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Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective Slackware: old warhorse is going strong
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective Slackware: old warhorse is going strong | Slackware: old warhorse is going strong |
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| Written by Sam Varghese | |
| Wednesday, 18 July 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2 A good reason I can think of for getting rid of GNOME is the dependency web ; to use a single application, one has to install a huge amount of software. The absence of GNOME isn't much of a drawback where Slackware is concerned; KDE has applications for everything and then some. There is no OpenOffice.org but KDE has its own office suite. There are two browsers - Firefox and KDE's Konqueror. Most of the KDE applications, like k3b, the DVD- and CD-burning package, are extremely well designed and easy to use. I was pleasantly surprised to see that sound configuration is now painless; the same can be said for installing the proprietary Flash player. There were a few issues, though - a USB drive wouldn't mount when it was plugged in and CDs refused to play due to permission problems. As Slackware now includes HAL (the hardware abstraction layer) and DBUS, this makes it even more surprising. Upgrading isn't easy - yet. When I was a user, Slackware had a rudimentary upgrade tool called pkgtool and one could not use an external repository for upgrades. Packages had to be downloaded and installed, taking care not to overwrite configuration files. This tool is still present. In addition, there is an application called slackpkg, a frontend for pkgtool, which is easier to use; it can use an external repository. Slackpkg does not get installed by default, though. But it has limitations - only a single mirror can be selected. The package list in Slackware appears to consist of around 850 packages compared to 16,000-plus for Debian. Other Slackware upgrade tools like slapt-get and swaret have been developed by external developers inspired by Debian's remarkable APT, the king of software management. But even with slapt-get one has to specify packages which should not be overwritten. In short, it is not easy to upgrade Slackware. The other major difference between Slackware and most other distributions is the initialisation system; Slackware uses the older BSD-style init system while most other distributions use System V style. However, Slackware has provided Sys V init compatibility from version 7.0 onwards and in version 12 the traditional System V init directories are present without the user having to create them. (There are differences in filesystem structure and print subsystems between the two. Dwelling on the differences too long tends to lead to religious wars, similar to the vi vs emacs, and GNOME vs KDE flamefests.) I guess Slackware will have its band of loyal users; it has some good points and a certain kind of people like their Linux the way Volkerding has designed the distribution. Had the upgrade process been less cumbersome, who knows, I might still be using it.
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