On Friday 24 September 2004 10:15 pm, Rob Wultsch wrote:
> My understanding was that slack was one of the least noobie friendly
> distros out there, 

It is and it isn't. I don't recommend it for Windows-only newbies trying Linux 
for the first time, as the initial learning curve is very steep. I came from 
Windows but had never used DOS or any other commandline. I started with 
Mandrake and used a lot of others, too. Wanted to learn more, so tried 
Slackware two years ago. Loved the simple, logical installation but couldn't 
do anything with it once I got it installed. Fought with it for months, 
trying to learn enough commandline to get it to work. HATED it! Couldn't do 
anything with it! Couldn't install a package for the life of me. For example, 
I learned that I could do Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get into a terminal, but the book 
didn't tell me how to go back into X! Learned to type man to read man pages, 
but didn't know how to close them! Felt really stupid, and frustrated.

Gave up eventually and went back to Mandrake, and found myself using the 
commandline more to fix things that the GUI Drak tools didn't get right. 
Discovered that I missed the crisp, "snappy" feeling that Slackware has. Took 
a deep breath, went back to Slackware, and found things were somehow easier.

If you choose the "Newbie" installation, it automatically installs the things 
that are required, and has verbose descriptions of the optional packages. You 
can learn a lot about your system from a Slackware installation. It doesn't 
have GUI configuration tools, but editing the configuration files in /etc is 
easy *IF* you know what you need to do. The file structure is very simple and 
logical, unlike Mandrake, Suse, etc. I have cheat notes that I refer to. And 
Slack uses the BSD-style init, rather than SysV. It's much easier to work 
with, IMO.

With the GUI-centric distributions, things break easier and then it's harder 
to find and fix the actual files "under the hood." The "newbie-friendly" 
point-and-click approach is only achieved by adding layers of complexity to 
the system. Great if it works, but much harder to fix if it doesn't. 

> yet you do not seem to know so fairly basic command 
> line stuff (cp, mkdir, mount, and rmdir are normally fairly basic, as
> are /etc/fstab's IMHO). 

I'm TERRIBLE at commandline! I know a tiny amount, and just enough Vi to edit 
a few files, like xorg.conf. Most files can be edited with Kwrite, and 
Konqueror is handy for moving files around. Konqueror has a super-user mode 
that can be accessed from a user account, so I don't have to use KDE as root. 
Most file editing consists of adding or removing a # in front of a line, and 
that just isn't hard to do :-) 
I would like to be able to do everything from commandline someday. 

> My understanding was that a tarball was the 
> most you got for a package and that you had to compile most everything
> myself.
>
> Was I way wrong?

Slackware packages are .tgz . I have a directory called "packages" 
in /usr/local that I download things to. I download a package, go 
to /usr/local/packages and type:

"installpkg blahblah.tgz" 

and it's done!
If slackware doesn't have a .tgz package, you can download the source tar.gz. 
Installation usually goes like:
 
tar -zxvf blahblah.tar.gz
cd blahblah
./configure
make
make install

It's done!

Slackware comes with so many libraries that I've almost never run into a 
dependency issue. 

Honestly, if I can do it, it's not that hard, LOL!

Siri Amrit


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