On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Mike M. Miskulin wrote:
>
> hey now,
>
> Perhaps this has been beaten to death before, I
> apologize ahead of time if it has but...
>
> I've always used Slakware - for at least 5 years.
> And with SMP for over 2 now, and I've not had any
> problems with anything. So can you tell us one or
> two examples of programs that wont work under
> Slakware, but do elsewhere, and any specific problems
> as related to SMP? (as opposed to "I've heard it more
> than once")
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mike
I'd have to second this. I've used Slackware for years, smp since
2.0.0. It works fine. Like any of the linux distributions, it can have
occasional problems with libraries or packages (e.g. modutils, binutils)
being out of sync with the needs of the "current kernel" and of course
all distributions inherit the problems of their distribution kernel
(which may or may not be any good -- Slackware 3.2 or 3.3 came with
2.0.27, as I recall, which of course deadlocked smp from time to time
for reasons that had nothing to do with slackware).
Slackware 3.5, on the other hand, ran 2.1.131 "cold" and had zero
problems EXCEPT compiling dhcpcd 1.36, and that was a standard "needs
glibc (libc 6) while it still had libc 5 installed" problem.
Conservative, possibly to a fault, but hardly "broken" for the 2.0.36
kernel (and dhcpcd 0.70) it came with.
What, really, could be broken? Slackware is boringly simple in its boot
sequence (you can read and understand its boot scripts without a road
map or ten years experience in Unix). It comes with the same gcc,
kernel, library set and all that that any of the distributions come with
(mostly gnu stuff outside the kernel, after all, and not even linux
specific). It's easy enough to break, of course -- it doesn't have
linuxconf or the equivalent doing complex things for you so one does
need to have SOME idea of how things work to make significant changes or
add daemons, but it is easier to add a boot-time daemon (say sshd) in
Slackware than it is in Red Hat, for example.
For personal use, I'd be using Slackware today if it weren't for its
relatively poor scaling, as a distribution, for an enterprise (where GUI
tools and automated install become fairly important). So I'm toiling
through RH at home to learn its ins and outs, with Debian next on the
horizon for experimentation. At the department/enterprise level we'll
probably settle on RH for its automated install and package management,
but I'd still recommend Slackware to anyone actually trying to LEARN
real systems management/programming, since in Slackware there is little
or no indirection -- no symlinks or start/stop scripts or sysconfig
scripts (all in different places and not intended to be touched by human
hands) just /bin/sh scripts that humans can read and humans can modify.
rgb
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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