Back to Slackware

There’s lots of reasons for this reorganization. One of which was that I was tired of dual booting on my main desktop PC. So now I’m splitting things up—one nice linux box for daily use and one WinXP box for gaming and trying out Visual Studio. I’m hoping to put together a third client PC that will remain dual boot. Then I’ve got one or two servers and a set of old (P1 andP2) laptops that I want to turn into a small cluster.

Anyway, the point of this was that if I had to reinstall and move everything around, I might as well upgrade my systems. I was running RedHat 8.0 which is still rather new, but I really wanted to try out something different. A couple years ago when I first got into linux I tried just about every distro I could find. In the end I went with RedHat since it seemed the most polished and friendliest. Now I wanted to try out Gentoo and some of the other newer distros.

I’ve played with Gentoo before and I really like the emerge system. The installation process is very long, but worth it since you really get to know your machine and the operating system. And the documentation is very good, so even a newer linux user could get through it without too much trouble.

After finally getting Gentoo installed and up and running, I emerged my system again to make sure everything was up to date. Well, that somehow broke emerge due to an incompatible library with python. At that point I was facing quite a bit of debugging and so, fed up, I decided to throw on the latest Mandrake to see how it was. (Someday I’ll try gentoo again).

I started with Mandrake a long time ago and you know what? Those penguins and ‘drakes’ everywhere really annoyed me. Don’t know why, just felt like I was running some preschool operating system. I’m glad to say that Mandrake has become a little nicer since those days, but it had real trouble with my video card. So after an hour or two of playing with it, I decided to try something else.

At this point I was thinking about going with FreeBSD or Slackware. It had been a long time since I tried either one and since staying with Linux would make my migration from RedHat easier, I decided to go with Slackware. The installation went perfectly and within an hour or so I was up and running.

You know what I really like about Slackware? It’ doesn’t mess with anything. You get plain ol’ KDE and vanilla Gnome which is the way I like it. Very little branding. After playing around with the basic install I threw fluxbox (a window manager) on it and started customizing it. I’ve always really like the more minimal window managers like fluxbox (blackbox) and WindowMaker. I’ve got a screen shot below.

The only thing I really miss are the networked installs. The emerge system and Debian’s apt are fabulous ideas and so far I haven’t found anything like that for Slackware. If anyone has a suggestion, let me know.

[update – july 23 2003] new dropline-gnome screenshot: anti-aliased goodness