Picking A Linux Distribution, Part 2

Slackware

Well I went back to what I thought was my comfort zone and pulled down Slackware 12.1 iso’s last night. I installed it this morning and was greeted by the familiar dialog based installer.

Installation

I enjoy the dialog installer because it really tells you what is on the system, how the system is going to be configured, and gives the advanced user a lot of flexibility in choosing what they want in the system from the get go. I removed a lot of unnecessary packages (Japanese fonts?) and services (rsh is a thing of the past!), and still got a lot of what I want in the system (svn, apache, php, KDE, etc). I was also able to setup the wired network through the installation and have it ready for me on bootup.

One thing that I did notice was that the default kernel now put on the slackware installation CD is huge! In fact, I believe it is called kernel-smp-huge. This makes sense because it supposed a lot more hardware for the initial setup, but I’m rather interested in rebuilding my kernel immediately to remove a lot of the excess.

FIrst Boot

My first boot did not go well. I got into the shell fine and then I ran into a problem – my wireless card was not detected, and when I fired up KDE for the first time the system totally froze on me. I have not tried to use KDE since and have concentrated on making the system work from the command line (this is why I love linux anyway!). Using dmesg, lspci, and lsmod (and some help from the folks on IRC), I was able to get my wireless card detected and setup rather quickly.

Security

Slackware is wonderful in that it really does not turn anything on by default unless you tell it to. The only network related stuff open on the machine at this point are ssh and httpd, and that’s because I told it to start those up. One drawback is that the installer does not prompt you to add a default user account. So the first login is as root, and as we all know that can lead to trouble quickly. Still, being a distribution built for power users this makes sense. I quickly added a user account, visudo’ed it, and logged out.

Documentation

The slackware project has come a long way in terms of documentation. Ten years ago I would have gone to the OLDP for anything I needed to do. Today I went to www.slackbook.org and started reading. It is short but informative, up to date, and well organized. It also has highlighted on the front page several sections that may be of interest to new users so I skipped past a lot of the stuff I already knew.

Update System/Package Management

I am disappointed in this area. pkgtool is old and getting older and it really does not hold its weight compared to apt. There is even an ongoing movement by some people (SlackBuilds) to port or maintain packages for slackware. This, in my opinion, means time to change.

GUI

As I stated earlier, KDE completely froze the system on me. I have not fired it up since so I’m not sure how it’s going to go the second time around. Slackware does offer several current window managers however and I did choose KDE, so in part this may be my fault. I am also tempted to play with a project called Ion3 that is a really lightweight GUI geared towards keyboard users. If I can get things like Eclipse to work in this WM, this may become a non-issue for the final chosen distribution.

Tweaking and Customization

The sky is the limit with slackware. The system is very well layed out and there are not a lot of bells and whistles to remove or consider when making changes to the system. An interesting side effect is that it does take longer to administer things. For example, I had to explicitly read up on the httpd.conf configuration options for Apache to turn on PHP and user directories. However, it was a simple matter of uncommenting the options. I do like how SuSE and Debian do this better however. There is a base config and then symlinks to enable/disable modules and configurations. I will heavily consider checking my configs into svn from this point on to make sure I remember how I did it!

Summary

Well, that’s it for now. I’m going to tweak this system out, get back into the swing of things, and then slap another distribution on here in a week or so. Overall, Slackware has scored really high in the security and customization areas and low in the initial productivity and GUI abilities.