonight and give it a live run on a laptop for the heck of it. I always liked Slack but where it has always been slacking is in the package dept. rpm2tgz doesn't always cut it. I consider them second to Debian.
Joined: Jan 2011 Gender: Male Posts: 212 Location: Orlando, FL
Re: Any Slackers out there ? « Reply #4 on May 19, 2011, 3:38pm »
It's one of my favorite distros. With slackpkg it's not that hard to deal with dependencies, but it does have it's advantages. I only use X number of programs and when they're installed, it's over. But I can see why many wouldn't like it.
Re: Any Slackers out there ? « Reply #8 on Oct 2, 2011, 8:42pm »
I ran Slack for 4 - 5 years and a few of the derivatives of it. Vector was ok and a few others but I preferred the straight vanilla Slack itself. It isn't for everyone and if you want more than whats on the install, you cannot be afraid of the terminal. I liked it because I could have whatever I wanted pretty much from wherever I wanted. Talk about a repository! Vanilla does have it's advantages. What got me tired of it was keeping things up to date by hand and over time, it just got slower and slower. When they elected to use kde4, I tried it, decided it pulled heap big vaccuum and elected to move to something else.
Btw, you don't have to turn an rpm into a tgz, just download the source and do the install. Slack is vanilla. I ran it for quite awhile and never had the first problem with conflicts. Most packages from Slacky. EU work fine. Just download and install with pkgtool I think it was.
« Last Edit: Oct 2, 2011, 8:46pm by smithnwesson »
Vector has RC seven out now. I fired up the live cd but have a fixed ip so I cant call home. It seems nice. I'm gonna go to the hotel tonight and give it a live run on a laptop for the heck of it.
I used Vector for a long time. Until a few months ago, as well as doing a lot of packaging for them, I was also looking after their repositories. A lot of work....
Unfortunately, they have now deviated enough from Slackware that not all Slack packages are compatible. They're also rather pushed for developers. VL 6.0 is now horribly out of date (a wide range of current software will no longer build under 6 at all, which is bad from the point of view of security patches). As an example, I used to maintain Seamonkey for them - the last several Seamonkey packages I put up for Vector 6 were repackaged versions of Slack 12.2 builds. I'm not even sure that those will still run under VL 6.0.
VL6 SOHO is not compatible with 6.0 Standard (its more like a watered down version of VL7 beta), which doesn't help.
The development for VL7 has now taken so long, that I suspect it will be badly outdated by the time it finally gets released. IMHO, they spent mucn too much time and resources developing a less than entirely satisfactory GUI installer, rather than developing the important stuff - the distro itself. Installation is something that should not be done often, so using all those resources to get rid of a perfectly adequate, fast and well proven text-mode installer has sapped too many of their resources.
Quote:
I always liked Slack but where it has always been slacking is in the package dept. rpm2tgz doesn't always cut it. I consider them second to Debian.
I've not run real Slack in quite a while - I'm too lazy to do all the configuring.
Personally, I find Salix a very good compromise - it remains 100% Slackware compatible, but adds refinements (dep tracking, easy setup tools, etc.). It also has a good, friendly community, and is built to very high standards. Stability is more highly valued than cutting edge, but it still has pretty up-to-date-software, as well as a number of options for getting the software you need.
The live version of Salix is lagging a bit at the moment, but the beta is well worth having a play with, and for install, there are several different install isos to try - Xfce, KDE, Ratpoison, etc...
Re: Any Slackers out there ? « Reply #10 on Oct 6, 2011, 5:37pm »
I tried Salix once about a year ago. It was fine until I tried to install packages from Slacky.EU. pkgtool wasn't installed to Salix. If it was it was broken. The "real" Slackware is time consuming to set up. It normally took me about 2 days to get things just the way I want them. One thing for sure, it's easier to install than Arch, which is also sweet as long as you get lucky and don't install an update that gives your box a dose of the salts.
I tried Salix once about a year ago. It was fine until I tried to install packages from Slacky.EU. pkgtool wasn't installed to Salix. If it was it was broken.
That sounds about right. In earlier versions, spkg was used instead of pkgtools. While it covers most of the pkgtools options, it isn't quite the same, and some things might not work. On the other hand, its much faster and has a much simpler interface if used natively.
With 13.37, pkgtools has been included, and spkg is there as a standalone package manager. There is also now a front-end to slapt-src called Sourcery, which can use slackbuilds (or Salix-native slkbuilds) and allows a good number of packages to be built on your local machine.
Quote:
The "real" Slackware is time consuming to set up. It normally took me about 2 days to get things just the way I want them. One thing for sure, it's easier to install than Arch, which is also sweet as long as you get lucky and don't install an update that gives your box a dose of the salts.
I've looked at Arch several times, but ended up not having the time to go through the fully install. I'm just about to try an alternative - ArchBang, since that provides a reasonably complete Arch install which can then be customised.
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