hpr1660 :: Trying out Slackware

Slackware-newbie Beni is talking to long time Slackware user mcnalu

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Hosted by beni on Friday, 2014-12-12 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: slackware, distro, linux. Comments: 4.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr1660

Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. Play now:

Duration: 01:05:26

Part of the series: general.

mcnalu wrote a article about Slackware in Linux Voice, Issue 6.

https://www.linuxvoice.com/issue-6/

Beni read this article which lead to him trying out Slackware and being very impressed by its simplicity.

That's why he asked mcnalu to do a HPR episode about Slackware, which is probably the oldest Linux Distro that's still around and whose developer follows a no-nonsense strategy and is very conservative when it comes switching to new stuff that comes up in the Linux world (like PAM or systemd)

The distro is one of the if not the most Unix-like Linux distro. It uses a BSD style init system instead of widely used sysvinit.

Beni and mcnalu talk about the installation process, finding documentation and why the website is outdated.

Further they discuss the package manager and what it means that it doesn't resolve dependencies. They also explain why this isn't necessarily a bad thing and where to find binary packages.

In the end they talk about where the Slackware community meets and who is in charge of Slackware.

https://www.slackware.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware

Slackware documentation isn't as good the BSDs documentation or the Arch Wiki. But it's definitely getting better

https://docs.slackware.com/

and there is also 'Slackware essentials', a book that's also available online:

https://www.slackware.com/book/

The Slackware forum on Linux Questions is pretty much the official Slackware forum: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/

mcnalu announced his Article in the Linux Questions forum: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/linux-voice-issue-6-a-4175513762/

To support the development of Slackware you could buy yourself a Christmas present from the Slackware store:

https://store.slackware.com

Comments

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Comment #1 posted on 2014-12-12 22:14:36 by Loomx

Hi,

Thanks, I enjoyed listening :-)

A minor correction: since 14.1 the iso is an isohybrid file, so you can use dd to put it straight onto a pendrive and install from that.

Comment #2 posted on 2014-12-13 00:13:16 by Mike Ray

Great episode

Thanks for a great show. Slackware was the first distro I encountered in about 1997 or thereabouts, back when I could still see.

I would like to get it going again but it is not at the front of the pack for accessibility.

I have done what was suggested above and DDed the DVD ISO to a USB key and had a read.

There seems to be a kernel which supports speakup using hardware synths. Luckily I have a laptop with a serial port and I collect old hardware synths.

So I have the tools I would need to get it up and running.

I would like to create a talking version which will talk OOTB with a software synth; eSpeak. The software speech kernel module is not currently included.

One question I have immediately is; why does my USB stick end up read-only and can I change that and still have it bootable?

I guess this might be the first step towards getting a talking software speech version done

Thanks again.

Mike

Comment #3 posted on 2014-12-13 09:28:02 by Beni

Thanks guys

Hey all,

Thanks for you feedback.

@Loomx interesting. For some reason it didn't work for me until I ran the scripts that makes it hybrid. Must have done something wrong. Maybe it failed for a totally different reason.

@Mike I believe CD iso images are read only by design, no matter whether the medium they're copied to could be written on. There is another slightly less intuitive way to create a installation usb drive. There is a usb image here:

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-14.1/usb-and-pxe-installers/

which can be copied to usb using the usbimg2disk.sh script. But you will have to copy the contents of the installation DVD over to the stick yourself to get a full installation medium.

Comment #4 posted on 2015-01-08 04:46:06 by Klaatu

slacker

Great overview of Slackware. I do think the hardest part about Slack is indeed not doing the research. By this, I mean one doesn't read the docs, or one doesn't go out and look for information when needed. Part of this, I think, is because that information isn't really being shouted out by every Linux news site one goes to, so one does have to go look for it a bit.

But https://docs.slackware.com is definitely a great resource, as are the sites of other Known Slackers.

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